Emil Lederer on The New Survey of London Life and Labour

Emil Lederer’s 1931 book review of The New Survey of London Life and Labour, Vol. I, Forty Years of Change, published in an English translation by W. C. R. Hicks, evaluates the renewal of Charles Booth’s investigation of London poverty. Its central concern is how a social survey can establish genuine progress without reducing changes in working-class life to movements in average wages. Lederer moves from Booth’s method and its national setting to the new volume’s demographic and economic findings, before assessing its preparation for more detailed investigations.

Booth’s achievement lay in combining classification with intimate knowledge of households. School Board visitors supplied sustained local observation; Booth supplemented their evidence through stays with families of different social ranks. Statistics thereby became a means of describing social relationships and lived conditions:

But it was bolder than is the wont of official publications, and provided a kind of transition from Statistics to descriptive Sociology, or to what may be called "Sociography."

Lederer makes this methodological judgment through a comparison of English and German reform. English individual initiative, he argues, encourages practical intervention and personal understanding; German distrust of private welfare places the burden of reform on the state, whose investigations tend toward statistical abstraction. He admires Booth’s combination of objectivity and sympathy while noting its limited philosophical outlook. The new survey’s value is to make this descriptive method historical: repeating Booth’s classifications could reveal transformations in social structure, not merely changes in earnings.

Such comparison nevertheless requires caution. The volume provisionally suggests that, if average real-wage gains extended across Booth’s classes, the proportion in extreme poverty might have fallen from 30 to eight per cent. Lederer endorses the authors’ refusal to treat that inference as established. He also questions whether a constant purchasing-power threshold can measure poverty across changing social expectations:

For there can be no doubt that at the end of the nineteenth century what would now in many respects be considered as poverty (e.g. in matters of housing and clothing), was felt to be the appropriate condition of a member of the working classes.

The conceptual move is from an income-defined minimum to a historically changing standard of acceptable life. Housing deterioration, longer journeys to work and the resulting loss of leisure complicate any inference from increased purchasing power to improved well-being.

Lederer next contrasts London’s relative demographic stability with Berlin’s rapid transformation. London’s major expansion preceded the period under review, while its poorest boroughs became increasingly native-born. These findings challenge the attribution of metropolitan poverty to migration:

Here arises a pauper population, entirely self-contained, and recruited from within its own ranks.

Stability here signifies confinement rather than security. Poverty restricts movement because relocation costs money; local restlessness need not offer escape from an enduring class position. The later survey volumes should make this population’s life comparable with Booth’s earlier portrait.

The review then examines employment, wages and working time. London’s distance from the provincial centres of mining, shipbuilding and textiles helped shield it from the worst post-war structural unemployment. Yet its relatively favourable position does not establish an adequate distribution of economic gains. Lederer stresses that the reported rise of roughly 30 per cent in real wages by 1928 depends on comparison with the low starting point of 1886. Against forty-two years of rapid technical development, that increase invites scrutiny, particularly when new commuting expenses remain difficult to measure. Shorter working hours likewise matter only insofar as leisure permits a fuller existence.

The closing assessment places the volume’s sections on housing, transport, health, education, recreation, industry, unemployment, charity and crime within this larger inquiry. Publicly supported housebuilding and declining overcrowding are substantial developments, but the introductory volume establishes the framework rather than settles the distribution and experience of improvement. Lederer’s favourable verdict rests on the survey’s promise of a historically comparative “sociography”: an account capable of showing how aggregate progress coexists with entrenched deprivation, and of making London’s development informative for other great cities.