ABSTRACT
Thus, with a somewhat literary flair, writes Charles Booth at the end of the nineteenth century in Life and Labour in London. The problem, according to Booth, is not that the poor and needy are overlooked, go unnoticed, but that they are over-painted, overdetermined one might say, by all the different parties working to represent them, bring attention to their problems and, in many cases, offer up some unrealistic solution. In fact, his analogy with the booth at the country fair suggests that the denizens of the East End have been intentionally misrepresented and sensationalized by the discourse of philanthropists, reformers, journalists and novelists in pursuance of their own agendas. Booth, through his series of investigations, was out to "lift the curtain," as he says, to tell the truth by turning the East Enders into numbers, into statistics that could not lie. He writes of his "resolution to make use of no fact to which [he] cannot give a quantitative value," even though "the materials of sensational stories lie plentifully in every book of [his] notes" (1:6).
