The monumental works of Charles Booth provide a detailed illustration of the
discourse of contagions and the economy of bad influence in the air. His descriptions, especially of the shabbiness and filth of slum districts in London, tended to highlight the degree of sanitation. In Booth’s study, environments could be classified and graded according to the newly founded standards of sanitation, using five degrees based on the evaluation of “light and air.”Elements known and newly confirmed as the main cause of contagions were applied. Here is one example of what Booth rated as “very bad”in both air and light:
Buildings (“
very bad”in both sections) is a large plain brick building with six floors, the lowest being half basement. Entering by a gate and ascending a few steps, a long passage is reached extending from the front to the back of the building. About half way along this passage is the staircase, and facing it is a window frame from which the sashes have been removed and a sink and water tap placed in the opening. This aperture looks out on a small courtyard. On the staircase is another opening to a second courtyard, long and narrow. These two open spaces light, or are supposed to light, the black tenements: their walls have been whitened recently. Close by the sink is the dust-shoot and a closet, and on the stairs is a second closet. This accommodation provides for nearly twenty tenements, one and two-roomed, whose doors open on this passage. The upper floors are similar, save that the passages are much darker, as they have no light from the street and make a turn at each end to give access to the remote tenements. The inner walls are dirty, and the plaster has fallen from the roof in patches. The basement has been condemned and closed as unsanitary. (Booth 17) For Booth, a set of criteria were required to compare the sanitation of livingenvironments, with another logical set of criteria for prioritizing improvements and evaluating their effects. As he noted, the inhabitants’environmental improvements
could be “grouped under three heads; viz. (1) better appearance; (2) better light; and (3) more and better internal fittings”(Booth 24). Poverty now became not just a social, political, ethical, or moral issue, but also an epistemological issue, as its assessment required a scientific method of observation and systematization of knowledge as the basis for understanding. Poverty initiated a scientific curiosity that could be examined, compared, and evaluated. The importance of Booth’s works was underlined by his scientific endeavor to examine the darkest aspects of the empire. Booth’s works were ambitious in establishing connections among the hierarchies of medical science, political science, journalistic reports, ethical dilemmas, and philosophical inquiries.
Other major concerns in Booth’s work, related to the Pasteurian discovery of bacterial infection, were the themes of transgression and transmission. Personal mobility, domestic migration from rural to urban areas or exotic passages from native land to abroad, were framed in terms of the metaphor of the medical concept of transmission: like the dissemination of bacteria, the movement of people was as well penetrative. The movement of population, first of all, was a phenomenon to be studied and classified as part of knowledge systems:
Immigrants into London may be roughly classified under two heads, drift and current. By drift, I mean the general “set”towards a great centre, carrying with it the restless and unsettled spirits with vague ambitions, rather than definite aims, and bearing on its surface not a little of the social wreckage of the provinces. By current, I mean the immigration of
individuals, often the cream of their native counties, moving to London to seek a distinct economic advantage. (Booth 68)
Poverty now became not just a social issue, nor a political, ethical, or moral one.
It is also an epistemological issue in regards to a scientific way of observation and a knowledge system. By the end of the nineteenth century, poverty became a subject for
epistemological cognition in Victorian society. Poverty, in short, was an episteme.
Since poverty became a scientific object, population in poverty could be examined in terms of a knowledge system. Poverty was no longer just a problem to debate, but also an issue to study. When scientific values permeate the study of poverty, more detailed and specific terms of knowledge should also set in:
The greater proportion of minors among immigrants from nearer parts is likely to be caused, at least in part, by the greater extent of immigration by whole families from adjacent counties, especially from agricultural districts.
Long distance migrants probably include large numbers of young men between the age of 20 and 30 who have served their time as apprentices in industrial provincial centres, where apprenticeship still prevails, and then come to London, attracted by higher wages. (Booth 69)
In this manner, the composition of the impoverished population should be formulated: “the 1881 census showed that 343 out of every 1000 inhabitants of
London were born in the other parts of the United Kingdom”(Booth 121). Motivation for population movement should itself be presented in a more scientifically neutral way: “the drive for the movement is an economic one”for the outflow of population (Booth 137). The result of population movement could therefore be expected:“free circulation of labour is the very life-blood of a modern industrial community”(Booth 145).