In 1866 Booth and his brother Alfred began a shipping service between Europe and Brazil. The business was reorganized as Booth Steamship Company, Ltd., in 1901, with Charles Booth as chairman. Appointed a privy councillor in 1904, he was a member of the royal commission on the Poor Law from 1905 to 1909.

Life and Labour is divided into three subject areas: poverty, industry, and the influences of religion. Booth described the conditions under which various social classes lived. He tried to determine the causes of poverty and to show the relationship between poverty and depravity on the one hand and regularity of income and a decent way of living on the other hand. Regularity of income played the largest role in determining poverty status. Booth found that, of the 4,076 poor individuals he studied, 62 percent were paid low or irregular wages; 23 percent had large families or suffered from illness; and 15 percent squandered their earnings, drank excessively, or refused to work. In his research Booth drew on his own observations and those of clergymen of long service in their parishes, and he consulted records of schools and charitable organizations. Life and Labour contains a series of maps of London in which various colours indicate the degree of poverty of each street. Especially concerned with the aged, Booth advocated old-age pensions for all rather than just for persons whose incomes were below a certain standard.