The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable by Thomas Gibson-Brydon (review)

While this study offers valuable information on Charles Booth's least known London investigation, his religious survey begun in the late 1890s, it must be used with caution. The book grew out of Gibson-Brydon's doctoral dissertation, which, unfortunately, he did not live long enough to revise – a task which was subsequently undertaken by his supervisor, Brian Lewis, and a friend, Hillary Kaell. In his study, Gibson-Brydon argues for a different understanding both of Charles Booth and of the London poor. He denies that Booth's survey should be seen as a precursor to modern social scientific investigation (as a number of historians have argued), claiming instead that it was deeply marked throughout by a moral vision and purpose. The first two chapters introduce Booth, the man, and his religious survey. In Chapter 1, Gibson-Brydon first explores Booth's religious beliefs, arguing that the latter saw religion "as a broad moral influence that could order society." (11) He then sets out the still wide-ranging influence of the evangelical impulse in late 19th-century society. The second chapter explores Booth's specific research agenda, and his classification scheme, arguing that he believed competition to be necessary in order to revitalize character, even though this meant there would always be some in "persistent misery." (38) Gibson-Brydon repeatedly argues that Booth found the causes of poverty in character and morality (or lack thereof), rather than in structural problems within the economy. In this approach, Gibson-Brydon says Booth shared much with the Charity Organisation Society (cos), a group to which a number of historians have hitherto contrasted Booth's understanding of poverty and philanthropy. Gibson-Brydon argues that the two "are best seen as competitors in an intensely subjective field of charity control, each armed with the same ideas about the immoral poor," (11) and he concludes that most of the ministers whom Booth interviewed were attempting to give charity carefully in ways that tallied closely with the cos mindset, in spite of incarnational theology's focus on loving the poor. The fourth chapter focuses on the role of women as agents in the control of charity. Gibson-Brydon is deeply critical of religious leaders, arguing that they took for granted, and demeaned, the contributions of women in charitable endeavours. Ministers regularly accused female charitable agents of giving indiscriminately to the unworthy as well as the deserving, even though Gibson-Brydon says evidence suggests women were equally committed to the kind of approach favoured by Booth and the cos. Indeed, he argues that women, as frontline charitable workers visiting the poor, were largely responsible for providing the raw data upon which Booth built his classification system.

In the last two chapters of the book Gibson-Brydon turns to the subjects of Booth's investigations: the poor themselves. In Chapter 5, he discusses what he calls "a socially conservative response to inequality" (14) on the part of working-class people. He says that Booth's hierarchy of classes came from the poor themselves (rather than being a middle-class imposition), and this was the case because working people bought into the middle-class ideology of respectability. The poor-but-respectable, as he terms them, did so because of anxiety that they might be pitched into absolute poverty. Gibson-Brydon says, "perpetually struggling for and sometimes unable to reach poor-but-respectable goals, working people took every opportunity to displace aggression, targeting their own perceived inferiors within the community." (14) Gibson-Brydon sees working people not as a unified class entity, but existing in a myriad of hierarchical social gradations within which men and women tenaciously defended their place against those below them and aspired to rise to the status of those above them. Not surprisingly, he denies the existence of class consciousness, saying that E.P. Thompson...