ABSTRACT
The circumstances leading to the writing of Seebohm Rowntree's classic Poverty: A Study of Town Life are not well-known. When it was published, in November 1901, he sent a copy to Charles Booth. 2 In the preface he thanked Booth and his associates for suggestions they had given him, and made much of the comparability of Booth's estimate of the proportion of London's population in poverty, and his own estimate of the proportion in poverty in York. But all that remains of whatever correspondence there was between them (except for a letter reproduced in Poverty) is a letter from Rowntree in 1902, concerned only with comments he added to the second edition, on the probable effects of old age pensions on poverty in York. 3 Very little now survives in the Rowntree archive from the period up to and around 190 1, for when Rowntree moved from York to Buckinghamshire in 1936, he destroyed many of his papers (Jackson, 1980, pp.i-ii). Those remaining have thrown no light on the writing of Poverty.4
