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Whitechapel, c1870–c1900: Crime, Policing and the Inner City

Sources for a Whitechapel enquiry

  • 3 things to know
  • Paper 1

Overview

Census returns, Charles Booth's survey and poverty maps, council, housing, employment and workhouse records, local police records, coroners' inquests, photographs, the Star and The Times, police investigation files, Old Bailey records, Punch and 'The Nemesis of Neglect', the limits of each, and how to plan a follow-up enquiry from a detail in a source.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

What can census returns show a historian about conditions in Whitechapel?

Key term

What was Charles Booth's survey of London?

Key term

What do housing and employment records reveal about people's lives in Whitechapel?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How often was a census taken, and what did it record about each person?

    Model answer

    Every ten years, listing each person in a household on one night with their age, sex, relationship to the head, job and place of birth.

  2. 2

    What can census returns show a historian about conditions in the district?

    Model answer

    How many people were packed into one address, what work they did, and how many had been born in Ireland or in Eastern Europe.

  3. 3

    Why do census returns give an incomplete picture of Whitechapel's people?

    Model answer

    They catch only one night in ten years, and the drifting lodging-house population was often missed altogether or gave false names.

  4. 4

    What was Charles Booth's survey of London?

    Model answer

    A vast investigation of how Londoners lived and earned, begun in the late 1880s, which recorded street by street how poor each part of the city was.

  5. 5

    How did Booth's poverty maps show what a street was like?

    Model answer

    Each street was coloured on a scale running from black for the roughest and most criminal up through blue and pink to yellow for the wealthy.

  6. 6

    How did Booth's investigators gather their evidence, and why should a historian be cautious with it?

    Model answer

    They walked the streets with police officers and questioned school visitors and employers, so the colours record their own judgements about respectability as much as income.

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