# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Booth, Charles

​BOOTH, CHARLES (1840-1916), shipowner and writer on social questions, was the third son of Charles Booth, corn merchant, of Liverpool, by his first wife, Emily Fletcher, of Liverpool. Both his parents were Unitarians. Henry Booth [q.v.] and James Booth [q.v.] were his uncles. He was born at Liverpool 30 March 1840, and educated there at the Royal Institution School. After some training in the Liverpool office of Lamport and Holt’s steamship company, he began his long and successful career as shipowner at the age of twenty-two, when he joined his eldest brother Alfred as partner in Alfred Booth & Co. Later, the Booth steamship company was formed, of ​which Booth himself was chairman until 1912. With but few intervals, Booth was actively engaged in his business to the end of his life.
Booth’s opinions on industrial matters owed much, he believed, to the influence of Comte. The positivist, Henry Crompton [q.v.], was his cousin, and Edward Spencer Beesly was married to a cousin. He insisted upon the importance in industry of enterprise and of leadership, and he was afraid of socialism mainly because, under it, business transactions would no longer be ‘tried in the court of profit and loss’ [Life and Labour: Industry, v, 72-8]. He grew up with the Trade Union movement, and in general sympathy with its earlier policy, but its later developments he regarded with misgiving [Industrial Unrest and Trade Union Policy, 1913]. In politics Booth was never a keen partisan: as a young man he was a radical; afterwards he became a unionist, and was a member of the unofficial Tariff Commission of 1903-1904.
Booth had always taken an interest in the welfare of working men, but it was not until he was past middle age that there began to appear the works which established his reputation as a writer on social questions. In his first paper, Occupations of the People (1886), he sought to portray the industrial complexion of Great Britain and Ireland by rearranging the census figures of 1841-1881. This canvas he found too large, and he turned to London, publishing in The Tower Hamlets (1887) the beginnings of his ‘inquiry into the condition and occupations of the people of London’, which continued without intermission for sixteen years. The earlier part appeared as Labour and Life of the People (1889), and the whole as Life and Labour of the People in London (1891-1903), comprising Poverty, four volumes, Industry, five volumes, Religious Influences, seven volumes, and a Final Volume. Booth’s volumes appeared at a critical time in the history of English social reform. A lively interest was being taken in the problems of pauperism, and it was coming to be recognized that benevolence, to be effective, must be scientific. Fitful investigations, such as those of Henry Mayhew [q.v.], had been made into the condition of the London poor, but there were as yet few data upon which reforms could be built with confidence. Booth’s object was to fill this gap; his Life and Labour was designed to show ‘the numerical relation which poverty, misery, and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under which each class lives’. His work was based partly—at the suggestion of Joseph Chamberlain—on the records of School Board visitors, partly on his own inquiries, and partly on information collected, under his direction, from the Charity Organization Society and from other bodies in touch with London pauperism. Among the many who helped him to compile his material, and edit it, were his wife’s cousin, Miss Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb) and (Sir) Graham Balfour for the earlier volumes, and Ernest Aves for the later. [The manuscript note-books containing the detailed evidence on which Life and Labour was founded are in the possession of his widow.] It was no proper part of Booth’s plan to analyse economic changes or to trace the course of social development. His object was to give an accurate picture of the condition of London as it was in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In this light, his Life and Labour was recognized as perhaps the most comprehensive and illuminating work of descriptive statistics which had yet appeared.
With one exception—old age pensions—Booth was hesitant in urging particular social reforms; although he put together a few conclusions in the Final Volume of his Life and Labour, and made recommendations, published in his Poor Law Reform (1910), to the Poor Law Commission of 1905-1909, from which he himself had had to retire owing to ill-health. His public advocacy of old age pensions began in 1891 with a paper to the Royal Statistical Society; and subsequently he devoted much time to writing and speaking in favour of old age pensions, especially by endowment, rather than by insurance as advocated by William Lewery Blackley [q.v.] [The Aged Poor: Condition, 1894, and other books]. The passing of the Old Age Pensions Act in 1908 was largely due to the part which he had played in converting public opinion. His main criticism of the Act was that pensions were granted not to all, but only to those whose incomes fell below a certain level.
Booth married in 1871 Mary, only daughter of Charles Zachary Macaulay, and granddaughter of Zachary Macaulay [q.v.]. There were three sons and four daughters of the marriage. Booth was president of the Royal Statistical Society (1892-1894), fellow of the Royal Society (1899), and a privy councillor (1904). In 1906 he received the first honorary degree given by the new university of Liverpool. ​He died 28 November 1916 at his home, Gracedieu Manor, Whitwick, and was buried at Thringstone, Leicestershire. A tablet to his memory, the work of Sir Charles Nicholson, Bart., was unveiled in 1920 in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral by (Sir) Austen Chamberlain.
[Booth’s published works; Charles Booth, A Memoir, anon., 1918 (by his widow); private information.]
F. W. O.