The poverty maps, papers and notebooks of Charles Booth’s inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London (1886 – 1903), an investigation into the distribution of wealth and poverty in late-Victorian London. The most famous items in this collection are the maps, known for their street-by-street colour-coded display of wealth distribution throughout the city at the time. This collection includes both the printed and hand-coloured maps produced by the inquiry. Further topics addressed in Booth's papers and notebooks include industry and religion.

‘Street Life in London’ (1877) is a book consisting of a series of articles by radical journalist Adolphe Smith and photographer John Thomson. The book vividly documents the lives of working-class Londoners living on the margins of society, combining Thomson’s photographs with detailed written passages based on interviews. The authors felt at the time that the images lent authenticity to the text, and their book is now regarded as a key work in the history of documentary photography. This collection includes the book itself, as well as a separate series containing only the photographs.

The books in this collection constitute some of the oldest material from The Women’s Library and LSE, dating from the early 17th century to the mid 19th century. The collection explores how social expectations of women and their perceived roles in society have changed throughout the centuries, featuring perspectives from both female and male authors. The books include academic and philosophical works, such as treatises, essays and recorded lectures, as well as petitions, instructional books, works of fiction, satire and general entertainment.

The data presented consists of 3 tables in csv format which show the numbers of births, marriages and deaths in English and Welsh regions for the years stated. These were extracted from image files of digitised printed material in LSE Library. The aim was to make that data more easily processed by the end-user in spreadsheet format.

The initial digitisation was the result of a project at LSE Library. The resulting corpus of materials consists of lengthy runs (some complete) of a series of publications including The Labour Gazette, The Annual Report of the Registrar General and the Census of Production. The Library, in conjunction with LSE’s Department of Economic History, began the digitisation project in 2018. This has made a substantial collection of materials available which can be used by members of the faculty (and beyond) for research and teaching purposes.

A second phase of the project attempted to extract tables from image files from the early years of the Annual Reports of the Registrar General. The aim was to convert the large amounts of valuable data across the publications into an open format so that it could be re-used, repurposed and analysed more easily in statistical analysis software. While the extraction proved considerably challenging, the extracted tables are relatively excellent reproductions and have been well rendered as csv files.

Note: Care has been taken to ensure the fidelity of the content of the tables but we cannot guarantee that the automated processes we have used have always captured this correctly. Some data cleansing may therefore be needed to be carried out as a result. The materials can be double checked against the originals which are available online at Annual report of the Registrar General of births, deaths and marriages in England and Wales.

The papers of George Lansbury MP (1859 – 1940), which include photographs and caricatures of Lansbury, press reviews of Lansbury’s published work, articles, pamphlets, speeches, leaflets, election addresses and personal ephemera. Topics covered in these papers include schools, the Labour Party, unemployment, agriculture, India, the 1931 Cabinet Crisis and the Metropolitan Police.

This collection incorporates a selection of material from the archives of Louisa Garrett Anderson and of Nina Last relating to the Endell Street Military Hospital (1915-1919). This includes the letters of Louisa Garret Anderson regarding the Women’s Hospital Corps (mainly to her mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson), a notebook by Nina Last regarding her work at Endell Street, a scrapbook kept by Flora Murray, and a series of photographs relating to the hospital and its staff, along with an image of an embroidered shoe bag. Transcripts are included with the original manuscripts in this collection.

This is a collection of pamphlets collected by Ruth Cavendish-Bentinck, socialist and suffragist, which have been bound into volumes. The collection contains many pamphlets relating to the women's suffrage campaign from the 1860s to approximately 1900. Other topics are also covered, such as Octavia Hill and her work with the poor (volume 1), the Marriage Law Reform Association (volume 22), The Women's Institute (the club, not the National Federation of Women's Institutes, volume 23) and women's suffrage in the United States (volume 35).

We are grateful to the Friends of The Women's Library for assisting with the digitisation of this collection.