BOOTH, CHARLES (1840-1916), English shipowner and sociologist, was born at Liverpool. In 1862 he became a partner in Alfred Booth and Co., a Liverpool firm engaged in the Brazil trade, and subsequently chairman of the Booth Steamship Co. He devoted much time and money to enquiries into the statistical aspects of social questions. The results of these are chiefly em bodied in a work entitled Life and Labour of the People in London (1891-1903 ), of which the earlier portion appeared under the title of Life and Labour in 1889. The book is designed to show "the numerical relation which poverty, misery and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under which each class lives." It contains a striking series of maps, in which the varying degrees of poverty are represented street by street, by shades of colour.
Booth also paid much attention to the lot of the aged poor. In 1894 he published a volume of statistics on the subject, and, in 1891 and 1899, works on old-age pensions, his scheme for the latter depending on a general provision of pensions of 5s. a week to all aged persons, irrespective of the cost to the State. He was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, from which he had, however, to retire for reasons of health, but he made im portant recommendations, which he published separately as Poor Law Reform (191o). He was made a privy councillor in 1904. Booth married, in 1871, Mary Macaulay, a granddaughter of Zachary Macaulay. She was the author of Charles Booth, a Memoir, published anonymously in 1918.