Charles Booth (1840-1916) was a British businessman and social reformer remembered today mostly for his efforts to document poverty in nineteenth-century London. He documented these efforts in his multivolume work Inquiry Into Life and Labor in London, which was published between 1889 and 1903. This publication was perhaps most well known for Booth's Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, which are color-coded according to wealth distribution in London on a street-by-street basis. In Charles Booth's London, a resource created by the London School of Economics (LSE), visitors can explore a digitized version of one of Booth's "poverty maps." As visitors view the map, they can use a slider at the bottom of their screen to transition between Booth's map and a modern-day Google map. Visitors may also conduct a search in order to explore a particular neighborhood or street of interest. In addition, visitors can explore some of the Booth's notebooks to learn more about his research process. These notebooks include a series of entries by police officers who assisted Booth in surveying neighborhoods for his maps.
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