Travail et emploi
|Great Expectations: Solving the Mystery of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London
Résumé
Les catégories utilisées par Charles Booth pour décrire les classes sociales dans son livre Life and Labour of the People in London révèlent une certaine incohérence. On peut expliquer cette dernière par la reprise d’une problématique de la « régulation morale » aux enquêtes statistiques du même type qui l’ont précédé. En effet, loin de traiter de l’extension de la pauvreté à Londres, les enquêtes de Booth s’efforcent de mesurer l’alignement des familles ouvrières sur une « conduite de vie » propre à la classe moyenne, c’est-à-dire de concevoir un projet de vie menant de la pauvreté à l’indépendance et au confort. Les enquêtes de Booth ne présentent donc pas une rupture à l’égard des présuppositions individualistes de l’économie libérale, puisque c’est sur la centralité des facteurs moraux qu elles insistent pour expliquer l’échec des projets d’amélioration sociale de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle.
Texte intégral
1This article seeks to provide an explanation for the peculiarities of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London which was published in installments from 1889 to 1903. Booth’s work is generally perceived as a pioneering survey into poverty but one which contains a surprising quantity of moralistic commentary at odds with its empiricist pretensions. These inconsistencies can be accounted for by using the concept of ‘moral regulation’ recently elaborated by the sociologist Ruonavaara [1997]. ‘Moral regulation’ refers to projects aimed at constructing the social identities of individual subjects in order to render them more capable of acting in an ethically acceptable manner. It can be understood in Weberian terms as an attempt to refashion the individual’s ‘conduct of life’. Ruonavaara seeks to provide a framework for the analysis of philanthropic projects and their relationship to State formation. Moral regulation is offered as an ancillary concept to the notions of cultural capital and ‘symbolic capital’ developed by Bourdieu but it also draws upon the sociology of moral regulation pioneered by Durkheim and the knowledge/power genealogies of Foucault.
2Because moral regulation presupposes greater conceptual reflexivity and autonomy than that implied in traditional moral tutelage, the concept clarifies the relationship between economic theory and social thinking in nineteenth century Britain. Informed by moderate protestantism and Malthusian political economy, ‘moral regulation’ represented an attempt to reform the conduct of life of the working class in the urban centres. The New Poor Law of 1834 provided the framework within which the regulators operated. Malthusian political economy justified poor relief arrangements which created the context of material adversity favourable to moral regulation. A pessimistic natural theology gave coherence to the overall world-vision. The peculiarites of Charles Booths Life and Labour of the People in London can be explained in terms of the sudden collapse of this natural theology and the need to invent new forms of moral regulation. The re-formulation of economics in order to accommodate the possibility of a slow tendency towards improvement had its equivalent in social survey findings. This was the focus on the benchmark of a rising ‘standard of living’.
3In the first part of this article we shall briefly sketch out the form taken by moral regulation in the nineteenth century from its origins in Malthusian economics to its incorporation into statistical surveys and charitable practice. The recasting of political economy to incorporate evangelical Christianity lent utilitarian philosophy and economics a moralistic character which underlined individualism. Moral regulation leaned heavily upon Malthusian economic theory in order to mobilise the reforming energies of the middle-class in a project aimed at securing the social position of the landed élite. In the second part, we shall show how the pessimistic natural philosophy which legitimated ‘moral regulation’ fell apart as a result of the absorption of utilitarianism into evolutionary theories. This resulted in the adoption of philosophical Idealism. Placed in a more optimistic context, the preoccupation with the conduct of life implied individual striving to overcome the selfishness and lack of direction associated with material deprivation. This ‘standard of life’ approach implied the maintaining of life-projects in an ethical framework of social improvement.
4Improvement projects ran up against any number of obstacles at the turn of the century, as we shall see in the third part. The housing crisis in London coupled to severe economic crises raised doubts about the viability of improvements based on the ‘standard of life’. The peculiarities of the housing and employment situation in the capital called for a major rethink on the form to be taken by moral regulation. In the fourth part, we shall examine the work of Charles Booth as an attempt to deny the plausibilty of the idea that poverty and unemployment impeded individual striving towards a higher ‘standard of life’. Booths project was an attempt to forge new instruments for the moral regulation of the workingclass in the metropolis. The quirks and inconsistencies of Charles Booth’ s Life and Labour of the People in London can be explained in these terms. His vast survey of working-class households in London represented an attempt to limit the explanatory importance of material deprivation by reference to the touchstone of working-class aspirations.
A Framework for Moral Regulation: Constructing Expectations
5During the nineteenth century, relief to the able-bodied poor took place under semi-punitive, deterrent conditions. The institutional framework surrounding the economic System was constructed in such a way as to create a clear distinction between those able-bodied wage-labourers who were prepared to maintain an independent existence and those who attempted to subsist out of public provision. In Benthamite terms, the battle against pauperism meant that propertyless wage-labourers had to be maintained in ‘poverty’ in order to maintain the incentives underpinning the labour market. The only fit object of relief was the ‘indigence’ of those who could not secure a subsistence through their labour [Dean, 1991, ch. 6]. Wage-labourers had to be taught to expect little or no assistance from the State beyond that which was distributed in an extremely humiliating way inside the workhouse. The principles underpinning the 1834 Reform could thus be accepted by utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill because they relieved poverty without relying on the paternalistic practices of a pre-liberal age [Offer, 1989].
6However, this form of policy, despite its utilitarian style, could be and was blended with the thinking of conservatives from the landed aristocracy. Well established in the universities, leading conservative thinkers were concerned to combine free market principles with respect for the existing social hierarchy. For these liberal Tories, the deterrent poor law proposals were perceived as instruments which could maintain the labouring poor in an economic situation which heavily underlined its inferior social position [Mandler, 1990]. The positive disciplinary aspects of the free labour market suggested that the exercise of virtue could be depicted as the property of the privileged classes. In other words, this reconciliation between economic theory and Christianity was encouraged by an emerging liberal Tory intelligensia with a vested interest in the discovery of new techniques of moral regulation. Hard-line social policy was justified on the grounds that it reflected the creator’s adaptation of nature to a degraded humanity’s need for atonement [Hilton, 1988, ch. 1 & 2]. Given that man under duress could be encouraged to turn away from sin, little should be attempted to soften the consequences of economic adversity. Because the New Poor Law enforced the harsh disciplines of the free labour market it could be justified on both utilitarian and Christian grounds.
7The catastrophic lowering of the expectations involved in the poor law reform could also be interpreted through the prism of the population doctrine. The optimistic aspect of the Malthusian population doctrine [Wrigley, 1988] was the idea that limited economic progress could be attained if workers could be encouraged towards greater exertion and later marriage by the search for pleasures and pastimes of a more cultivated nature. Although this ‘standard of life’ mechanism promised a racheting upwards in material conditions which was largely self-fulfilling, material progress was not to be furthered by social policy. In fact, Malthusian policy blended well with the poor laws once the moral regulatory aspects of the standard of life were brought to the fore. This occurred thanks to the efforts of the Scottish divine, the Reverend Thomas Chalmers. His attempt to practice a ‘Christian surveillance of families’ [Chalmers, 1838] in a poor ward of Glasgow was aimed at resocializing an uprooted urban population by the promotion of more ambitious standards of behaviour. This involved the re-introduction of respectable notables into the neighbourhood and the penetration of charity visitors into working-class households [Chalmers, 1833]. Because this imaginary reconstruction of a legitimate social hierarchy relied heavily upon higher economic standards, it offered another region where utilitarian principles and evangelical Christianity could be reconciled.
8An important offshoot of Malthusian economics was the emergence of statistical societies. For the more traditional Tories of the London Statistical Society, this form of knowledge was useful because it undermined the deductive economics of Ricardo which constituted a threat to the landed interest [Goldman, 1983]. The more liberal Tories, on the other hand, could use statistics to underline the morally degraded nature of the working population in the great towns and recommend the disciplines of the New Poor Law. Pauperism and criminality devolved from the social promiscuity of urban crowding. Statistical knowledge therefore justified institutions (school, church, savings club etc.) capable of morally regulating the labouring poor into a society which offered them little more than the workhouse [Berg, 1980, p. 291-314], In Manchester, the same problematic led to the utilization of survey techniques by Kay Shuttleworth [1832, p. 80-83] which owed much to the door to door enquiry methods pioneered by Thomas Chalmers. Because large and insanitary cities required large scale improvements in sanitation and housing, together with a transformation in the conduct of life of slum dwellers, the work of reformers like Kay Shuttleworth could imply both moral regulation and large-scale utilitarian projects of the kind associated with Chadwick [Weiner, 1990, p. 45].
- 1 Mill’s main adversaries in economic theory were the members of the Liberal Tory school led by Will (...)
9Stuart Mill's enthusiastic adoption of the Malthusian doctrine led him to advocate a rise in the ‘habitual standards and requirements’ of the working-class which echoed Thomas Chalmers’ ‘raising the general platform of human life’ [Chalmers, 1832, preface]. Mill's philosophy underlined the importance of free intellectual enquiry by established thinkers-a Coleridgean-type ‘clerisy’ [Mill, 1840]. In both cases, the late marriage and luxury good consumption which orthodox Malthusianism offered as a solution to over-population was replaced with a hightened sensitivity to the qualities, intellectual or moral, of superior individuals. Thus while Mill's objection to certain forms of statistical determinism placed him in the front-line of efforts to preserve economic theory, his enthusiasm for Comte betrayed a preoccupation with social stability, consensus and hierarchy. As a result, Mill's secular solution to the social problem obliged him to champion the cause of an economic science which had become the ideological plaything of his conservative rivals. Mill himself was not prepared to countenance the social and cultural consequences of rapid economic growth. His advocacy of an endowed class of intellectuals thus partially mirrored the reactionary policies of Chalmers. But there is evidence that Mill's unexpected recantation of the wage-fund doctrine represented an attempt to remove the distortions which the Tory school1 had introduced into political economy [Forget, 1992].
Moral Regulation without Utilitarianism
10The relationship between economic thinking and moral regulation was fundamentally recast in the more optimistic climate of the second half of the nineteenth century. The close relationship between Malthusian economics and virtue unravelled as a consequence of the disappearance of a solid grounding in natural theology. The discovery of the law of the conservation of energy removed the Deity from active intervention in nature. Accordingly, Spencerian evolutionary theory replaced the habitual fear of consequences with the idea of continuous, upward development or the conservation of force [Haines, 1992], Lamarkian adaptation produced the necessary adjustment of internal relations to external ones. Because this removed the need for associationist psychology, Stuart Mill suspected the re-emergence of the kind of theological intuitionism which utilitarianism was designed to dissolve. As it turned out, the stress on energy facilitated the emergence of an economic theory based on efficiency rather than intrinsic value [de Vroey, 1975]. By defining economic activity in terms of the efficient allocation of goods or services given a certain energy supply, Jevons placed productive and unproductive activity on a par. A much higher level of public intervention could thus be justified in terms of the modified utility standard promoted by Stuart Mill. Determined public intervention to improve housing, education and sanitation was necessary to raise the social and moral level of the workingclass [Bowman, 1989].
11The timely emergence of Idealist philosophy ultimately rescued moral regulation from the double threat posed by evolutionary theory [Bequemont, 1992, p. 249-274] and full-fledged utilitarianism. It was Gladstone’s realisation that the reform of the traditional universities could create a Coleridgean-type clerisy situated in the higher reaches of the civil service which lent urgency to the activity of the small group of Idealist thinkers based at Oxford University [Gowen, 1987]. Gladstone’s network of statistical societies drew upon a very wide range of reforming groups and included all the leading utilitarians [Goldman, 1986]. But the Broad Church position which he preferred was sharply hostile to their programme-minded mindset. Despite the sustained activity of the leading utilitarians, Gladstone preferred the high moral tone of England’s leading public schools-particularly Rugby-and the pastoral work undertaken by dons in the traditional universities. Because the traditional universities were opening up to non-Anglicans from the public schools, the moral attitudes which their students often adopted [Meacham, 1987, ch. 1 & 2] could be employed to create a more aristocratic tone in social thinking. In this way, the accelerated recruitment of earnest members of the gentry into the higher reaches of the civil service would protect the landed interest from the threat represented by democracy.
12Idealism replaced utilitarianism with an insistence upon the nature of duty as revealed in everyday social expectations or conventions. In T.H. Green’s philosophy, for example, individualism was replaced by the notion of an implicit common good. The passive self gave way to the rational self who struggled against selfish impulses in order to improve his own condition and that of his dependents [Jencks, 1977]. With the Bosanquets, an idealised State based on rational behaviour patterns emerged as more real than the individual, impulse-driven self of the utilitarians [Emmet, 1989]. Aspirations towards a better life supplemented the narrow expectations constructed by utilitarianism. Removing the individual self entailed that suffering and privation could be depicted as opportunities for growth towards higher values [Bosanquet, 1906, p. 7-35]. Individuals could be made responsible for the maintenance of their own families by coercive State intervention. Hence the workhouse was perceived as the place where one should find those who were unwilling to follow the march of Mind towards perfection. Charity organisation, based on the work of Chalmers, operated in such a way as to exclude those who were judged incapable of taking advantage of the opportunity which was offered them to construct a more coherent and independent life-style. Moral regulation was required in order to induce the working-class into a more ambitious form of life. More earnest behaviour was expected from members of the upperclass. Because idealism was a movement for the reform of motives, it implied little in the way of State intervention to relieve poverty.
13Moral regulation on this basis was the focus of the vast economic synthesis undertaken by Alfred Marshall. The incorporation of T.H. Green s Idealist philosophy into a scheme of economic improvement borrowed heavily upon Benjamin Kidd’s ‘religion of respectability’ and Spencerian evolution. The Malthusian dilemma and the wage-fund doctrine disappeared due to the increased ‘industrial efficiency’ which followed the activation of the moral values contained in the working-class family. These included greater investment in education and adequate housing. The way that working-class families constructed their lives, or in economic terms, how their ‘wants adjusted to activities’ [Parsons, 1968, p. 137-146] became the key issue. Marshallian economics predicted slow but certain progress given relentless efforts to educate the working-class into greater ambition and efficiency. Poor law administration could be buttressed by a philanthropic practice which favoured the striving poor. In this way, the distinction between an active ‘standard of life and a utilitarian ‘standard of comfort’ would be sharpened to the detriment of the latter. All this presupposed the exclusion of those who resisted the forward march of progress. A toughened workhouse System was all that could be given to the ‘residuum’ who were incapable of permanent improvement.
The Emergence of a Debate on Poverty
14Involved in overcoming their own selfish nature, leading intellectuals were enjoined to lend their moral prestige to the elimination of the low standard of life of the poorer working-class areas by undertaking projects to raise their level of aspiration. For the middle-class moral regulators this required close contact with the poor, moral rigour, sacrifice and scholarship oriented towards ‘higher goals’. Various forms of settlement introduced higher forms of culture into deprived areas and implied brief sejourns by middle-class outsiders. It was at this time that brief residence by Oxbridge students in one of the more sordid areas of London became a passport into the higher levels of the civil service. Many of the leading policy experts of the early twentieth century –W. H. Beveridge and Hubert Llewellyn Smith– were effortlessly recruited into public service in this way. Charitable relief was adapted in order to help those individuals who appeared to display the right kind of potential for a higher and more independent form of life. The Charity Organisation Society distributed funds after careful enquiry by dedicated case-workers. Efforts were made to encourage working-class tenants to disburse more money on their accommodation in order to eliminate overcrowding and insalubrity etc. [Darley, 1990, p. 132-158]. This ‘bootstrapping’ took place in a controlled environment of model dwellings based on the attentions of ‘friendly’ rent-collectors [Gauldie, 1974, p. 213-250].
15The highly visible failure of reformers to improve away slums in London undermined this optimism. In the 1860’s the industrial cities of the provinces witnessed major clearance projects which tended to displace slum residents. The absence of a statutory rehousing obligation increased overcrowding. This was also the pattern in London in the 1850 s. Later improvement schemes –notably the Artisan and Labourer s Dwellings Act of 1875– were underfunded and wrongheaded; attempts to raise the overall standard of life by the removal of the temptation to let housing which corresponded to the low aspirations of certain sections of the working-class. Slums were demolished, Wholesale and cleared sites made available for the construction of model dwellings let at a commercially viable but low rate of return. Improvement proved to be impossible on these terms. Coinciding with the massive clearances needed for the building of railway stations, the Act of 1875 significantly worsened the housing shortage in London and pushed the philanthropic housing effort into the paradoxical posture of recommending the provision of model housing on a lower standard for tenants [Yelling, 1986, p. 27-32], From the 1880’s onwards, few believed that the housing problem could be relieved by pushing workers towards a greater outlay on rent. Indeed, irregular employment in central London meant that the poorer workers were unable to move to the outskirts. Official reports underlined poverty and the spatial fixing of irregular workers as major factors in the emerging housing crisis [First Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioner For Inquiring into the Housing of the Working Classes, 1885, p. 16; The Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, Vol II, 1885, p. 4293-4901). Worst still, the severe economic crises in London during this period threw thousands of workers onto dependence on the poor law and opened up the floodgates of unorganised –‘sentimental’– charitable relief. The careful structuring of working-class expectations by the New Poor Law was disintegrating. As a direct result the maintenance of aspirations amongst the more respectable workers was proving to be impossible.
16It is interesting to note that Charles Booth was an advocate of the suburban solution to the housing problem in London [Booth, 1901], The poverty maps pointed to the gradual outward movement of artisans. Booth was well aware of the problems posed by irregular work in the centre. The proximity between employment and residence was an important focus of his survey. The rôle of poverty in the creation of the housing problem was, on the other hand, downplayed. In its stead, Booth placed the emphasis on the problems which abnormally overcrowded labour markets created for the construction of viable working-class lives. Disorganised labour markets meant that a mass of desperate workers undermined the economic situation of those workers who displayed greater ambition. For these reasons, Booth –like his friend Alfred Marshall– was led to advocate more selective procedures for the allocation of housing space in central London. They both advocated restricted access to housing based on the attainment of a certain standard of life.
- 2 Founded in 1869, the Charity Organisation Society (C.O.S.) became the principal source of social p (...)
17The popularity of Henry George’s economics in England and the sudden revival of the land-nationalisation movement were sharp reminders of the potential nuisance value contained in the unvarnished interpretations of Ricardian economics. The sudden worsening of urban conditions at the turn of the century –not to mention the peculiarities of land ownership in London– lent plausibility to Georges insistence on the rôle of the landed interest in the genesis of urban poverty. Other radical thinkers insisted upon the impossibility of ‘industrial efficiency’ given the terrible waste represented by urban conditions, the degradation of work, poor food and housing etc. Hobson underlined the disastrous consequences of irregular work patterns on the efforts of workers to construct a viable life. Even the very orthodox C.O.S. militant2, the Reverend Samual Barnett, recognised the existence of terrible poverty in the East End of London. The salvationist William Booth, representing the counter-attack of the evangelicals, underlined the fact that many workers in London were lucky if they could obtain the standard of a cab-horse.
The Life and Labour of the People in London
18Although Charles Booth’s survey is usually presented as a pioneering door-to-door enquiry into poverty in the metropolis, it collated little data on the incomes of working-class households [O’Day and Englander, 1993, p. 42-63]. School Board Visitors supplied unreliable and incomplete wage statistics. Data was gleaned from interviews with the middleclass reformers who worked in unrepresentative model dwelling projects. Leplaysian-style budgets supplied information on a mere 50 households. The material on dock labour was based on interviews with the inmates of the Katherine Buildings and so on. These shortcomings did not, however, prevent Booth and his collaborators from constructing a finely graduated classification System capable of distinguishing the various strata within the working-class supposedly on the basis of regularity of employment and the degree of poverty. This is hardly surprising: Booth’s explicit intention to map the progress of the ‘standard of life’ in London –including material on ‘religious influences’– meant that the language which he used to characterise the situation of working-class households barely differed from that of the statistical surveys of the preceding generation [Cullen, 1979].
19The lack of information on real incomes was by no means a handicap in a survey which had for object the classification of households in terms of their particular ‘standard of life’ [Booth, 1904, p. 157]. Far from being centred on poverty, Booth’s classification System revolved around the comfortable situation of classes E and F, classes whose lifestyle was taken to represent the contemporary standard. This norm of acceptable behaviour typical of a ‘large proportion of the artisans and most other regular wage earners’, could not be successfully diffused among the other classes because casual labourers (Class B) had spread lower standards by contagion. Booth therefore suggested the exclusion not, as is usually believed, of the whole class of loafers, but only those individuals whose behaviour typified its lack of ambition [Booth, 1903, p. 327].
20In behavioural terms, the irregular workers of Class C were virtually indistinguishable from the members of the lumpenproletariat of Class B [Booth, 1904, p. 131-175]. In the classification, the latter appeared to have lost the stable reference point provided by regularity. Earning ‘casual’ rather than ‘intermittent’ earnings the loafing class could not be improved on a permanent basis and indeed its very existence took employment and earnings away from the more ambitious ‘poor’ of Classes C and D. But, Booth’s classification by no means supported the environmental position. The hard working members of class D were not better situated because of their regularity. Earning low wages but increasingly living on a narrow ledge of economic security, these individuals had in many ways a lower standard of living than class C. Many of them were on their way down into class B and ultimately into the workhouse. In other words, Booth was by no means condemning irregularity as such. Rather he was underlining its disastrous consequences in an environment deprived both of positive models of behaviour and standards of ambition.
21In practical terms, Booth advocated the ‘limited socialism’ of transferring the casual underclass into labour colonies situated outside of London and its gradual re-introduction on good behaviour. Hobson rightly complained that this class could not be distinguished objectively. But the identification of negative models of behaviour and their replacement was precisely what Booth’s survey was all about. Those workers left in the centre could divide amongst themselves the work which had been taken from the loafers. The enthusiasm for work of ‘the poor’ would produce higher wages and better conditions. The ‘very poor’ were to be retrained or excluded. Thus, whilst a more demanding employment situation required the removal of the elderly from the active population by non-contributory pensions (subject to moral regulatory selection), the more expensive accommodation required by ambitious workers could be paid for in higher levels of efficiency. The poverty problem would utlimately solve itself on the basis of a coincidence between ambition and enhanced efficiency. It is for this reason that Booth welcomed the fact that a rising standard of life made life more difficult for incapable workers [Distress from Want of Employment. Minutes of Evidence, 1895, p. 10571].
22Mainstream nineteenth century social thinking was clearly more concerned with moral regulation than with overcoming material deprivation in the urban centres. Poverty was rarely the issue. A more optimistic appreciation of the potentialities of the liberal economy placed utilitarianism on the defensive. Regulation in the absence of utilitarian goals placed the social classes in an imaginary community of feeling and interest which was physically doser to the working-class home and neighbourhood. Improvement thus took place in an atmosphere of rising expectations. The philanthropists played the rôle of moral regulatory handmaidens to unbridled economic development. The crisis in improvement which took place at the turn of the century threatened to replace the timid optimism of the regulators with the impatience of a politically maturing working-class. Dangerous ideas were in circulation. This was particulary true of London which concentrated some of the more acute social problems in the country. The close interconnection between the employment situation in the capital and the housing crisis, however, meant that the existing solutions were simply not operative.
23Charles Booth’s reaction to the crisis in improvement was timely but muddle-headed. The resumption of the statistical surveys of the earlier nineteenth century produced precisely the same emphasis on overcrowding, promiscuity and moral degradation which had been explored by a generation of social thinkers. The added twist of a rising standard of living merely re-directed attention towards a nuisance-class of loafers hidden within an otherwide efficient and ambitious working-class. The limited outward movement of the middle-classes and slum clearance had indeed worsened the situation for the workers who remained in the centre of London. Overcrowding and unemployment expressed social deprivation on a massive scale and confused schemes of moral regulation considerably worsened the situation. The geographical displacement of the irregular class of London into a suburban limbo was never on the cards. Indeed, all the efforts which had been made to transfer the problem outwards had failed. Hence the idea of universalizing selection into housing areas by the rigid enforcement of the standard of life. Booths dream of identifying and excluding the ‘residuum’ of idlers by the rigid enforcement of such a standard had little to do with poverty. It was simply moral regulation with a vengence.
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Notes
1 Mill’s main adversaries in economic theory were the members of the Liberal Tory school led by William Whewell and Richard Jones.
2 Founded in 1869, the Charity Organisation Society (C.O.S.) became the principal source of social policy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Heavily influenced by the pioneering casework practiced by the Rev. Chalmers in Glasgow, the C.O.S. promoted the scientific organisation of philanthropy. This consisted in the strict selection of meritworthy cases and the suppression of spontaneous giving by wealthy individuals.
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