Social Investigation

Abstract

In the spring of 1886, Beatrice Webb attended the first meeting of Charles Booth’s ‘Board of Statistical Research’, the team of investigators that was to carry out his plan for an analysis of poverty in London. By December of that year, Webb and Booth had decided that she would undertake an investigation of East End dock labour, to be followed by an inquiry into the ‘sweating system’ of the East End tailoring trade (p. 286; 17 April 1886). So, for the next two years, Webb worked on the investigative essays that appeared in Booth’s East London in 1889: in these years she practised the ‘craft’ of social investigation, helped to create methods of social inquiry, formed new opinions about political solutions to social problems, and engaged in what must be called experiments in identity.¹ For Webb it was a time of methodological and personal experimentation, a period of professional and political transformation.

[C]an the investigator, coming from one social class, ever accurately analyse the dynamic force and the specific direction of the feelings of another social class?

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Methods of Social Study