Labour & life of the people

Labour and Life of the People, edited by Charles Booth and published by Macmillan & Co., was a pioneering sociological survey of working-class life in late Victorian London. First issued in two volumes in 1889, the work laid the foundation for Booth’s later, more expansive series, Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–1903). Drawing on detailed fieldwork, statistical data, and personal observation, Booth and his team examined employment, wages, housing, and living conditions across London’s boroughs. The project is especially renowned for its poverty maps, which used colour-coded street-level detail to visualise the economic conditions of the city's population. Booth’s work was groundbreaking in its scale, method, and influence, shaping both social policy and the emerging field of urban sociology.