Shipowner and sociologist whose Life and Labour of the People in London (17 vol., 1891-1903) contributed to the knowledge of social problems and to the methodology of statistical measurement.
In 1866 Booth and his brother Alfred began a shipping service between Europe and Brazil. The business was reorganized as Booth Steamship Company, Ltd., in 1901, with Charles Booth as chairman until his retirement in 1912.
Appointed a privy councillor in 1904, he was a member of the royal commission on the poor law from 1905 to 1909.
In his 17-volume work, Booth described the conditions under which various social classes lived. He tried to determine the causes of individual poverty (of 4,076 cases, 62 % were paid low or irregular wages; 23 % had large families or suffered from illness; and 15 % squandered their earnings, drank excessively, or refused to work) and to show the relationship between poverty and depravity on the one hand and regularity of income and a decent way of living on the other nand.
Life and Labour contains a series of maps on which various colours indicate the degrees of poverty found street by street. Booth drew on his own observations and those of clergymen of long service in their parishes and consulted records of schools and charitable organizations.
Especially concerned with the aged, Booth advocated old-page pensions for all rather than just for persons whose incomes were below a certain standard. Otherwise he showed little enthusiasm for specific reforms. HIs wife, Mary Macaulay, a niece of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, wrote Charles Booth, a Memoir (1918).
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