The Charles Booth Online Archive provides free desk-top access to guides, digitised images and maps from the Booth archive collections at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of London Library.
The project website contains a detailed online catalogue of materials relating to Booth’s survey into life and labour in London (1886-1903). The catalogue is linked to digitised images of 31 of the survey notebooks and to an interactive digitised image of 12 “poverty” maps of London produced by the survey. The 450 original survey notebooks and maps are housed in the Library archives at the London School of Economics and Political Science (the world-renowned British Library of Political and Economic Science) - where the project is based. In addition, the site offers an online catalogue of Booth family papers held at the University of London Library archives and digitised images of seven editions of the Booth family magazine.
The new and detailed catalogue of Booth survey materials was created by the project archivist, Caroline Ferris. The existing handlist of Booth family papers was put into machine readable form with enhancements by Caroline and others Text images were digitised and then compressed and put online, and links made to the relevant catalogue entries. Following digitisation, the map images were georectified to compensate for deficiencies in Victorian cartography, mosiaced together, and linked to a database of gazetteer information. In this way the maps are now searchable as one seamless image and are linked to relevant catalogue entries. They can also be compared to a modern map of London. The project’s technical officer was Andrew Morrison and the project manager was Caroline Shaw.
The Charles Booth Online Archive helps to unlock information about Victorian London with diverse applications in many fields, and probably in ways which we cannot yet imagine - such is the nature of high quality primary sources. The detailed catalogue of the Booth survey materials enables researchers to identify and locate relevant material which was previously hidden within the notebooks. There is obvious potential for the survey material to be used for research into economic history, social history, labour history, as well as the history of social research itself.
By facilitating the parallel study of notebook and map images, the process by which the poverty map was created is much illuminated. Beyond this, there are many ways in which the maps could be used by researchers to plot spatial trends in such things as health, crime, and demography against poverty levels in the 19th century.
It is not just researchers working in higher education who will be able to use the archive materials to develop their research into late Victorian London. Family historians, for example, can consult the map and the survey to find out the kind of social conditions in which their ancestors were living - they may even find an ancestor amongst the thousands of survey interviewees. The possibilities for using this material in schools, particularly in London, is also immediately apparent. The use of original documents and maps, the opportunities for comparison between Victorian descriptions of a neighbourhood and contemporary observation: this all finds a place in the national curriculum.
The site also hopes to cater for the casual visitor. With just a couple of clicks, it will be possible for anyone to find out who lived down their London street a century ago - and what the social investigators said about them!
Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 7223
E-mail: document@lse.ac.uk
Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 2 July 2002