Like other civic-minded businessmen, Booth had long been active in his local statistical society and shared the Victorian conviction that good data were a prerequisite for effective social action. When Chamberlain was mayor of Birmingham, he had done a survey at his behest and they had become friends. His finding that more than a quarter of Birmingham’s school-age children were neither at home nor in school had led to a spate of legislation. In the early 1880s, when poverty amid plenty was again becoming the rallying cry for critics of contemporary society, he was struck by the widespread “sense of helplessness” that well-intentioned people felt in the face of an apparently intractable problem and a bewildering array of conflicting diagnoses and prescriptions. The trouble, he thought, was that political economists had theories and activists had anecdotes, but neither could supply an unbiased or complete description of the problem. It was as if he had been asked to reorganize South American shipping routes without the benefit of maps.
The previous spring, Booth had been outraged by an assertion by some Socialists that more than one-quarter of London’s population was destitute. Suspecting but unable to prove that the figure was grossly exaggerated, he had been goaded into taking action. He determined that he would survey every house and workshop, every street and every type of employment, and learn the income, occupation, and circumstances of every one of London’s 4.5 million citizens. Using his own money, he would create a map of poverty in London.
Unlike Henry Mayhew, whom Beatrice admired, Booth had the vision, managerial experience, and technical sophistication to carry out this extraordinary plan. His first step, after consulting friends such as Alfred Marshall, who was teaching at Oxford at the time, and Samuel Barnett of the settlement house Toynbee Hall, was to recruit a research team. Beatrice accepted his invitation to attend the first meeting of the Board of Statistical Research at the London branch of his firm. She was, of course, the only woman. Booth explained that he aimed to get a “fair picture of the whole of London society” and presented them with an “elaborate and detailed plan” that involved the use, among other things, of truant officers as interviewers and census returns and charity records as cross-checks.99 He wanted to start with the East End, which contained 1 million out of London’s 4 million inhabitants:
My only justification for taking up the subject in the way I have done is that this piece of London is supposed to contain the most destitute population in England, and to be, as it were, the focus of the problem of poverty in the midst of wealth, which is troubling the minds and hearts of so many people.100
Beatrice was deeply impressed that Booth had launched the ambitious undertaking singlehandedly. She could imagine herself taking on a similarly pioneering role in the future. This was, she realized, “just the sort of work I should like to undertake . . . if I were free.”101 She decided to apprentice herself to her cousin, so to speak, devoting as much time and absorbing as much knowledge as caring for her family would allow. Her role was not going to be collecting statistics. Instead she was to go into workshops and homes, make her own observations, and interview workers—starting with London’s legendary dockworkers.
When the Potters returned to their country estate, Beatrice took advantage of her enforced isolation to fill a gap in her education. Augmenting statistics with personal observation and interviews seemed essential to her, but she grasped that good observation was impossible without some theory to separate the wheat from the chaff. Mayhew had failed to produce lasting insights because he had gathered facts indiscriminately. The need for some sort of framework made her eager to learn some economics and especially to learn how economic ideas had evolved, since “each fresh development corresponded with some unconscious observation of the leading features of the contemporary industrial life.”102
After a day or two of fitful reading, Beatrice complained that political economy was “most hateful drudgery.”103 A mere two weeks later, however, she was satisfied that she had “broken the back of economical science.”104 She had finished—or at least skimmed—Mill’s A System of Logic and Fawcett’s Manual of Political Economy and was convinced that she had “gotten the gist” of what Smith, Ricardo, and Marshall had to say. By the first week of August, she was putting the finishing touches on a critique of English political economy. Except for Marx, whose work she read in the fall, the leading political economists were guilty of treating assumptions as if they were facts, she argued, chiding them for paying too little attention to collections of facts about actual behavior. She sent her indictment to Cousin Charlie, hoping that he would help her get it published. To her chagrin, Booth wrote back suggesting that she put the piece away and return to it in a year or two.
A year later, after she had completed her study of dockworkers, Booth took Beatrice to an exhibition of pre-Raphaelite artists in Manchester. Beatrice was so moved by the paintings that she resolved to turn her next study—of sweatshops in the tailoring trades—into a “picture” too. It occurred to her that if she wanted to “dramatize” her account, she would have to go underground. “I could not get at the picture without living among the actual workers. This I think I could do.”105
Preparing for her debut role as a working girl took months. She spent the summer at Standish, immersed in “all the volumes, Blue Books, pamphlets and periodicals bearing on the subject of sweating that I could buy or borrow.”106 In the fall, she lived in a small East End hotel for six weeks while she spent eight to twelve hours a day at a cooperative tailoring workshop, learning how to sew. At night, when she wasn’t too exhausted to fall into her bed, she went out to fashionable West End dinner parties.
By April 1888, she was ready to begin her underground investigation. She moved to a shabby East End rooming house. The next morning she threw on a set of shabby old clothes and went off on foot “to begin life as a working woman.” In a few hours, she got her first taste of job hunting.
It gave her, she confessed, “a queer feeling.” As she wrote in her diary, “No bills up, except for ‘good tailoress’ and at these places I daren’t apply, feeling myself rather an imposter. I wandered on, until my heart sank with me, my legs and back began to ache, and I felt all the feeling of ‘out o’ work.’ At last I summoned up courage.”107
“It don’t look as if you have been ’customed to much work,” she heard again and again. Still, twenty-four hours later, in spite of her fear that everyone saw through her disguise and her awkward attempts to drop her h’s, Beatrice was sitting at a large table making a clumsy job of sewing a pair of trousers. Her fingers felt like sausages, and she had to rely on the kindness of a fellow worker, who, though she was paid by the piece, took the time to teach Beatrice the ropes, and of the “sweater” who sent out a girl to buy the trimmings that workers were expected to supply themselves.
The woman whose motto was “A woman, in all the relations of life, should be sought,” gleefully transcribed the lyrics of a work girls’ song:
If a girl likes a man, why should she not propose?
Why should the little girls always be led by the nose?108
As soon as the gas was lit, the heat was terrific. Beatrice’s fingers were sore and her back ached. “Eight o’clock by the Brewery clock,” cried out a shrill voice.
For this she received a shilling, the first she had ever earned. “A shilling a day is about