London: The Biography

One of the great studies of poverty in late nineteenth-century London was, and remains, Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1903); it ran to seventeen volumes, and went through three editions. Like the city that it was examining, it was on the largest possible scale. A monumental work, it is filled with suggestive details and suffused by a curious pity. It is in fact the vision of London lives which renders Booth’s work so significant. “The last occupant of the back room was a widower, scavenger to Board of Works, a man who would not believe in hell or heaven … At No. 7 lives a car-man in broken-down health. He fell off his cart and being run over broke his leg. On the floor above is a very poor old lady living on charity, but a happy soul expectant of heaven.” In the neighbourhood lived a man who was “a notorious Atheist, one who holds forth on behalf of his creed under railway arches, saying that if there be a God he must be a monster to permit such misery as exists. This man suffers from heart disease, and the doctor tells him that some day in his excitement he will drop down dead.” These are the permanent inhabitants of London. “On the ground floor live Mr. and Mrs. Meek. Meek is a hatter and was engaged in dyeing children’s hats in a portable boiler. A cheery little man … At the back lives Mrs. Helmot, whose husband, formerly an optician, is now at Hanwell suffering from suicidal melancholia.” All the variety of human experience is revealed here; the cheerful hat-maker and the suicidal optician are more suggestive than any characters in nineteenth-century urban fiction.

It is as if the city had become a sort of desert island, upon which its occupants picked their way. But there was another life which, against all the odds, kept on breaking through. “How the poor live,” a nurse told Booth, “when they are helpless remains a mystery, save for their great kindness to each other, even to those who are strangers. This is the great explanation.” A Nonconformist preacher also told him that “It is only the poor that really give. They know exactly the wants of one another and give when needed.” A Roman Catholic priest informed him, “To each other their goodness is wonderful.” Here is another reality lying concealed beneath all the descriptions of filth and squalor. The intimate experience of shared suffering did not necessarily injure the spirits of the very poor. The conditions of urban life could lead to despair, and drunkenness, and death, but there was at least the possibility of another form of human expression in kindness and generosity to those trapped within the same harsh and noisome reality.

Booth ends his account with a memorable paragraph: “The dry bones that lie scattered over the long valley that we have traversed together lie before my reader. May some great soul, master of a subtler and nobler alchemy than mine, disentangle the confused issues, reconcile the apparent contradictions in aim, melt and commingle the various influences for good into one divine uniformity of effort and make these dry bones live, so that the streets of our Jerusalem may sing with joy.” It is an astonishing revelation. Charles Booth more than any other man understood the horror and the misery of nineteenth-century London, yet he invoked the image of a joyful Jerusalem to conclude his discourse.

By the time he had completed his labours, which took eighteen years, Booth recognised that the very worst conditions had been alleviated, but only the very worst. Many of the slums had been removed, some of their erstwhile inhabitants moving to “model dwellings” or to the newly established council houses on council estates. Improved sanitation, and a more general concern with urban hygiene, also affected the lot of the poor in marginal ways. But where would the city be without its poor?

A survey conducted in the late 1920s, the New Survey of London Life and Labour, calculated that 8.7 per cent of Londoners were still living in poverty; the same figure, however, has been re-estimated in other contexts as 5 percent and 21 per cent. This illustrates the problems in any discussion of poverty-levels of deprivation are relative, but relative to what? The depression of the 1930s, for example, led to the creation of what were then known as “the new poor,” and another survey in 1934 reported that 10 per cent of London families lived beneath the “poverty line.” There was no famine, but there was malnutrition; there were fewer rags, but still a plethora of ragged clothes. The first decades of the twentieth century were marked by hunger marches and marches of the unemployed, the effects of which were mitigated by the introduction of unemployment benefit and more enlightened use of the Poor Laws.