THE GREAT TOWNS.

A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without

reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint

which could lead to the inference that there is open country within

reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping

together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has

multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has

raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant

docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the

Thames. I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames

offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of

buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards,

the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer

together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of

the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one

another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect

himself, but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness before he sets

foot upon English soil. {23}

But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After

roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with

difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles,

after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first

time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best

qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of

civilisation which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which

slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in

order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union

with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something

repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of

thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not

all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same

interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek

happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by

one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one

another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his

own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the

crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a

glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his

private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these

individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however

much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow

self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it

is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in

the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads,

of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here

carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is

here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard

each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end

of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that

the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while

to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true

of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on

one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare,

every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering

under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed

that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they

manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole

crazy fabric still hangs together.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence

and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried

on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon

the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the

whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy

as to find work, _i.e_., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich

itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep

body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not

afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care

that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner. During my residence

in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple

starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely

been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the

matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and

unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always

finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death

from starvation. The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these

cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. But indirectly, far more

than directly, many have died of starvation, where long continued want of

proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced

such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained

inoperative, brought on severe illness and death. The English working-

men call this "social murder," and accuse our whole society of

perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?

True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the

working-man that it may not be his turn to-morrow? Who assures him

employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his

lord and master discharges him to-morrow, he can struggle along with

those dependent upon him, until he may find some one else "to give him

bread?" Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain

work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues

recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No

one. He knows that he has something to-day, and that it does not depend

upon himself whether he shall have something to-morrow. He knows that

every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of

trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has

temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible

to keep his head above water. He knows that, though he may have the

means of living to-day, it is very uncertain whether he shall to-morrow.

Meanwhile, let us proceed to a more detailed investigation of the

position, in which the social war has placed the non-possessing class.

Let us see what pay for his work society does give the working-man in the

form of dwelling, clothing, food, what sort of subsistence it grants

those who contribute most to the maintenance of society; and, first, let

us consider the dwellings.

Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is

crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to

the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been

assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it

may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in

all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of

the towns; usually one or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with

cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses

of three or four rooms and a kitchen form, throughout England, some parts

of London excepted, the general dwellings of the working-class. The

streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and

animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul,

stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad,

confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human

beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails

in these working-men's quarters may readily be imagined. Further, the

streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched

across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing.

Let us investigate some of the slums in their order. London comes first,

and in London the famous rookery of St. Giles which is now, at last,

about to be penetrated by a couple of broad streets. St. Giles is in the

midst of the most populous part of the town, surrounded by broad,

splendid avenues in which the gay world of London idles about, in the

immediate neighbourhood of Oxford Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar

Square and the Strand. It is a disorderly collection of tall, three or

four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there

is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except

that, here, people of the working-class only are to be seen. A vegetable

market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits,

naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the sidewalk still

further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers' stalls, arises

a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy

within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being

could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in

comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the

streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the

filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole

window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-

frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or

altogether wanting in this thieves' quarter, where no doors are needed,

there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all

directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in

stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid

workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately

huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those

who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds

them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to

resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.

Nor is St. Giles the only London slum. In the immense tangle of streets,

there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses

too bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever

upon a dwelling fit for human beings. Close to the splendid houses of

the rich such a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be

found. So, a short time ago, on the occasion of a coroner's inquest, a

region close to Portman Square, one of the very respectable squares, was

characterised as an abode "of a multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty

and filth." So, too, may be found in streets, such as Long Acre and

others, which, though not fashionable, are yet "respectable," a great

number of cellar dwellings out of which puny children and half-starved,

ragged women emerge into the light of day. In the immediate

neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, the second in London, are some of

the worst streets of the whole metropolis, Charles, King, and Park

Streets, in which the houses are inhabited from cellar to garret

exclusively by poor families. In the parishes of St. John and St.

Margaret there lived in 1840, according to the _Journal of the

Statistical Society_, 5,366 working-men's families in 5,294 "dwellings"

(if they deserve the name!), men, women, and children thrown together

without distinction of age or sex, 26,830 persons all told; and of these

families three-fourths possessed but one room. In the aristocratic

parish of St. George, Hanover Square, there lived, according to the same

authority, 1,465 working-men's families, nearly 6,000 persons, under

similar conditions, and here, too, more than two-thirds of the whole

number crowded together at the rate of one family in one room. And how

the poverty of these unfortunates, among whom even thieves find nothing

to steal, is exploited by the property-holding class in lawful ways! The

abominable dwellings in Drury Lane, just mentioned, bring in the

following rents: two cellar dwellings, 3s.; one room, ground-floor, 4s.;

second-storey, 4s. 6d.; third-floor, 4s.; garret-room, 3s. weekly, so

that the starving occupants of Charles Street alone, pay the house-owners

a yearly tribute of 2,000 pounds, and the 5,336 families above mentioned

in Westminster, a yearly rent of 40,000 pounds.

The most extensive working-people's district lies east of the Tower in

Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where the greatest masses of London

working-people live. Let us hear Mr. G. Alston, preacher of St.

Philip's, Bethnal Green, on the condition of his parish. He says:

"It contains 1,400 houses, inhabited by 2,795 families, or about

12,000 persons. The space upon which this large population dwells, is

less than 400 yards (1,200 feet) square, and in this overcrowding it

is nothing unusual to find a man, his wife, four or five children,

and, sometimes, both grandparents, all in one single room, where they

eat, sleep, and work. I believe that before the Bishop of London

called attention to this most poverty-stricken parish, people at the

West End knew as little of it as of the savages of Australia or the

South Sea Isles. And if we make ourselves acquainted with these

unfortunates, through personal observation, if we watch them at their

scanty meal and see them bowed by illness and want of work, we shall

find such a mass of helplessness and misery, that a nation like ours

must blush that these things can be possible. I was rector near

Huddersfield during the three years in which the mills were at their

worst, but I have never seen such complete helplessness of the poor as

since then in Bethnal Green. Not one father of a family in ten in the

whole neighbourhood has other clothing than his working suit, and that

is as bad and tattered as possible; many, indeed, have no other

covering for the night than these rags, and no bed, save a sack of

straw and shavings."

The foregoing description furnishes an idea of the aspect of the interior

of the dwellings. But let us follow the English officials, who

occasionally stray thither, into one or two of these working-men's homes.

On the occasion of an inquest held Nov. 14th, 1843, by Mr. Carter,

coroner for Surrey, upon the body of Ann Galway, aged 45 years, the

newspapers related the following particulars concerning the deceased: She

had lived at No. 3 White Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London, with her

husband and a nineteen-year-old son in a little room, in which neither a

bedstead nor any other furniture was to be seen. She lay dead beside her

son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked

body, there being neither sheet nor coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast

over the whole body that the physician could not examine the corpse until

it was cleansed, and then found it starved and scarred from the bites of

vermin. Part of the floor of the room was torn up, and the hole used by

the family as a privy.

On Monday, Jan. 15th, 1844, two boys were brought before the police

magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and

immediately devoured a half-cooked calf's foot from a shop. The

magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received

the following details from the policeman: The mother of the two boys was

the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard

time since the death of her husband, to provide for her nine children.

She lived at No. 2 Pool's Place, Quaker Court, Spitalfields, in the

utmost poverty. When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of

her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no

furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small

table with two legs broken, a broken cup, and a small dish. On the

hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old

rags as would fill a woman's apron, which served the whole family as a

bed. For bed clothing they had only their scanty day clothing. The poor

woman told him that she had been forced to sell her bedstead the year

before to buy food. Her bedding she had pawned with the victualler for

food. In short, everything had gone for food. The magistrate ordered

the woman a considerable provision from the poor-box.

In February, 1844, Theresa Bishop, a widow 60 years old, was recommended,

with her sick daughter, aged 26, to the compassion of the police

magistrate in Marlborough Street. She lived at No. 5 Brown Street,

Grosvenor Square, in a small back room no larger than a closet, in which

there was not one single piece of furniture. In one corner lay some rags

upon which both slept; a chest served as table and chair. The mother

earned a little by charring. The owner of the house said that they had

lived in this way since May, 1843, had gradually sold or pawned

everything that they had, and had still never paid any rent. The

magistrate assigned them 1 pound from the poor-box.

I am far from asserting that _all_ London working-people live in such

want as the foregoing three families. I know very well that ten are

somewhat better off, where one is so totally trodden under foot by

society; but I assert that thousands of industrious and worthy people--far

worthier and more to be respected than all the rich of London--do find

themselves in a condition unworthy of human beings; and that every

proletarian, everyone, without exception, is exposed to a similar fate

without any fault of his own and in spite of every possible effort.

But in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are

fortunate, fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless. In London

fifty thousand human beings get up every morning, not knowing where they

are to lay their heads at night. The luckiest of this multitude, those

who succeed in keeping a penny or two until evening, enter a

lodging-house, such as abound in every great city, where they find a bed.

But what a bed! These houses are filled with beds from cellar to garret,

four, five, six beds in a room; as many as can be crowded in. Into every

bed four, five, or six human beings are piled, as many as can be packed

in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as

they come, indiscriminately. Then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if

these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged and things

done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses to

record. And those who cannot pay for such a refuge? They sleep where

they find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and

the owners leave them undisturbed. A few individuals find their way to

the refuges which are managed, here and there, by private charity, others

sleep on the benches in the parks close under the windows of Queen

Victoria. Let us hear the London _Times_:

"It appears from the report of the proceedings at Marlborough Street

Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an average

number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the

parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by

the trees and a few hollows of the embankment. Of these, the majority

are young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers

and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless

penury, and all the recklessness of early vice.

"This is truly horrible! Poor there must be everywhere. Indigence

will find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great

and luxurious city. Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of

a populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much

suffering--much that offends the eye--much that lurks unseen.

"But that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion, nigh

the regal grandeur of St. James, close on the palatial splendour of

Bayswater, on the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters,

in a district where the cautious refinement of modern design has

refrained from creating one single tenement for poverty; which seems,

as it were, dedicated to the exclusive enjoyment of wealth, that

_there_ want, and famine, and disease, and vice should stalk in all

their kindred horrors, consuming body by body, soul by soul!

"It is indeed a monstrous state of things! Enjoyment the most

absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more

innocent pleasures of sense can supply to man's craving, brought in

close contact with the most unmitigated misery! Wealth, from its

bright saloons, laughing--an insolently heedless laugh--at the unknown

wounds of want! Pleasure, cruelly but unconsciously mocking the pain

that moans below! All contrary things mocking one another--all

contrary, save the vice which tempts and the vice which is tempted!

"But let all men remember this--that within the most courtly precincts

of the richest city of God's earth, there may be found, night after

night, winter after winter, women--young in years--old in sin and

suffering--outcasts from society--ROTTING FROM FAMINE, FILTH, AND

DISEASE. Let them remember this, and learn not to theorise but to

act. God knows, there is much room for action nowadays." {32}

I have referred to the refuges for the homeless. How greatly overcrowded

these are, two examples may show. A newly erected Refuge for the

Houseless in Upper Ogle Street, that can shelter three hundred persons

every night, has received since its opening, January 27th to March 17th,

1844, 2,740 persons for one or more nights; and, although the season was

growing more favourable, the number of applicants in this, as well as in

the asylums of Whitecross Street and Wapping, was strongly on the

increase, and a crowd of the homeless had to be sent away every night for

want of room. In another refuge, the Central Asylum in Playhouse Yard,

there were supplied on an average 460 beds nightly, during the first

three months of the year 1844, 6,681 persons being sheltered, and 96,141

portions of bread were distributed. Yet the committee of directors

declare this institution began to meet the pressure of the needy to a

limited extent only when the Eastern Asylum also was opened.

Let us leave London and examine the other great cities of the three

kingdoms in their order. Let us take Dublin first, a city the approach

to which from the sea is as charming as that of London is imposing. The

Bay of Dublin is the most beautiful of the whole British Island Kingdom,

and is even compared by the Irish with the Bay of Naples. The city, too,

possesses great attractions, and its aristocratic districts are better

and more tastefully laid out than those of any other British city. By

way of compensation, however, the poorer districts of Dublin are among

the most hideous and repulsive to be seen in the world. True, the Irish

character, which, under some circumstances, is comfortable only in the

dirt, has some share in this; but as we find thousands of Irish in every

great city in England and Scotland, and as every poor population must

gradually sink into the same uncleanliness, the wretchedness of Dublin is

nothing specific, nothing peculiar to Dublin, but something common to all

great towns. The poor quarters of Dublin are extremely extensive, and

the filth, the uninhabitableness of the houses and the neglect of the

streets, surpass all description. Some idea of the manner in which the

poor are here crowded together may be formed from the fact that, in 1817,

according to the report of the Inspector of Workhouses, {33} 1,318

persons lived in 52 houses with 390 rooms in Barral Street, and 1,997

persons in 71 houses with 393 rooms in and near Church Street; that:

"In this and the adjoining district there exists a multitude of foul

courts and alleys; many cellars receive all their light through the

door, while in not a few the inhabitants sleep upon the bare floor,

though most of them possess bedsteads at least; Nicholson's Court, for

example, contains twenty-eight wretched little rooms with 151 human

beings in the greatest want, there being but two bedsteads and two

blankets to be found in the whole court."

The poverty is so great in Dublin, that a single benevolent institution,

the Mendicity Association, gives relief to 2,500 persons or one per cent.

of the population daily, receiving and feeding them for the day and

dismissing them at night.

Dr. Alison describes a similar state of things in Edinburgh, whose superb

situation, which has won it the title of the Modern Athens, and whose

brilliant aristocratic quarter in the New Town, contrast strongly with

the foul wretchedness of the poor in the Old Town. Alison asserts that

this extensive quarter is as filthy and horrible as the worst district of

Dublin, while the Mendicity Association would have as great a proportion

of needy persons to assist in Edinburgh as in the Irish capital. He

asserts, indeed, that the poor in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh and

Glasgow, are worse off than in any other region of the three kingdoms,

and that the poorest are not Irish, but Scotch. The preacher of the Old

Church of Edinburgh, Dr. Lee, testified in 1836, before the Commission of

Religious Instruction, that:

"He had never before seen such misery as in his parish, where the

people were without furniture, without everything, two married couples

often sharing one room. In a single day he had visited seven houses

in which there was not a bed, in some of them not even a heap of

straw. Old people of eighty years sleep on the board floor, nearly

all slept in their day-clothes. In one cellar room he found two

families from a Scotch country district; soon after their removal to

the city two of the children had died, and a third was dying at the

time of his visit. Each family had a filthy pile of straw lying in a

corner; the cellar sheltered besides the two families a donkey, and

was, moreover, so dark that it was impossible to distinguish one

person from another by day. Dr. Lee declared that it was enough to

make a heart of adamant bleed to see such misery in a country like

Scotland."

In the Edinburgh _Medical and Surgical Journal_, Dr. Hennan reports a

similar state of things. From a Parliamentary Report, {35a} it is

evident that in the dwellings of the poor of Edinburgh a want of

cleanliness reigns, such as must be expected under these conditions. On

the bed-posts chickens roost at night, dogs and horses share the

dwellings of human beings, and the natural consequence is a shocking

stench, with filth and swarms of vermin. The prevailing construction of

Edinburgh favours these atrocious conditions as far as possible. The Old

Town is built upon both slopes of a hill, along the crest of which runs

the High Street. Out of the High Street there open downwards multitudes

of narrow, crooked alleys, called wynds from their many turnings, and

these wynds form the proletarian district of the city. The houses of the

Scotch cities, in general, are five or six-storied buildings, like those

of Paris, and in contrast with England where, so far as possible, each

family has a separate house. The crowding of human beings upon a limited

area is thus intensified. {35b}

"These streets," says an English journal in an article upon the

sanitary condition of the working-people in cities, "are often so

narrow that a person can step from the window of one house into that

of its opposite neighbour, while the houses are piled so high, storey

upon storey, that the light can scarcely penetrate into the court or

alley that lies between. In this part of the city there are neither

sewers nor other drains, nor even privies belonging to the houses. In

consequence, all refuse, garbage, and excrements of at least 50,000

persons are thrown into the gutters every night, so that, in spite of

all street sweeping, a mass of dried filth and foul vapours are

created, which not only offend the sight and smell, but endanger the

health of the inhabitants in the highest degree. Is it to be wondered

at, that in such localities all considerations of health, morals, and

even the most ordinary decency are utterly neglected? On the

contrary, all who are more intimately acquainted with the condition of

the inhabitants will testify to the high degree which disease,

wretchedness, and demoralisation have here reached. Society in such

districts has sunk to a level indescribably low and hopeless. The

houses of the poor are generally filthy, and are evidently never

cleansed. They consist in most cases of a single room which, while

subject to the worst ventilation, is yet usually kept cold by the

broken and badly fitting windows, and is sometimes damp and partly

below ground level, always badly furnished and thoroughly

uncomfortable, a straw-heap often serving the whole family for a bed,

upon which men and women, young and old, sleep in revolting confusion.

Water can be had only from the public pumps, and the difficulty of

obtaining it naturally fosters all possible filth."

In the other great seaport towns the prospect is no better. Liverpool,

with all its commerce, wealth, and grandeur yet treats its workers with

the same barbarity. A full fifth of the population, more than 45,000

human beings, live in narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated cellar

dwellings, of which there are 7,862 in the city. Besides these cellar

dwellings there are 2,270 courts, small spaces built up on all four sides

and having but one entrance, a narrow, covered passage-way, the whole

ordinarily very dirty and inhabited exclusively by proletarians. Of such

courts we shall have more to say when we come to Manchester. In Bristol,

on one occasion, 2,800 families were visited, of whom 46 per cent.

occupied but one room each.

Precisely the same state of things prevails in the factory towns. In

Nottingham there are in all 11,000 houses, of which between 7,000 and

8,000 are built back to back with a rear parti-wall so that no through

ventilation is possible, while a single privy usually serves for several

houses. During an investigation made a short time since, many rows of

houses were found to have been built over shallow drains covered only by

the boards of the ground floor. In Leicester, Derby, and Sheffield, it

is no better. Of Birmingham, the article above cited from the _Artisan_

states:

"In the older quarters of the city there are many bad districts,

filthy and neglected, full of stagnant pools and heaps of refuse.

Courts are very numerous in Birmingham, reaching two thousand, and

containing the greater number of the working-people of the city. These

courts are usually narrow, muddy, badly ventilated, ill-drained, and

lined with eight to twenty houses, which, by reason of having their

rear walls in common, can usually be ventilated from one side only. In

the background, within the court, there is usually an ash heap or

something of the kind, the filth of which cannot be described. It

must, however, be observed that the newer courts are more sensibly

built and more decently kept, and that even in the old ones, the

cottages are much less crowded than in Manchester and Liverpool,

wherefore Birmingham shows even during the reign of an epidemic a far

smaller mortality than, for instance, Wolverhampton, Dudley, and

Bilston, only a few miles distant. Cellar dwellings are unknown, too,

in Birmingham, though a few cellars are misused as workrooms. The

lodging-houses for proletarians are rather numerous (over four

hundred), chiefly in courts in the heart of the town. They are nearly

all disgustingly filthy and ill-smelling, the refuge of beggars,

thieves, tramps, and prostitutes, who eat, drink, smoke, and sleep

here without the slightest regard to comfort or decency in an

atmosphere endurable to these degraded beings only."

Glasgow is in many respects similar to Edinburgh, possessing the same

wynds, the same tall houses. Of this city the _Artisan_ observes:

"The working-class forms here some 78% of the whole population (about

300,000), and lives in parts of the city which exceed in wretchedness

and squalor the lowest nooks of St. Giles and Whitechapel, the

Liberties of Dublin, the Wynds of Edinburgh. There are numbers of

such localities in the heart of the city, south of the Trongate,

westward from the Saltmarket, in Calton and off the High Street,

endless labyrinths of lanes or wynds into which open at almost every

step, courts or blind alleys, formed by ill-ventilated, high-piled,

waterless, and dilapidated houses. These are literally swarming with

inhabitants. They contain three or four families upon each floor,

perhaps twenty persons. In some cases each storey is let out in

sleeping places, so that fifteen to twenty persons are packed, one on

top of the other, I cannot say accommodated, in a single room. These

districts shelter the poorest, most depraved, and worthless members of

the community, and may be regarded as the sources of those frightful

epidemics which, beginning here, spread desolation over Glasgow."

Let us hear how J. C. Symonds, Government Commissioner for the

investigation of the condition of the hand-weavers, describes these

portions of the city: {38}

"I have seen wretchedness in some of its worse phases both here and

upon the Continent, but until I visited the wynds of Glasgow I did not

believe that so much crime, misery, and disease could exist in any

civilised country. In the lower lodging-houses ten, twelve, sometimes

twenty persons of both sexes, all ages and various degrees of

nakedness, sleep indiscriminately huddled together upon the floor.

These dwellings are usually so damp, filthy, and ruinous, that no one

could wish to keep his horse in one of them."

And in another place:

"The wynds of Glasgow contain a fluctuating population of fifteen to

thirty thousand human beings. This quarter consists wholly of narrow

alleys and square courts, in the middle of every one of which there

lies a dung heap. Revolting as was the outward appearance of these

courts, I was yet not prepared for the filth and wretchedness within.

In some of the sleeping-places which we visited at night (the

Superintendent of Police, Captain Miller, and Symonds) we found a

complete layer of human beings stretched upon the floor, often fifteen

to twenty, some clad, others naked, men and women indiscriminately.

Their bed was a litter of mouldy straw, mixed with rags. There was

little or no furniture, and the only thing which gave these dens any

shimmer of habitableness was a fire upon the hearth. Theft and

prostitution form the chief means of subsistence of this population.

No one seemed to take the trouble to cleanse this Augean stable, this

Pandemonium, this tangle of crime, filth, and pestilence in the centre

of the second city of the kingdom. An extended examination of the

lowest districts of other cities never revealed anything half so bad,

either in intensity of moral and physical infection, nor in

comparative density of population. In this quarter most of the houses

have been declared by the Court of Guild ruinous and unfit for

habitation, but precisely these are the most densely populated,

because, according to the law, no rent can be demanded for them."

The great manufacturing district in the centre of the British Islands,

the thickly peopled stretch of West Yorkshire and South Lancashire, with

its numerous factory towns, yields nothing to the other great

manufacturing centres. The woollen district of the West Riding of

Yorkshire is a charming region, a beautiful green hill country, whose

elevations grow more rugged towards the West until they reach their

highest point in the bold ridge of Blackstone Edge, the watershed between

the Irish Sea and the German Ocean. The valleys of the Aire, along which

stretches Leeds, and of the Calder, through which the Manchester-Leeds

railway runs, are among the most attractive in England, and are strewn in

all directions with the factories, villages, and towns. The houses of

rough grey stone look so neat and clean in comparison with the blackened

brick buildings of Lancashire, that it is a pleasure to look at them. But

on coming into the towns themselves, one finds little to rejoice over.

Leeds lies as the _Artisan_ describes it, and as I found confirmed upon

examination: "on a gentle slope that descends into the valley of the

Aire. This stream flows through the city for about a mile-and-a-half and

is exposed to violent floods during thaws or heavy rain. The higher

western portions of the city are clean, for such a large town. But the

low-lying districts along the river and its tributary becks are narrow,

dirty, and enough in themselves to shorten the lives of the inhabitants,

especially of little children. Added to this, the disgusting state of

the working-men's districts about Kirkgate, Marsh Lane, Cross Street and

Richmond Road, which is chiefly attributable to their unpaved, drainless

streets, irregular architecture, numerous courts and alleys, and total

lack of the most ordinary means of cleanliness, all this taken together

is explanation enough of the excessive mortality in these unhappy abodes

of filthy misery. In consequence of the overflows of the Aire" (which,

it must be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture,

flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at

the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse),

"the houses and cellars are often so full of water that they have to be

pumped out. And at such times the water rises, even where there are

sewers, out of them into cellars, {40a} engenders miasmatic vapours

strongly impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen, and leaves a disgusting

residuum highly injurious to health. During the spring-floods of 1839

the action of such a choking of the sewers was so injurious, that,

according to the report of the Registrar of Births and Deaths for this

part of the town, there were three deaths to two births, whereas in the

same three months, in every other part of the town, there were three

births to two deaths. Other thickly populated districts are without any

sewers whatsoever, or so badly provided as to derive no benefit from

them. In some rows of houses the cellars are seldom dry; in certain

districts there are several streets covered with soft mud a foot deep.

The inhabitants have made vain attempts from time to time to repair these

streets with shovelfuls of cinders, but in spite of all such attempts,

dung-heaps, and pools of dirty water emptied from the houses, fill all

the holes until wind and sun dry them up. {40b} An ordinary cottage in

Leeds occupies not more than five yards square of land, and usually

consists of a cellar, a living room, and one sleeping-room. These

contracted dwellings, filled day and night with human beings, are another

point dangerous alike to the morals and the health of the inhabitants."

And how greatly these cottages are crowded, the Report on the Health of

the Working-Classes, quoted above, bears testimony: "In Leeds we found

brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, sharing the parents'

sleeping-room, whence arise consequences at the contemplation of which

human feeling shudders."

So, too, Bradford, which, but seven miles from Leeds at the junction of

several valleys, lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black,

foul-smelling stream. On week-days the town is enveloped in a grey cloud

of coal smoke, but on a fine Sunday it offers a superb picture, when

viewed from the surrounding heights. Yet within reigns the same filth

and discomfort as in Leeds. The older portions of the town are built

upon steep hillsides, and are narrow and irregular. In the lanes,

alleys, and courts lie filth and _debris_ in heaps; the houses are

ruinous, dirty, and miserable, and in the immediate vicinity of the river

and the valley bottom I found many a one, whose ground-floor, half-buried

in the hillside, was totally abandoned. In general, the portions of the

valley bottom in which working-men's cottages have crowded between the

tall factories, are among the worst built and dirtiest districts of the

whole town. In the newer portions of this, as of every other factory

town, the cottages are more regular, being built in rows, but they share

here, too, all the evils incident to the customary method of providing

working-men's dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak

more particularly in discussing Manchester. The same is true of the

remaining towns of the West Riding, especially of Barnsley, Halifax and

Huddersfield. The last named, the handsomest by far of all the factory

towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, by reason of its charming situation

and modern architecture, has yet its bad quarter; for a committee

appointed by a meeting of citizens to survey the town, reported August

5th, 1844: "It is notorious that in Huddersfield whole streets and many

lanes and courts are neither paved nor supplied with sewers nor other

drains; that in them refuse, _debris_, and filth of every sort lies

accumulating, festers and rots, and that, nearly everywhere, stagnant

water accumulates in pools, in consequence of which the adjoining

dwellings must inevitably be bad and filthy, so that in such places

diseases arise and threaten the health of the whole town."

If we cross Blackstone Edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we enter

upon that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved its

masterwork and from which all labour movements emanate, namely, South

Lancashire with its central city Manchester. Again we have beautiful

hill country, sloping gently from the watershed westwards towards the

Irish Sea, with the charming green valleys of the Ribble, the Irwell, the

Mersey, and their tributaries, a country which, a hundred years ago

chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown with towns and

villages, and is the most densely populated strip of country in England.

In Lancashire, and especially in Manchester, English manufacture finds at

once its starting point and its centre. The Manchester Exchange is the

thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade. The modern art of

manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester. In the cotton

industry of South Lancashire, the application of the forces of Nature,

the superseding of hand labour by machinery (especially by the power-loom

and the self-acting mule), and the division of labour, are seen at the

highest point; and, if we recognise in these three elements that which is

characteristic of modern manufacture, we must confess that the cotton

industry has remained in advance of all other branches of industry from

the beginning down to the present day. The effects of modern manufacture

upon the working-class must necessarily develop here most freely and

perfectly, and the manufacturing proletariat present itself in its

fullest classic perfection. The degradation to which the application of

steam-power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the working-man,

and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement, must

likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest

consciousness. Hence because Manchester is the classic type of a modern

manufacturing town, and because I know it as intimately as my own native

town, more intimately than most of its residents know it, we shall make a

longer stay here.

The towns surrounding Manchester vary little from the central city, so

far as the working-people's quarters are concerned, except that the

working-class forms, if possible, a larger proportion of their

population. These towns are purely industrial and conduct all their

business through Manchester upon which they are in every respect

dependent, whence they are inhabited only by working-men and petty

tradesmen, while Manchester has a very considerable commercial

population, especially of commission and "respectable" retail dealers.

Hence Bolton, Preston, Wigan, Bury, Rochdale, Middleton, Heywood, Oldham,

Ashton, Stalybridge, Stockport, etc., though nearly all towns of thirty,

fifty, seventy to ninety thousand inhabitants, are almost wholly working-

people's districts, interspersed only with factories, a few thoroughfares

lined with shops, and a few lanes along which the gardens and houses of

the manufacturers are scattered like villas. The towns themselves are

badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys,

reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright

red brick, turned black with time, which is here the universal building

material. Cellar dwellings are general here; wherever it is in any way

possible, these subterranean dens are constructed, and a very

considerable portion of the population dwells in them.

Among the worst of these towns after Preston and Oldham is Bolton, eleven

miles north-west of Manchester. It has, so far as I have been able to

observe in my repeated visits, but one main street, a very dirty one,

Deansgate, which serves as a market, and is even in the finest weather a

dark, unattractive hole in spite of the fact that, except for the

factories, its sides are formed by low one and two-storied houses. Here,

as everywhere, the older part of the town is especially ruinous and

miserable. A dark-coloured body of water, which leaves the beholder in

doubt whether it is a brook or a long string of stagnant puddles, flows

through the town and contributes its share to the total pollution of the

air, by no means pure without it.

There is Stockport, too, which lies on the Cheshire side of the Mersey,

but belongs nevertheless to the manufacturing district of Manchester. It

lies in a narrow valley along the Mersey, so that the streets slope down

a steep hill on one side and up an equally steep one on the other, while

the railway from Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct

above the city and the whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout

the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks,

indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent.

But far more repulsive are the cottages and cellar dwellings of the

working-class, which stretch in long rows through all parts of the town

from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill. I do not remember to

have seen so many cellars used as dwellings in any other town of this

district.

A few miles north-east of Stockport is Ashton-under-Lyne, one of the

newest factory towns of this region. It stands on the slope of a hill at

the foot of which are the canal and the river Tame, and is, in general,

built on the newer, more regular plan. Five or six parallel streets

stretch along the hill intersected at right angles by others leading down

into the valley. By this method, the factories would be excluded from

the town proper, even if the proximity of the river and the canal-way did

not draw them all into the valley where they stand thickly crowded,

belching forth black smoke from their chimneys. To this arrangement

Ashton owes a much more attractive appearance than that of most factory

towns; the streets are broad and cleaner, the cottages look new, bright

red, and comfortable. But the modern system of building cottages for

working-men has its own disadvantages; every street has its concealed

back lane to which a narrow paved path leads, and which is all the

dirtier. And, although I saw no buildings, except a few on entering,

which could have been more than fifty years old, there are even in Ashton

streets in which the cottages are getting bad, where the bricks in the

house-corners are no longer firm but shift about, in which the walls have

cracks and will not hold the chalk whitewash inside; streets, whose

dirty, smoke-begrimed aspect is nowise different from that of the other

towns of the district, except that in Ashton, this is the exception, not

the rule.

A mile eastward lies Stalybridge, also on the Tame. In coming over the

hill from Ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right and left,

fine large gardens with superb villa-like houses in their midst, built

usually in the Elizabethan style, which is to the Gothic precisely what

the Anglican Church is to the Apostolic Roman Catholic. A hundred paces

farther and Stalybridge shows itself in the valley, in sharp contrast

with the beautiful country seats, in sharp contrast even with the modest

cottages of Ashton! Stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ravine, much

narrower even than the valley at Stockport, and both sides of this ravine

are occupied by an irregular group of cottages, houses, and mills. On

entering, the very first cottages are narrow, smoke-begrimed, old and

ruinous; and as the first houses, so the whole town. A few streets lie

in the narrow valley bottom, most of them run criss-cross, pell-mell, up

hill and down, and in nearly all the houses, by reason of this sloping

situation, the ground floor is half-buried in the earth; and what

multitudes of courts, back lanes, and remote nooks arise out of this

confused way of building may be seen from the hills, whence one has the

town, here and there, in a bird's-eye view almost at one's feet. Add to

this the shocking filth, and the repulsive effect of Stalybridge, in

spite of its pretty surroundings, may be readily imagined.

But enough of these little towns. Each has its own peculiarities, but in

general, the working-people live in them just as in Manchester. Hence I

have especially sketched only their peculiar construction, and would

observe, that all more general observations as to the condition of the

labouring population in Manchester are fully applicable to these

surrounding towns as well.

Manchester lies at the foot of the southern slope of a range of hills,

which stretch hither from Oldham, their last peak, Kersallmoor, being at

once the racecourse and the Mons Sacer of Manchester. Manchester proper

lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two

smaller ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell.

On the left bank of the Irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river,

lies Salford, and farther westward Pendleton; northward from the Irwell

lie Upper and Lower Broughton; northward of the Irk, Cheetham Hill; south

of the Medlock lies Hulme; farther east Chorlton on Medlock; still

farther, pretty well to the east of Manchester, Ardwick. The whole

assemblage of buildings is commonly called Manchester, and contains about

four hundred thousand inhabitants, rather more than less. The town

itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years,

and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a

working-people's quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he

confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises

chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as

with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people's quarters are

sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle-

class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of

charity. Manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial

district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting

almost wholly of offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole district is

abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen

and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns. This

district is cut through by certain main thoroughfares upon which the vast

traffic concentrates, and in which the ground level is lined with

brilliant shops. In these streets the upper floors are occupied, here

and there, and there is a good deal of life upon them until late at

night. With the exception of this commercial district, all Manchester

proper, all Salford and Hulme, a great part of Pendleton and Chorlton,

two-thirds of Ardwick, and single stretches of Cheetham Hill and

Broughton are all unmixed working-people's quarters, stretching like a

girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around the commercial

district. Outside, beyond this girdle, lives the upper and middle

bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid out streets in the

vicinity of the working quarters, especially in Chorlton and the lower

lying portions of Cheetham Hill; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas

with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of

Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air,

in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by

omnibuses going into the city. And the finest part of the arrangement is

this, that the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest

road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of

business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy

misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares

leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on

both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in

the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of

self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external appearance and

_can_ care for it. True, these shops bear some relation to the districts

which lie behind them, and are more elegant in the commercial and

residential quarters than when they hide grimy working-men's dwellings;

but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of

strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the

complement of their wealth. So, for instance, Deansgate, which leads

from the Old Church directly southward, is lined first with mills and

warehouses, then with second-rate shops and alehouses; farther south,

when it leaves the commercial district, with less inviting shops, which

grow dirtier and more interrupted by beerhouses and gin palaces the

farther one goes, until at the southern end the appearance of the shops

leaves no doubt that workers and workers only are their customers. So

Market Street running south-east from the Exchange; at first brilliant

shops of the best sort, with counting-houses or warehouses above; in the

continuation, Piccadilly, immense hotels and warehouses; in the farther

continuation, London Road, in the neighbourhood of the Medlock,

factories, beerhouses, shops for the humbler bourgeoisie and the working

population; and from this point onward, large gardens and villas of the

wealthier merchants and manufacturers. In this way any one who knows

Manchester can infer the adjoining districts, from the appearance of the

thoroughfare, but one is seldom in a position to catch from the street a

glimpse of the real labouring districts. I know very well that this

hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities; I know,

too, that the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business

to take possession of the great highways; I know that there are more good

buildings than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value

of land is greater near them than in remoter districts; but at the same

time I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class

from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might

affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester. And

yet, in other respects, Manchester is less built according to a plan,

after official regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident, than any

other city; and when I consider in this connection the eager assurances

of the middle-class, that the working-class is doing famously, I cannot

help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the "Big Wigs" of

Manchester, are not so innocent after all, in the matter of this

sensitive method of construction.

I may mention just here that the mills almost all adjoin the rivers or

the different canals that ramify throughout the city, before I proceed at

once to describe the labouring quarters. First of all, there is the old

town of Manchester, which lies between the northern boundary of the

commercial district and the Irk. Here the streets, even the better ones,

are narrow and winding, as Todd Street, Long Millgate, Withy Grove, and

Shude Hill, the houses dirty, old, and tumble-down, and the construction

of the side streets utterly horrible. Going from the Old Church to Long

Millgate, the stroller has at once a row of old-fashioned houses at the

right, of which not one has kept its original level; these are remnants

of the old pre-manufacturing Manchester, whose former inhabitants have

removed with their descendants into better-built districts, and have left

the houses, which were not good enough for them, to a population strongly

mixed with Irish blood. Here one is in an almost undisguised working-

men's quarter, for even the shops and beerhouses hardly take the trouble

to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness. But all this is nothing in

comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access

can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human beings

can pass at the same time. Of the irregular cramming together of

dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which

they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey

an idea. And it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of

Manchester which are to blame for this; the confusion has only recently

reached its height when every scrap of space left by the old way of

building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is

left to be further occupied.

The south bank of the Irk is here very steep and between fifteen and

thirty feet high. On this declivitous hillside there are planted three

rows of houses, of which the lowest rise directly out of the river, while

the front walls of the highest stand on the crest of the hill in Long

Millgate. Among them are mills on the river, in short, the method of

construction is as crowded and disorderly here as in the lower part of

Long Millgate. Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from

the main street into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets

into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be

found--especially in the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which

contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet

beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at

the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the

inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through

foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. This is the first court on

the Irk above Ducie Bridge--in case any one should care to look into it.

Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole

neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge

the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty

stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. The first court below Ducie

Bridge, known as Allen's Court, was in such a state at the time of the

cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and

disinfected with chloride of lime. Dr. Kay gives a terrible description

of the state of this court at that time. {49} Since then, it seems to

have been partially torn away and rebuilt; at least looking down from

Ducie Bridge, the passer-by sees several ruined walls and heaps of debris

with some newer houses. The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed

from mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as a man, is

characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather

stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of

debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry

weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime

pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of

miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even

on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But

besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs,

behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above

the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains

and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the

contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be easily

imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. Below the

bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse, filth, and offal

from the courts on the steep left bank; here each house is packed close

behind its neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all black, smoky,

crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window frames. The background

is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. On the lower right

bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin

without a roof, piled with debris; the third stands so low that the

lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors.

Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the

Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the

"Poor-Law Bastille" of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks

threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the

hilltop, upon the working-people's quarter below.

Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank

steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both banks grows worse

rather than better. He who turns to the left here from the main street,

Long Millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns

countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys,

until after a few minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not whither to

turn. Everywhere half or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually

uninhabited, which means a great deal here; rarely a wooden or stone

floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting

windows and doors, and a state of filth! Everywhere heaps of debris,

refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which alone

would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilised to

live in such a district. The newly-built extension of the Leeds railway,

which crosses the Irk here, has swept away some of these courts and

lanes, laying others completely open to view. Immediately under the

railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which

surpass all the others by far, just because it was hitherto so shut off,

so secluded that the way to it could not be found without a good deal of

trouble. I should never have discovered it myself, without the breaks

made by the railway, though I thought I knew this whole region

thoroughly. Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines,

one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in

most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping-

room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I

found two beds--and such bedsteads and beds!--which, with a staircase and

chimney-place, exactly filled the room. In several others I found

absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned

against it. Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort

of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and

there, with the feet. This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human

beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the

third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow

doorway alone led out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept

labyrinth of dwellings.

Enough! The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless,

knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness,

whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external

surroundings. And how could the people be clean with no proper

opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants? Privies

are so rare here that they are either filled up every day, or are too

remote for most of the inhabitants to use. How can people wash when they

have only the dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps and water pipes can be

found in decent parts of the city alone? In truth, it cannot be charged

to the account of these helots of modern society if their dwellings are

not more cleanly than the pig-sties which are here and there to be seen

among them. The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six

or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors

of which stand at least two feet below the low-water level of the Irk

that flows not six feet away from them; or like the upper floor of the

corner-house on the opposite shore directly above the bridge, where the

ground floor, utterly uninhabitable, stands deprived of all fittings for

doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region, when this open

ground floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for want of

other facilities!

If we leave the Irk and penetrate once more on the opposite side from

Long Millgate into the midst of the working-men's dwellings, we shall

come into a somewhat newer quarter, which stretches from St. Michael's

Church to Withy Grove and Shude Hill. Here there is somewhat better

order. In place of the chaos of buildings, we find at least long

straight lanes and alleys or courts, built according to a plan and

usually square. But if, in the former case, every house was built

according to caprice, here each lane and court is so built, without

reference to the situation of the adjoining ones. The lanes run now in

this direction, now in that, while every two minutes the wanderer gets

into a blind alley, or, on turning a corner, finds himself back where he

started from; certainly no one who has not lived a considerable time in

this labyrinth can find his way through it.

If I may use the word at all in speaking of this district, the

ventilation of these streets and courts is, in consequence of this

confusion, quite as imperfect as in the Irk region; and if this quarter

may, nevertheless, be said to have some advantage over that of the Irk,

the houses being newer and the streets occasionally having gutters,

nearly every house has, on the other hand, a cellar dwelling, which is

rarely found in the Irk district, by reason of the greater age and more

careless construction of the houses. As for the rest, the filth, debris,

and offal heaps, and the pools in the streets are common to both

quarters, and in the district now under discussion, another feature most

injurious to the cleanliness of the inhabitants, is the multitude of pigs

walking about in all the alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept

imprisoned in small pens. Here, as in most of the working-men's quarters

of Manchester, the pork-raisers rent the courts and build pig-pens in

them. In almost every court one or even several such pens may be found,

into which the inhabitants of the court throw all refuse and offal,

whence the swine grow fat; and the atmosphere, confined on all four

sides, is utterly corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable

substances. Through this quarter, a broad and measurably decent street

has been cut, Millers Street, and the background has been pretty

successfully concealed. But if any one should be led by curiosity to

pass through one of the numerous passages which lead into the courts, he

will find this piggery repeated at every twenty paces.

Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I

am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from

black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and

uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness,

ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this

single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand

inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city

of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes

to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air--and

_such_ air!--he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and

yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the _Old_

Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one

mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but

what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and

indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the _industrial epoch_. The

couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long

since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone

has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the

industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between these old houses

to win a covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the

agricultural districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone

enables the owners of these cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to

human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the

health of thousands, in order that they _alone_, the owners, may grow

rich. In the industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the

worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere

material, a mere chattel; that he must let himself be crowded into a

dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys

the right to let go utterly to ruin. This manufacture has achieved,

which, without these workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have

lived. True, the original construction of this quarter was bad, little

good could have been made out of it; but, have the landowners, has the

municipality done anything to improve it when rebuilding? On the

contrary, wherever a nook or corner was free, a house has been run up;

where a superfluous passage remained, it has been built up; the value of

land rose with the blossoming out of manufacture, and the more it rose,

the more madly was the work of building up carried on, without reference

to the health or comfort of the inhabitants, with sole reference to the

highest possible profit on the principle that _no hole is so bad but that

some poor creature must take it who can pay for nothing better_. However,

it is the Old Town, and with this reflection the bourgeoisie is

comforted. Let us see, therefore, how much better it is in the New Town.

The New Town, known also as Irish Town, stretches up a hill of clay,

beyond the Old Town, between the Irk and St. George's Road. Here all the

features of a city are lost. Single rows of houses or groups of streets

stand, here and there, like little villages on the naked, not even grass-

grown clay soil; the houses, or rather cottages, are in bad order, never

repaired, filthy, with damp, unclean, cellar dwellings; the lanes are

neither paved nor supplied with sewers, but harbour numerous colonies of

swine penned in small sties or yards, or wandering unrestrained through

the neighbourhood. The mud in the streets is so deep that there is never

a chance, except in the dryest weather, of walking without sinking into

it ankle deep at every step. In the vicinity of St. George's Road, the

separate groups of buildings approach each other more closely, ending in

a continuation of lanes, blind alleys, back lanes and courts, which grow

more and more crowded and irregular the nearer they approach the heart of

the town. True, they are here oftener paved or supplied with paved

sidewalks and gutters; but the filth, the bad order of the houses, and

especially of the cellars, remains the same.

It may not be out of place to make some general observations just here as

to the customary construction of working-men's quarters in Manchester. We

have seen how in the Old Town pure accident determined the grouping of

the houses in general. Every house is built without reference to any

other, and the scraps of space between them are called courts for want of

another name. In the somewhat newer portions of the same quarter, and in

other working-men's quarters, dating from the early days of industrial

activity, a somewhat more orderly arrangement may be found. The space

between two streets is divided into more regular, usually square courts.

These courts were built in this way from the beginning, and communicate

with the streets by means of covered passages. If the totally planless

construction is injurious to the health of the workers by preventing

ventilation, this method of shutting them up in courts surrounded on all

sides by buildings is far more so. The air simply cannot escape; the

chimneys of the houses are the sole drains for the imprisoned atmosphere

of the courts, and they serve the purpose only so long as fire is kept

burning. {55} Moreover, the houses surrounding such courts are usually

built back to back, having the rear wall in common; and this alone

suffices to prevent any sufficient through ventilation. And, as the

police charged with care of the streets, does not trouble itself about

the condition of these courts, as everything quietly lies where it is

thrown, there is no cause for wonder at the filth and heaps of ashes and

offal to be found here. I have been in courts, in Millers Street, at

least half a foot below the level of the thoroughfares, and without the

slightest drainage for the water that accumulates in them in rainy

weather! More recently another different method of building was adopted,

and has now become general. Working-men's cottages are almost never

built singly, but always by the dozen or score; a single contractor

building up one or two streets at a time. These are then arranged as

follows: One front is formed of cottages of the best class, so fortunate

as to possess a back door and small court, and these command the highest

rent. In the rear of these cottages runs a narrow alley, the back

street, built up at both ends, into which either a narrow roadway or a

covered passage leads from one side. The cottages which face this back

street command least rent, and are most neglected. These have their rear

walls in common with the third row of cottages which face a second

street, and command less rent than the first row and more than the

second.

By this method of construction, comparatively good ventilation can be

obtained for the first row of cottages, and the third row is no worse off

than in the former method. The middle row, on the other hand, is at

least as badly ventilated as the houses in the courts, and the back

street is always in the same filthy, disgusting condition as they. The

contractors prefer this method because it saves them space, and furnishes

the means of fleecing better paid workers through the higher rents of the

cottages in the first and third rows. These three different forms of

cottage building are found all over Manchester and throughout Lancashire

and Yorkshire, often mixed up together, but usually separate enough to

indicate the relative age of parts of towns. The third system, that of

the back alleys, prevails largely in the great working-men's district

east of St. George's Road and Ancoats Street, and is the one most often

found in the other working-men's quarters of Manchester and its suburbs.

In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats,

stand the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six and

seven-storied buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above

the low cottages of the workers. The population of the district

consists, therefore, chiefly of mill hands, and in the worst streets, of

hand-weavers. The streets nearest the heart of the town are the oldest,

and consequently the worst; they are, however, paved, and supplied with

drains. Among them I include those nearest to and parallel with Oldham

Road and Great Ancoats Street. Farther to the north-east lie many newly-

built-up streets; here the cottages look neat and cleanly, doors and

windows are new and freshly painted, the rooms within newly whitewashed;

the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant building lots between

them larger and more numerous. But this can be said of a minority of the

houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every

cottage; many streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than

all, this neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes

within the first ten years. For the construction of the cottages

individually is no less to be condemned than the plan of the streets. All

such cottages look neat and substantial at first; their massive brick

walls deceive the eye, and, on passing through a _newly-built_ working-

men's street, without remembering the back alleys and the construction of

the houses themselves, one is inclined to agree with the assertion of the

Liberal manufacturers that the working population is nowhere so well

housed as in England. But on closer examination, it becomes evident that

the walls of these cottages are as thin as it is possible to make them.

The outer walls, those of the cellar, which bear the weight of the ground

floor and roof, are one whole brick thick at most, the bricks lying with

their long sides touching; but I have seen many a cottage of the same

height, some in process of building, whose outer walls were but one-half

brick thick, the bricks lying not sidewise but lengthwise, their narrow

ends touching. The object of this is to spare material, but there is

also another reason for it; namely, the fact that the contractors never

own the land but lease it, according to the English custom, for twenty,

thirty, forty, fifty, or ninety-nine years, at the expiration of which

time it falls, with everything upon it, back into the possession of the

original holder, who pays nothing in return for improvements upon it. The

improvements are therefore so calculated by the lessee as to be worth as

little as possible at the expiration of the stipulated term. And as such

cottages are often built but twenty or thirty years before the expiration

of the term, it may easily be imagined that the contractors make no

unnecessary expenditures upon them. Moreover, these contractors, usually

carpenters and builders, or manufacturers, spend little or nothing in

repairs, partly to avoid diminishing their rent receipts, and partly in

view of the approaching surrender of the improvement to the landowner;

while in consequence of commercial crises and the loss of work that

follows them, whole streets often stand empty, the cottages falling

rapidly into ruin and uninhabitableness. It is calculated in general

that working-men's cottages last only forty years on the average. This

sounds strangely enough when one sees the beautiful, massive walls of

newly-built ones, which seem to give promise of lasting a couple of

centuries; but the fact remains that the niggardliness of the original

expenditure, the neglect of all repairs, the frequent periods of

emptiness, the constant change of inhabitants, and the destruction

carried on by the dwellers during the final ten years, usually Irish

families, who do not hesitate to use the wooden portions for

fire-wood--all this, taken together, accomplishes the complete ruin of

the cottages by the end of forty years. Hence it comes that Ancoats,

built chiefly since the sudden growth of manufacture, chiefly indeed

within the present century, contains a vast number of ruinous houses,

most of them being, in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness. I

will not dwell upon the amount of capital thus wasted, the small

additional expenditure upon the original improvement and upon repairs

which would suffice to keep this whole district clean, decent, and

inhabitable for years together. I have to deal here with the state of

the houses and their inhabitants, and it must be admitted that no more

injurious and demoralising method of housing the workers has yet been

discovered than precisely this. The working-man is constrained to occupy

such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for others, and because

there are no others in the vicinity of his mill; perhaps, too, because

they belong to the employer, who engages him only on condition of his

taking such a cottage. The calculation with reference to the forty

years' duration of the cottage is, of course, not always perfectly

strict; for, if the dwellings are in a thickly-built-up portion of the

town, and there is a good prospect of finding steady occupants for them,

while the ground rent is high, the contractors do a little something to

keep the cottages inhabitable after the expiration of the forty years.

They never do anything more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and

the dwellings so repaired are the worst of all. Occasionally when an

epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary

police is a little stirred, raids are made into the working-men's

districts, whole rows of cellars and cottages are closed, as happened in

the case of several lanes near Oldham Road; but this does not last long:

the condemned cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much

better off by letting them, and the sanitary police won't come again so

soon. These east and north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on

which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the

year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories

hither, and that the working-people alone may breathe.

Southward from Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working-

men's quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached,

irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty

building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet

weather. The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to

mind. The stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most

thickly built-up and the worst. Here flows the Medlock with countless

windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the

valley of the Irk. Along both sides of the stream, which is coal black,

stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men's

dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition. The bank is chiefly

declivitous and is built over to the water's edge, just as we saw along

the Irk; while the houses are equally bad, whether built on the

Manchester side or in Ardwick, Chorlton, or Hulme. But the most horrible

spot (if I should describe all the separate spots in detail I should

never come to the end) lies on the Manchester side, immediately south-

west of Oxford Road, and is known as Little Ireland. In a rather deep

hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall

factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups

of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live

about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are

old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into

ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and

sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the

atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened

by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women

and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon

the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery

furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be

equalled in the worst court on the Irk. The race that lives in these

ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung

doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless

filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this

race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. This is the

impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district

forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in

each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a

cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole

region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible

privy is provided; and that in spite of all the preachings of the

physicians, in spite of the excitement into which the cholera epidemic

plunged the sanitary police by reason of the condition of Little Ireland,

in spite of everything, in this year of grace 1844, it is in almost the

same state as in 1831! Dr. Kay asserts that not only the cellars but the

first floors of all the houses in this district are damp; that a number

of cellars once filled up with earth have now been emptied and are

occupied once more by Irish people; that in one cellar the water

constantly wells up through a hole stopped with clay, the cellar lying

below the river level, so that its occupant, a hand-loom weaver, had to

bale out the water from his dwelling every morning and pour it into the

street!

Farther down, on the left side of the Medlock, lies Hulme, which,

properly speaking, is one great working-people's district, the condition

of which coincides almost exactly with that of Ancoats; the more thickly

built-up regions chiefly bad and approaching ruin, the less populous of

more modern structure, but generally sunk in filth. On the other side of

the Medlock, in Manchester proper, lies a second great working-men's

district which stretches on both sides of Deansgate as far as the

business quarter, and in certain parts rivals the Old Town. Especially

in the immediate vicinity of the business quarter, between Bridge and

Quay Streets, Princess and Peter Streets, the crowded construction

exceeds in places the narrowest courts of the Old Town. Here are long,

narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages,

the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a

blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to,

unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and separately.

According to Dr. Kay, the most demoralised class of all Manchester lived

in these ruinous and filthy districts, people whose occupations are

thieving and prostitution; and, to all appearance, his assertion is still

true at the present moment. When the sanitary police made its expedition

hither in 1831, it found the uncleanness as great as in Little Ireland or

along the Irk (that it is not much better to-day, I can testify); and

among other items, they found in Parliament Street for three hundred and

eighty persons, and in Parliament Passage for thirty thickly populated

houses, but a single privy.

If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the

river, a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking,

is one large working-men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue.

Salford, once more important than Manchester, was then the leading town

of the surrounding district to which it still gives its name, Salford

Hundred. Hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty,

and ruinous locality is to be found here, lying opposite the Old Church

of Manchester, and in as bad a condition as the Old Town on the other

side of the Irwell. Farther away from the river lies the newer portion,

which is, however, already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage

life, and therefore ruinous enough. All Salford is built in courts or

narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever

seen, the little lanes of Genoa. The average construction of Salford is

in this respect much worse than that of Manchester, and so, too, in

respect to cleanliness. If, in Manchester, the police, from time to

time, every six or ten years, makes a raid upon the working-people's

districts, closes the worst dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots in

these Augean stables to be cleansed, in Salford it seems to have done

absolutely nothing. The narrow side lanes and courts of Chapel Street,

Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly never been cleansed since they

were built. Of late, the Liverpool railway has been carried through the

middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished many of the

filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? Whoever passes over this

viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness enough; and, if any

one takes the trouble to pass through these lanes, and glance through the

open doors and windows into the houses and cellars, he can convince

himself afresh with every step that the workers of Salford live in

dwellings in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible. Exactly the

same state of affairs is found in the more distant regions of Salford, in

Islington, along Regent Road, and back of the Bolton railway. The

working-men's dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane, where a

mass of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state,

vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding. In

this district I found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in

a cow stable. He had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen,

which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead

and lived there, though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This

man was too old and weak for regular work, and supported himself by

removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung-heaps lay next door to his

palace!

Such are the various working-people's quarters of Manchester as I had

occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. If we briefly

formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit that 350,000

working-people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them,

in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them

are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without

the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the

profit secured by the contractor. In a word, we must confess that in the

working-men's dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience,

and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such

dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity,

degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel

comfortable and at home. And I am not alone in making this assertion. We

have seen that Dr. Kay gives precisely the same description; and, though

it is superfluous, I quote further the words of a Liberal, {63}

recognised and highly valued as an authority by the manufacturers, and a

fanatical opponent of all independent movements of the workers:

"As I passed through the dwellings of the mill hands in Irish Town,

Ancoats, and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it is possible to

maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes. These towns, for in

extent and number of inhabitants they are towns, have been erected with

the utmost disregard of everything except the immediate advantage of the

speculating builder. A carpenter and builder unite to buy a series of

building sites (_i.e_., they lease them for a number of years), and cover

them with so-called houses. In one place we found a whole street

following the course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could

be secured without the cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or

rubbish, but for dwellings for human beings. _Not one house of this

street escaped the cholera_. In general, the streets of these suburbs

are unpaved, with a dung-heap or ditch in the middle; the houses are

built back to back, without ventilation or drainage, and whole families

are limited to a corner of a cellar or a garret." I have already

referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police manifested

during the cholera visitation. When the epidemic was approaching, a

universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city. People remembered

the unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before the certainty

that each of these slums would become a centre for the plague, whence it

would spread desolation in all directions through the houses of the

propertied class. A Health Commission was appointed at once to

investigate these districts, and report upon their condition to the Town

Council. Dr. Kay, himself a member of this Commission, who visited in

person every separate police district except one, the eleventh, quotes

extracts from their reports: There were inspected, in all, 6,951

houses--naturally in Manchester proper alone, Salford and the other

suburbs being excluded. Of these, 6,565 urgently needed whitewashing

within; 960 were out of repair; 939 had insufficient drains; 1,435 were

damp; 452 were badly ventilated; 2,221 were without privies. Of the 687

streets inspected, 248 were unpaved, 53 but partially paved, 112

ill-ventilated, 352 containing standing pools, heaps of debris, refuse,

etc. To cleanse such an Augean stable before the arrival of the cholera

was, of course, out of the question. A few of the worst nooks were

therefore cleansed, and everything else left as before. In the cleansed

spots, as Little Ireland proves, the old filthy condition was naturally

restored in a couple of months. As to the internal condition of these

houses, the same Commission reports a state of things similar to that

which we have already met with in London, Edinburgh, and other cities.

{64}

It often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed; often

a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in an

indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, stolidity, and

wretchedness. Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two

families in two rooms. All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen

and dining-room in common. Often more than one family lived in a single

damp cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were

crowded together. To these and other sources of disease must be added

that pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting

kind were found.

We must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves,

receive boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes by no

means rarely sleep in the same bed with the married couple; and that the

single case of a man and his wife and his adult sister-in-law sleeping in

one bed was found, according to the "Report concerning the sanitary

condition of the working-class," six times repeated in Manchester. Common

lodging-houses, too, are very numerous; Dr. Kay gives their number in

1831 at 267 in Manchester proper, and they must have increased greatly

since then. Each of these receives from twenty to thirty guests, so that

they shelter all told, nightly, from five to seven thousand human beings.

The character of the houses and their guests is the same as in other

cities. Five to seven beds in each room lie on the floor--without

bedsteads, and on these sleep, mixed indiscriminately, as many persons as

apply. What physical and moral atmosphere reigns in these holes I need

not state. Each of these houses is a focus of crime, the scene of deeds

against which human nature revolts, which would perhaps never have been

executed but for this forced centralisation of vice. {65} Gaskell gives

the number of persons living in cellars in Manchester proper as 20,000.

The _Weekly Dispatch_ gives the number, "according to official reports,"

as twelve per cent. of the working-class, which agrees with Gaskell's

number; the workers being estimated at 175,000, 21,000 would form twelve

per cent. of it. The cellar dwellings in the suburbs are at least as

numerous, so that the number of persons living in cellars in

Manchester--using its name in the broader sense--is not less than forty

to fifty thousand. So much for the dwellings of the workers in the

largest cities and towns. The manner in which the need of a shelter is

satisfied furnishes a standard for the manner in which all other

necessities are supplied. That in these filthy holes a ragged, ill-fed

population alone can dwell is a safe conclusion, and such is the fact.

The clothing of the working-people, in the majority of cases, is in a

very bad condition. The material used for it is not of the best adapted.

Wool and linen have almost vanished from the wardrobe of both sexes, and

cotton has taken their place. Shirts are made of bleached or coloured

cotton goods; the dresses of the women are chiefly of cotton print goods,

and woollen petticoats are rarely to be seen on the washline. The men

wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton goods, and jackets

or coats of the same. Fustian has become the proverbial costume of the

working-men, who are called "fustian jackets," and call themselves so in

contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth, which latter words are

used as characteristic for the middle-class. When Feargus O'Connor, the

Chartist leader, came to Manchester during the insurrection of 1842, he

appeared, amidst the deafening applause of the working-men, in a fustian

suit of clothing. Hats are the universal head-covering in England, even

for working-men, hats of the most diverse forms, round, high,

broad-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, or without brims--only the younger men in

factory towns wearing caps. Any one who does not own a hat folds himself

a low, square paper cap.

The whole clothing of the working-class, even assuming it to be in good

condition, is little adapted to the climate. The damp air of England,

with its sudden changes of temperature, more calculated than any other to

give rise to colds, obliges almost the whole middle-class to wear flannel

next the skin, about the body, and flannel scarfs and shirts are in

almost universal use. Not only is the working-class deprived of this

precaution, it is scarcely ever in a position to use a thread of woollen

clothing; and the heavy cotton goods, though thicker, stiffer, and

heavier than woollen clothes, afford much less protection against cold

and wet, remain damp much longer because of their thickness and the

nature of the stuff, and have nothing of the compact density of fulled

woollen cloths. And, if a working-man once buys himself a woollen coat

for Sunday, he must get it from one of the cheap shops where he finds

bad, so-called "Devil's-dust" cloth, manufactured for sale and not for

use, and liable to tear or grow threadbare in a fortnight, or he must buy

of an old clothes'-dealer a half-worn coat which has seen its best days,

and lasts but a few weeks. Moreover, the working-man's clothing is, in

most cases, in bad condition, and there is the oft-recurring necessity

for placing the best pieces in the pawnbroker's shop. But among very

large numbers, especially among the Irish, the prevailing clothing

consists of perfect rags often beyond all mending, or so patched that the

original colour can no longer be detected. Yet the English and Anglo-

Irish go on patching, and have carried this art to a remarkable pitch,

putting wool or bagging on fustian, or the reverse--it's all the same to

them. But the true, transplanted Irish hardly ever patch except in the

extremest necessity, when the garment would otherwise fall apart.

Ordinarily the rags of the shirt protrude through the rents in the coat

or trousers. They wear, as Thomas Carlyle says,--{67}

"A suit of tatters, the getting on or off which is said to be a

difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides

of the calendar."

The Irish have introduced, too, the custom previously unknown in England,

of going barefoot. In every manufacturing town there is now to be seen a

multitude of people, especially women and children, going about barefoot,

and their example is gradually being adopted by the poorer English.

As with clothing, so with food. The workers get what is too bad for the

property-holding class. In the great towns of England everything may be

had of the best, but it costs money; and the workman, who must keep house

on a couple of pence, cannot afford much expense. Moreover, he usually

receives his wages on Saturday evening, for, although a beginning has

been made in the payment of wages on Friday, this excellent arrangement

is by no means universal; and so he comes to market at five or even seven

o'clock, while the buyers of the middle-class have had the first choice

during the morning, when the market teems with the best of everything.

But when the workers reach it, the best has vanished, and, if it was

still there, they would probably not be able to buy it. The potatoes

which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese

old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken

from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death,

and not fresh even then, often half decayed. The sellers are usually

small hucksters who buy up inferior goods, and can sell them cheaply by

reason of their badness. The poorest workers are forced to use still

another device to get together the things they need with their few pence.

As nothing can be sold on Sunday, and all shops must be closed at twelve

o'clock on Saturday night, such things as would not keep until Monday are

sold at any price between ten o'clock and midnight. But nine-tenths of

what is sold at ten o'clock is past using by Sunday morning, yet these

are precisely the provisions which make up the Sunday dinner of the

poorest class. The meat which the workers buy is very often past using;

but having bought it, they must eat it. On the 6th of January, 1844 (if

I am not greatly mistaken), a court leet was held in Manchester, when

eleven meat-sellers were fined for having sold tainted meat. Each of

them had a whole ox or pig, or several sheep, or from fifty to sixty

pounds of meat, which were all confiscated in a tainted condition. In

one case, sixty-four stuffed Christmas geese were seized which had proved

unsaleable in Liverpool, and had been forwarded to Manchester, where they

were brought to market foul and rotten. All the particulars, with names

and fines, were published at the time in the _Manchester Guardian_. In

the six weeks, from July 1st to August 14th, the same sheet reported

three similar cases. According to the _Guardian_ for August 3rd, a pig,

weighing 200 pounds, which had been found dead and decayed, was cut up

and exposed for sale by a butcher at Heywood, and was then seized.

According to the number for July 31st, two butchers at Wigan, of whom one

had previously been convicted of the same offence, were fined 2 and 4

pounds respectively, for exposing tainted meat for sale; and, according

to the number for August 10th, twenty-six tainted hams seized at a

dealer's in Bolton, were publicly burnt, and the dealer fined twenty

shillings. But these are by no means all the cases; they do not even

form a fair average for a period of six weeks, according to which to form

an average for the year. There are often seasons in which every number

of the semi-weekly _Guardian_ mentions a similar case found in Manchester

or its vicinity. And when one reflects upon the many cases which must

escape detection in the extensive markets that stretch along the front of

every main street, under the slender supervision of the market

inspectors--and how else can one explain the boldness with which whole

animals are exposed for sale?--when one considers how great the

temptation must be, in view of the incomprehensibly small fines mentioned

in the foregoing cases; when one reflects what condition a piece of meat

must have reached to be seized by the inspectors, it is impossible to

believe that the workers obtain good and nourishing meat as a usual

thing. But they are victimised in yet another way by the money-greed of

the middle-class. Dealers and manufacturers adulterate all kinds of

provisions in an atrocious manner, and without the slightest regard to

the health of the consumers. We have heard the _Manchester Guardian_

upon this subject, let us hear another organ of the middle-class--I

delight in the testimony of my opponents--let us hear the _Liverpool

Mercury_: "Salted butter is sold for fresh, the lumps being covered with

a coating of fresh butter, or a pound of fresh being laid on top to

taste, while the salted article is sold after this test, or the whole

mass is washed and then sold as fresh. With sugar, pounded rice and

other cheap adulterating materials are mixed, and the whole sold at full

price. The refuse of soap-boiling establishments also is mixed with

other things and sold as sugar. Chicory and other cheap stuff is mixed

with ground coffee, and artificial coffee beans with the unground

article. Cocoa is often adulterated with fine brown earth, treated with

fat to render it more easily mistakable for real cocoa. Tea is mixed

with the leaves of the sloe and with other refuse, or dry tea-leaves are

roasted on hot copper plates, so returning to the proper colour and being

sold as fresh. Pepper is mixed with pounded nutshells; port wine is

manufactured outright (out of alcohol, dye-stuffs, etc.), while it is

notorious that more of it is consumed in England alone than is grown in

Portugal; and tobacco is mixed with disgusting substances of all sorts

and in all possible forms in which the article is produced." I can add

that several of the most respected tobacco dealers in Manchester

announced publicly last summer, that, by reason of the universal

adulteration of tobacco, no firm could carry on business without

adulteration, and that no cigar costing less than threepence is made

wholly from tobacco. These frauds are naturally not restricted to

articles of food, though I could mention a dozen more, the villainy of

mixing gypsum or chalk with flour among them. Fraud is practiced in the

sale of articles of every sort: flannel, stockings, etc., are stretched,

and shrink after the first washing; narrow cloth is sold as being from

one and a half to three inches broader than it actually is; stoneware is

so thinly glazed that the glazing is good for nothing, and cracks at

once, and a hundred other rascalities, _tout comme chez nous_. But the

lion's share of the evil results of these frauds falls to the workers.

The rich are less deceived, because they can pay the high prices of the

large shops which have a reputation to lose, and would injure themselves

more than their customers if they kept poor or adulterated wares; the

rich are spoiled, too, by habitual good eating, and detect adulteration

more easily with their sensitive palates. But the poor, the

working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are important, who must buy

many things with little money, who cannot afford to inquire too closely

into the quality of their purchases, and cannot do so in any case because

they have had no opportunity of cultivating their taste--to their share

fall all the adulterated, poisoned provisions. They must deal with the

small retailers, must buy perhaps on credit, and these small retail

dealers who cannot sell even the same quality of goods so cheaply as the

largest retailers, because of their small capital and the large

proportional expenses of their business, must knowingly or unknowingly

buy adulterated goods in order to sell at the lower prices required, and

to meet the competition of the others. Further, a large retail dealer

who has extensive capital invested in his business is ruined with his

ruined credit if detected in a fraudulent practice; but what harm does it

do a small grocer, who has customers in a single street only, if frauds

are proved against him? If no one trusts him in Ancoats, he moves to

Chorlton or Hulme, where no one knows him, and where he continues to

defraud as before; while legal penalties attach to very few adulterations

unless they involve revenue frauds. Not in the quality alone, but in the

quantity of his goods as well, is the English working-man defrauded. The

small dealers usually have false weights and measures, and an incredible

number of convictions for such offences may be read in the police

reports. How universal this form of fraud is in the manufacturing

districts, a couple of extracts from the _Manchester Guardian_ may serve

to show. They cover only a short period, and, even here, I have not all

the numbers at hand:

_Guardian_, June 16, 1844, Rochdale Sessions.--Four dealers fined five to

ten shillings for using light weights. Stockport Sessions.--Two dealers

fined one shilling, one of them having seven light weights and a false

scale, and both having been warned.

_Guardian_, June 19, Rochdale Sessions.--One dealer fined five, and two

farmers ten shillings.

_Guardian_, June 22, Manchester Justices of the Peace.--Nineteen dealers

fined two shillings and sixpence to two pounds.

_Guardian_, June 26, Ashton Sessions.--Fourteen dealers and farmers fined

two shillings and sixpence to one pound. Hyde Petty Sessions.--Nine

farmers and dealers condemned to pay costs and five shillings fines.

_Guardian_, July 9, Manchester--Sixteen dealers condemned to pay costs

and fines not exceeding ten shillings.

_Guardian_, July 13, Manchester.--Nine dealers fined from two shillings

and sixpence to twenty shillings.

_Guardian_, July 24, Rochdale.--Four dealers fined ten to twenty

shillings.

_Guardian_, July 27, Bolton.--Twelve dealers and innkeepers condemned to

pay costs.

_Guardian_, August 3, Bolton.--Three dealers fined two shillings and

sixpence, and five shillings.

_Guardian_, August 10, Bolton.--One dealer fined five shillings.

And the same causes which make the working-class the chief sufferers from

frauds in the quality of goods make them the usual victims of frauds in

the question of quantity too.

The habitual food of the individual working-man naturally varies

according to his wages. The better paid workers, especially those in

whose families every member is able to earn something, have good food as

long as this state of things lasts; meat daily, and bacon and cheese for

supper. Where wages are less, meat is used only two or three times a

week, and the proportion of bread and potatoes increases. Descending

gradually, we find the animal food reduced to a small piece of bacon cut

up with the potatoes; lower still, even this disappears, and there remain

only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes, until on the lowest round of

the ladder, among the Irish, potatoes form the sole food. As an

accompaniment, weak tea, with perhaps a little sugar, milk, or spirits,

is universally drunk. Tea is regarded in England, and even in Ireland,

as quite as indispensable as coffee in Germany, and where no tea is used,

the bitterest poverty reigns. But all this pre-supposes that the workman

has work. When he has none, he is wholly at the mercy of accident, and

eats what is given him, what he can beg or steal. And, if he gets

nothing, he simply starves, as we have seen. The quantity of food

varies, of course, like its quality, according to the rate of wages, so

that among ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger

prevails in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill-

paid is very large. Especially in London, where the competition of the

workers rises with the increase of population, this class is very

numerous, but it is to be found in other towns as well. In these cases

all sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and

rotten vegetables are eaten for want of other food, and everything

greedily gathered up which may possibly contain an atom of nourishment.

And, if the week's wages are used up before the end of the week, it often

enough happens that in the closing days the family gets only as much

food, if any, as is barely sufficient to keep off starvation. Of course

such a way of living unavoidably engenders a multitude of diseases, and

when these appear, when the father from whose work the family is chiefly

supported, whose physical exertion most demands nourishment, and who

therefore first succumbs--when the father is utterly disabled, then

misery reaches its height, and then the brutality with which society

abandons its members, just when their need is greatest, comes out fully

into the light of day.

To sum up briefly the facts thus far cited. The great towns are chiefly

inhabited by working-people, since in the best case there is one

bourgeois for two workers, often for three, here and there for four;

these workers have no property whatsoever of their own, and live wholly

upon wages, which usually go from hand to mouth. Society, composed

wholly of atoms, does not trouble itself about them; leaves them to care

for themselves and their families, yet supplies them no means of doing

this in an efficient and permanent manner. Every working-man, even the

best, is therefore constantly exposed to loss of work and food, that is

to death by starvation, and many perish in this way. The dwellings of

the workers are everywhere badly planned, badly built, and kept in the

worst condition, badly ventilated, damp, and unwholesome. The

inhabitants are confined to the smallest possible space, and at least one

family usually sleeps in each room. The interior arrangement of the

dwellings is poverty-stricken in various degrees, down to the utter

absence of even the most necessary furniture. The clothing of the

workers, too, is generally scanty, and that of great multitudes is in

rags. The food is, in general, bad; often almost unfit for use, and in

many cases, at least at times, insufficient in quantity, so that, in

extreme cases, death by starvation results. Thus the working-class of

the great cities offers a graduated scale of conditions in life, in the

best cases a temporarily endurable existence for hard work and good

wages, good and endurable, that is, from the worker's standpoint; in the

worst cases, bitter want, reaching even homelessness and death by

starvation. The average is much nearer the worst case than the best. And

this series does not fall into fixed classes, so that one can say, this

fraction of the working-class is well off, has always been so, and

remains so. If that is the case here and there, if single branches of

work have in general an advantage over others, yet the condition of the

workers in each branch is subject to such great fluctuations that a

single working-man may be so placed as to pass through the whole range

from comparative comfort to the extremest need, even to death by

starvation, while almost every English working-man can tell a tale of

marked changes of fortune. Let us examine the causes of this somewhat

more closely.