ABSTRACT
In 1889, Charles Booth published the first volume of Life and Labour of the People in London. When publication was completed in 1903, the text comprised seventeen volumes, including a one-volume conclusion and three separate multi-volume series on poverty, industry, and religious influences. This chapter examines the form of Life and Labour’s investigation. It considers existing historiographic readings of the text’s form by the Simeys, Stedman Jones, and Brown. The investigation in Life and Labour depended on two kinds of raw materials: first, official statistics on overcrowding, birth rates, death rates, occupations, etc.; and second, information supplied by those set in administrative authority over the poor. Volume one of the poverty series offered a household classification, which had been previewed in Booth’s earlier articles. Volume one of the industry series took up again the question of classification by employment which had been dropped at the end of the first volume of the poverty series.
