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First edition, with the editor's compliments slips tipped onto the front free endpaper of Volume II and the Appendix Volume. Booth's work is one of the key resources for the social and economic history of late Victorian London, based on years of surveys by a team of researchers on a house-by-house basis. The survey describes living and working conditions, the organization of trade and industry, the effects of national and international migration, and the leisure activities and religious life of the inhabitants of the capital. The maps are colored street by street to indicate levels of poverty and wealth. Booth argued that chronic poverty lead to depravity, and that its reduction was a crucial issue for local and national government. "The significance of Booth's survey was hotly debated at the time, and continues to be so a century later. Some have claimed him as one of the founding fathers of sociology or of empirical social science, whereas others have suggested that, despite its huge accumulation of facts, the survey had little or no explanatory validity. Some have portrayed Booth's poverty findings as a crucial influence on the growth of the welfare state; whereas others have concluded that Booth's practical influence on social policy was negligible... Current research on Booth has moved away from this type of question, and has concentrated less upon the survey's scientific strengths and deficiencies and more on its status as a unique historical archive; as a documentary periscope into the assumptions, beliefs, and anxieties of one of the major protagonists of the late Victorian era" (ODNB). The work was later expanded to nine volumes under the title Life and Labour of the People of London (1892-7) and finally 17 volumes (1902-3). Provenance: the first volume has the inscription to the front free endpaper verso, "F. Burroughs from Mr. Wilberforce Bryant Stoke Park, Bucks, 1889". Bryant (1837-1906) was the leading match manufacturer in Britain, whose factory is briefly referred to in the second volume (p. 463) - "the descendants of the women who used to ply the now dying trade of plaiting at the cottage door may now, perhaps, be pasting labels on Crosse & Blackwell's jam-pots, or packing Lucifer matches for Bryant & May". A Quaker, and a conservative in politics, Bryant had recently lost to a major strike by his workers the previous year. The title page of Volume II and the Appendix volume has the penciled ownership signature of Joseph Crompton, possibly the Australian manufacturer and exporter of that name (1840-1901). READ MORE Two volumes bound in three, as issued. Original light blue cloth, spines and front covers lettered in black. With 9 folding colored maps mounted on linen as issued. Slight yellow spotting to Vol. I, minor rubbing and bumping at extremities. An excellent set. .