Charles Booth’s enquiry (1886-1903) was a ground-breaking social investigation into late-Victorian London. The enquiry’s most famous outputs are the poverty maps which showed street-by-street levels of wealth and poverty. LSE Library holds Booth’s original notebooks and 2nd edition maps which formed the basis for his publication, 'Life and Labour of the People in London'.

This collection of materials has been selected from some of LSE Library’s key collections of economic and government statistics. It includes several lengthy time-series of data in the form of official and government publications which have been digitised to reveal the richness of information contained within (demographics, economics, public health etc), which we hope will be useful to a wide range of users.

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.