The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle

Author:David Boyle [David Boyle ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007372898
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

IV

‘We are very fond of each other,’ Beatrice confided in her diary in 1887, well into the first year of working side by side with Booth. ‘A close intimate relationship between a man and a woman without sentiment (perhaps not without sentiment, but without passion or the dawning of passion). We are fellow workers both inspired by the same intellectual desire.’ But it was all about to change. If he had still not reached any conclusion about his figures, Beatrice had. She now believed in municipal workshops as a solution to low and intermittent wages. And, worse, she had met and secretly become engaged to a socialist: the frighteningly intelligent socialist Sidney Webb. ‘A huge head and a tiny body’, she confided in her diary.

The Booths couldn’t stand him. Trying to avoid the awkwardness, Beatrice suggested to Mary that they ignore the engagement. Mary breathed a sigh of relief: ‘You see Charlie and I have nothing in common with Mr Webb,’ she wrote back. ‘Charlie would never go to him for help, and he would never go to Charlie, so that it would not be natural for them to see each other. When you are married it will be different.’

But it wasn’t. The rift grew and as Sidney and Beatrice embraced the new Fabian Society and set about making the next century in the image of dull, authoritarian socialism, and as Charles continued to agonize about coming to any sure conclusion, they and the Booths drifted further and further apart. It was the end of a fifteen-year relationship. ‘When I strained it, I should have thought slightly, it broke – or rather I found that it was already broken,’ wrote Beatrice later. ‘Even today I have not yet fully recovered from my amazement and wonder at this fact.’

Booth didn’t seem to notice. He was off on the second phase of his gigantic project, looking at the work and living conditions of Londoners. And although Beatrice wasn’t there this time, Booth took her great lesson to heart. She had learned ‘how to sweat’ as a tailor’s assistant in order to write about the rag trade. So when he divided the classes from A (underclass) to H (upper middle class), he set about sharing lives. He took lodgings in houses typical of classes C, D and E, to find out about life around the poverty line.

‘CB went to live in the East End,’ said Mary’s diary baldly, hiding what an extraordinary thing this was to do in late Victorian England. He refused to disguise himself, but seemed accepted by his fellow lodgers as he caught fleas and filled his notebooks with details like the frozen garbage in the gutters. A man of his time, he seemed to feel no shame at all – no sense of apology for landing on them from his different station, as modern Booths would probably consider natural. One working class family he stayed with in Liverpool only discovered who he was when he suddenly invited them to work as caretakers at Gracedieu.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.