So would he have run?

[MrBarnett]

Sally,

Thanks for filling in the gaps, I was working from a print out that had the right margin cropped, duh!

MrB

[Fisherman]

For what it's worth, here is the great man's assessment of Mayfields Buildings in St. Geo in the East:

'Uncoloured on the map, but should be black. The worst place in the subdivision. Not one male in the street above school age that has not been convicted. Thieves - rough cockney Irish. Broken dirty windows, ? women. Doors open, black shiny doorposts. 3 story houses. Has been the ruin of Princes square, else a quiet country like place.'

Seems more of a moral classification than an economic one.

MrB

So it is - but the facts he built his street maps with it´s colours on were economic facts. Otherwise, we could be certain that there was no crime in any of the other colours than black, since Booth did not mention that particular shortcoming other than in relation to that particular colour. It is in fact - and of course - impossible to do the kind of mapping that is suggested, where BOTH income and criminality MUST coincide. If you were deprived of your job and wealth, Mr Barnett, would you automatically become a criminal...? And would you get honest again when you got a new job?

Booth described the colours like this:

BLACK: Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.
DARK BLUE: Very poor, casual. Chronic want.
LIGHT BLUE: Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family
PURPLE: Mixed. Some comfortable others poor
PINK: Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.
RED: Middle class. Well-to-do.
YELLOW: Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.

In the first volume of the poverty series in the final edition of Life and Labour of the People in London, Booth elaborated more on the classifications, eight of them:

A The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink
B Casual earnings, very poor. The labourers do not get as much as three days work a week, but it is doubtful if many could or would work full time for long together if they had the opportunity. Class B is not one in which men are born and live and die so much as a deposit of those who from mental, moral and physical reasons are incapable of better work
C Intermittent earning. 18s to 21s per week for a moderate family. The victims of competition and on them falls with particular severity the weight of recurrent depressions of trade. Labourers, poorer artisans and street sellers. This irregularity of employment may show itself in the week or in the year: stevedores and waterside porters may secure only one of two days' work in a week, whereas labourers in the building trades may get only eight or nine months in a year.
D Small regular earnings. poor, regular earnings. Factory, dock, and warehouse labourers, carmen, messengers and porters. Of the whole section none can be said to rise above poverty, nor are many to be classed as very poor. As a general rule they have a hard struggle to make ends meet, but they are, as a body, decent steady men, paying their way and bringing up their children respectably.
E Regular standard earnings, 22s to 30s per week for regular work, fairly comfortable. As a rule the wives do not work, but the children do: the boys commonly following the father, the girls taking local trades or going out to service.
F Higher class labour and the best paid of the artisans. Earnings exceed 30s per week. Foremen are included, city warehousemen of the better class and first hand lightermen; they are usually paid for responsibility and are men of good character and much intelligence.
G Lower middle class. Shopkeepers and small employers, clerks and subordinate professional men. A hardworking sober, energetic class.
H Upper middle class, servant keeping class.

Once again, ALL criminals and semi-criminals are encompassed by the lowest classification of earnings. Take a look at any society, and you will find that criminality exists all over the range of different incomes.

Luckily, Booth points out that the "black" class people also involves occsaional labourers and street vendors, for example.

My own take on this is that Sally oversimplifies things to a completely ridiculous extent. But I can see why: Hutchinson was an occasional labourer, "some occasional labourers" are counted into the black mass, and the black mass - according to Sally, ahem ... - is one where ALL people were criminals!

Case closed, eh, Sally?

The best,
Fisherman

[MrBarnett]

Booth again on Pennington Street:

'The houses in Pennington Street should I think be not worse than blue. The trouble to the police is from the occasional quarrel in which the people indulge but for months they are quiet + since dock labour has been more regular the tone and behaviour of the people is quieter. There are thieves and prostitutes, but no brothels...'

The key word in his black classification would appear to be 'vicious', i.e. violent
and troublesome to the police, who presumably the main source for the information on criminality.

MrB

[MrBarnett]

Hi Fish,

Category A includes occasional labourers and B includes labourers who do not get as much as three days work a week. (Do you detect and economic gulf between the two?)

However, category A labourers live the life of savages and their only luxury is drink.

I think it is safe to assume a reasonable correlation between black shaded streets and streets where it would be dangerous to walk.

MrB

[MrBarnett]

Hi again Fish,

If you look at the detailed classifications again you will notice that of the working class categories A - F only A doesn't mention earnings. The two examples given clearly show Booth considering criminality over and above economic considerations. He doesn't use the word because, but his meaning is surely that Mayfields should be black because they are a bunch of thieves but
Pennington St should remain blue because they don't give the police much trouble.

MrB

[Fisherman]

Booth again on Pennington Street:

'The houses in Pennington Street should I think be not worse than blue. The trouble to the police is from the occasional quarrel in which the people indulge but for months they are quiet + since dock labour has been more regular the tone and behaviour of the people is quieter. There are thieves and prostitutes, but no brothels...'

The key word in his black classification would appear to be 'vicious', i.e. violent
and troublesome to the police, who presumably the main source for the information on criminality.

MrB

The problem is, this cannot be reconciled with what other sources say, some of them speaking of for example George Yard as being inhabited by patently honest people who were nevertheless extremely poor.

The best,
Fisherman

[Fisherman]

MrBarnett: Hi Fish,

Category A includes occasional labourers and B includes labourers who do not get as much as three days work a week. (Do you detect and economic gulf between the two?)

I think the ones in category A were weven more occasional workers than the ones on category B, quite simply.

However, category A labourers live the life of savages and their only luxury is drink.

Do I detect a generalization here? Yes I do.

I think it is safe to assume a reasonable correlation between black shaded streets and streets where it would be dangerous to walk.

And I think it is quite safe to assume that Booth was a product of his time, Mr Barnett - he obviously thought there was a correlation between poverty and dishonesty. And many people did at this stage; it was an era when poverty was regarded as a moral punishment imposed upon bad people by higher powers. It was an era when it was believed that long fingers gave away pickpockets.

We are enlightened people, or at least we have a responsibility to be so. We know that God had nothing to do with castigating bad people and making them poor. We know that long fingers is a genetically inherited trait that is as useful for culture-spreading pianists as it is for pickpockets. And we know that poverty is not something that automatically will induce a criminal behavior.

To this we must add our knowledge that socially and economically deprived people are people will at times react by stealing what they are never given the chance to earn. Thus there WILL sometimes be criminality in economically wanting groups of people.

To reason that the Booth maps were actually made to show to what extent a criminal behavior could be expected is not true. The fact that Booth clearly lists how much the different groups earned effectively dissolves such a suggestion. To state that Booth (wrongly) believed that criminality followed with low incomes is however fairly certain. Therefore, he believed that listing income levels would be listing how prone the inhabitants of certain areas would be to become criminals.

Once again, we have a resonsibility to acknowledge that such a suggestion is balderdash. What the people in these areas, described as more or less animals by Booth, thought about it, we can only guess.

The best,
Fisherman

[Lechmere]

The maps were specifically called Descriptive Map of London Poverty' - which shows the emphasis.
The bottom category was describe on this manner:
The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink.
No doubt some people who lived in the black coloured areas did match this description and some of his survey assistants recorded interesting local information. However it is not a crime survey, nor can it be taken as a reliable indication of where it was safe to walk.

[MrBarnett]

Hi Fish,

Yes, GY Buildings were said to be inhabited by the deserving poor, but unless I am mistaken it was the common lodging houses at the NE end of GY that were coloured black.

[Lechmere]

Yes that's right - on the other side of Old Montague Street

[MrBarnett]

Hi Ed,

One step at a time. My comments about GY were made to challenge the suggestion that Booth's black classification did not necessarily imply criminality. If we accept the statement that the residents of GYB were the poorest of the poor, then why were they not in the black category? I would suggest it was that they had been vetted, their tenancy depended on their 'respectability' and Booth's police chaperones were aware of the fact .

Time and again on the police notebooks Booth defends or questions his colour coding in terms of criminality. I haven't read them all, but I have yet to see an entry such as, 'black on map, but average earnings seem to have increased so should be blue'

MrB

[Observer]

Hi Mr Barnett

Is Booth's poverty map a true reflection of wealth, and poverty in the city of London though? I mean, we have areas of red (middle class, well to do) either side of Commercial Street, within a stones throw of Dorset Street, one of the blackest dastardly streets in London. Surely we can't have well heeled gents living, and wandering about in that locale?

Regards

Observer

[Fisherman]

Hi Mr Barnett

Is Booth's poverty map a true reflection of wealth, and poverty in the city of London though? I mean, we have areas of red (middle class, well to do) either side of Commercial Street, within a stones throw of Dorset Street, one of the blackest dastardly streets in London. Surely we can't have well heeled gents living, and wandering about in that locale?

Regards

Observer

God forbid!

Fisherman

[Sam Flynn]

Is Booth's poverty map a true reflection of wealth, and poverty in the city of London though?

It's all relative, Obs. Booth made the mistake of starting in the East End; as I've said elsewhere, this was tantamount to setting out to survey average height by calibrating your tools in Lilliput.

When Booth extended his survey to other London boroughs, his categorisations (and colour-codes) started to creak, such that comparing a "red" in Whitechapel to a "red" in (say) Bloomsbury would give a rather misleading impression.

Don't get me wrong - Booth's maps are an excellent resource, but they should be treated with a little caution.

[Fisherman]

If we accept the statement that the residents of GYB were the poorest of the poor, then why were they not in the black category? I would suggest it was that they had been vetted, their tenancy depended on their 'respectability' and Booth's police chaperones were aware of the fact .

MrB

Well, what if the caretakers wife was overestimating the poverty?

Come to think of it, Crow was a cabdriver and Reeves a waterside labourer, so they had steady jobs, apparently. And was that not something that was expected of those who were to stay in the model buildings...? I seem to remember such a ruking, but that could be wrong, of course.

If this holds true, then it of course demolishes the bolstering of my own argument that poor people can be nice people anyway, but there you are. Maybe it goes without saying, after all?

The best,
Fisherman