by barriers which exclude every breath of direct ventilation--this can
never be otherwise than a cause of sickness and mortality to those whose
necessities allot them such residence; and, if it be an incontrovertible
fact that subsistence in closed courts is an unhealthy and short-lived
subsistence in comparison with that of the dwellers in open streets,
then, I apprehend, it cannot be doubted that such a manner of life ought
to be dealt with as a great evil, and ought as much as possible to be
interrupted.
A surveyor’s inspection of the City would reveal to you many places
answering to the description I have given; places to which no
ventilation could arrive except by removal of whole streets of houses
which wall them in.
To remove the well-constructed houses of the City, in order that its
wretched courts and alleys should participate in the blessings of light
and air, might seem one method of conquering the difficulty which is
before you; but I apprehend the opposite alternative, of proceeding to a
gradual suppression of all residence in the former class of dwellings,
may more naturally have your approbation.
To the latter aim, sooner or later, the sanitary efforts of the
Corporation must be directed.
There are many parts of the City where great and immediate advantage
would arise from an expenditure of money applied solely to the purpose
of destruction; parts, where the purchase of an entire court, or series
of courts, for the sole object of pulling down houses, and leaving open
spaces in their stead, would be the cheapest as well as the most
effective manner of dealing with their sanitary difficulties. And I have
earnestly to suggest for your consideration, that proceedings of this
nature will require to be pursued to a very great extent, and at a large
annual expense, within the City, before the cleanliness and habitability
of its poorer localities will stand in their legitimate proportion to
the modern stateliness of thoroughfare and grandeur of public buildings
which attest the magnificence of the Corporation.
I would, therefore, beg to recommend that a survey be made of the worst
districts which I have specified, with a view to the immediate purchase
and destruction of some considerable portion of the court-property lying
in them; and, still more, I would urge that this is an exertion, which
for some years must proceed systematically, in order to thin the density
of a population which now breeds pestilence and augments mortality by
its overcrowding and excess.
I am aware that considerable difficulties lie in the way of
accomplishing an object of this sort with immediate rapidity. It is my
great hope, however, that the principle may be distinctly recognised;
and that the City will not tolerate within its municipal jurisdiction
the continuance of houses absolutely incompatible with healthy
habitation. This principle being once established, and a certain annual
expenditure devoted to enforce it, I feel assured that within a few
years opportunities will have arisen for that outlay to have been made
in the most judicious manner, and for its results amply to have
demonstrated the advantages of the system which I recommend.
SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE POOR.
VI. Last, and not least, among the influences prejudicial to health in
the City of London, as elsewhere, must be reckoned the social condition
of the lower classes; and I refer to this the more especially, because
often, in discussion of sanitary subjects before your Hon. Court, the
filthy, or slovenly, or improvident, or destructive, or intemperate, or
dishonest habits of these classes, are cited as an explanation of the
inefficiency of measures designed for their advantage. It is constantly
urged, that to bring improved domestic arrangements within the reach of
such persons is a waste and a folly; that if you give them a
coal-scuttle, a washing-basin, and a watercloset, these several utensils
will be applied indifferently to the purposes of each other, or one to
the purposes of all; and that meanwhile the objects of your charitable
solicitude will remain in the same unredeemed lowness and misery as
before. Now it is unquestionable, and I admit it,--that in houses
containing all the sanitary evils which I have enumerated--undrained,
and waterless, and unventilated--there do dwell whole hordes of persons,
who struggle so little in self-defence against that which surrounds
them, that they may be considered almost indifferent to its existence,
or almost acclimated to endure its continuance. It is too true that,
among these classes, there are swarms of men and women, who have yet to
learn that human beings should dwell differently from cattle; swarms, to
whom personal cleanliness is utterly unknown; swarms, by whom delicacy
and decency in their social relations are quite unconceived. Men and
women, boys and girls, in scores of each, using jointly one single
common privy; grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their
married parents; a woman suffering travail in the midst of the males and
females of three several families of fellow-lodgers in a single room; an
adult son sharing his mother’s bed during her confinement;--such are
instances recently within my knowledge (and I might easily adduce
others) of the degree and of the manner in which a people may relapse
into the habits of savage life, when their domestic condition is
neglected, and when they are suffered to habituate themselves to the
uttermost depths of physical obscenity and degradation.
Here again, as in an earlier part of my Report, I think it requisite to
remark, that I do not mean in any degree to suggest that the evils
adverted to present themselves within the City to a greater extent than
in sundry other parts of the metropolis. My sphere of duty lies within
the City boundary, and it would be an impertinence in me to comment,
either favourably or unfavourably, on districts which lie within another
jurisdiction than that of the Commission which I have the honour to
address. Simply to guard myself against the possibility of being
misunderstood, I again draw attention to the fact that I studiously
refrain from instituting comparisons with other metropolitan localities.
Let me likewise observe that I am far from insinuating, or suspecting,
that the majority of the poorer population of the city has fallen to
that extreme debasement which I have just illustrated as affecting some
portion (perhaps not an inconsiderable portion) of the poorest; but I
dare not suppress my knowledge that such instances exist, nor can I
refrain from stating my belief, that ignorance and poverty will soon
contribute to increase them, if sanitary and social improvement do not
co-operate against their continuance.
Contemplating such cases, I feel the deepest conviction that no sanitary
system can be adequate to the requirements of the time, or can cure
those radical evils which infest the under-framework of society, unless
the importance be distinctly recognised, and the duty manfully
undertaken, of improving the social condition of the poor.
Those who suffer under the calamitous sanitary conditions which I have
disclosed, have been led, perhaps, to consider them as inseparable from
poverty; and after their long habituation to such influences, who can
wonder if personal and moral degradation conform them more and more to
the physical debasement of their abode? In the midst of inevitable
domestic filth, who can wonder that personal cleanliness should be
neglected? In an atmosphere which forbids the breath to be drawn freely,
which maintains habitual ill health, which depresses all the natural
spring and buoyancy of life, who can wonder that frequent recourse
should be had to stimulants, which, however pernicious in themselves,
still for a moment dispel the malarious languor of the place, give
temporary vigour to the brain, and cheer the flagging pulses of a
poisoned circulation? Who can wonder that habits of improvidence and
recklessness should arise in a population, which not only has much
ignorance and prejudice amongst it, but is likewise often unaccustomed
to consideration and kindness? Who can wonder that the laws of society
should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye of society habitually
overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears to discard?
I believe that now there is a very growing feeling abroad, that the poor
of a Christian country can no longer, in their own ignorance and
helplessness, be suffered to encounter all the chances which accompany
destitution, and which link it often indissolubly to recklessness,
profligacy, and perdition. The task of interfering in behalf of these
classes, however insensible they may be of their own danger and frequent
degradation, begins at length to be recognised as an obligation of
society; and as such an interference may be fraught with the utmost
advantage to sanitary progress, I shall now proceed to point out the
manner in which, with this view only, it may most usefully and most
humanely be made.
First of all I would point out to you, that within your Act of
Parliament there are contained some enactments on this subject which
might be of great value, were it not for their very limited
application:--‘Whereas the owners and keepers of lodging-houses of an
inferior description, for the accommodation of mendicants, strangers,
and other persons for the night, or other short periods, allow the same
to be crowded, by receiving more lodgers than such lodging-houses are
adapted to contain with a due regard to health,’ therefore, and for some
other reasons enumerated in the 91st clause, it is enacted that you may
require the registration, and may order the periodical inspection of
such houses; that you may from time to time fix and determine the number
of lodgers who may be accommodated in each lodging-house; that you may
issue ‘rules or instructions regarding health, cleanliness, and
ventilation;’ that you may ‘order that a ticket, containing the number
of lodgers for which the house is registered,’ together with your rules
and regulations, ‘shall be hung up, or placed in a conspicuous part of
each room into which lodgers are received;’ and finally, ‘that if any
keeper of such lodging-house shall offend against any of these
provisions, he shall be liable for each such offence to a penalty not
exceeding 5_l._, and the like penalty for every day after the first upon
which any such offence shall be continued.’ The spirit of these
enactments is excellent; but unhappily the definition given at the end
of the clause excludes from the operation of the law those very cases
which most need to fall within it. ‘Common lodging-house’ (it runs)
‘shall, for the purposes of this act, mean any public lodging-house, not
being a licensed victualling-house, in which persons are harboured or
lodged for hire, for a single night, or for less than a week at one
time, or in which any room is let for hire to be occupied by more than
one family at one time.’ Lodging-houses, according to this definition,
are (I am informed) hardly to be found within the City of London; and
the clause has remained, and seems in its present form likely to remain,
quite inoperative. If, in any future renewal or amendment of your Act,
the definition could be modified in such a manner, that the powers given
in respect of lodging-houses should be extended to all the poorer
tenements of the City, where the several floors are let separately at a
weekly rent, the clause in question would be rendered one of the most
serviceable in the Act, and one of the most general application. In its
present form, the clause barely enables you to deal with the temporary
bed-accommodation of trampers and vagrants,--a class happily not very
numerous in the City; while, modified in the manner I suggest, it would
put under your sanitary regulation the whole household economy of the
permanent industrial population of the City; and, if effectively worked,
would conduce beyond all estimation to the physical, social, and moral
improvement of that class.
* * * * *
Secondly, and as a matter of even higher importance, I would beg you to
consider the incalculable good which may be conferred on the poorer
classes of society, by the direct educational influence of those in
better and more enlightened circumstances than their own. When I say
that all the social errors to which I now more particularly refer, would
gradually but swiftly vanish under the influence of education, I do not
mean that the cure would lie in learning to read and to write and to
sum:--though these attainments, of course, would largely increase the
power, usefulness, and market value of their possessor. The education to
which I refer, as an all-important influence for sanitary progress, is
that which would consist in exhibiting to the lowest classes of society
frequent practical evidences of the attainability and the advantages of
higher civilization; an education which, by model and examples, would
lead them to know cleanliness from dirt, decency from grossness, human
propriety from brutish self-abandonment; an education which, by sensible
experience, would teach them to feel the comfort and the profit of
sanitary observances, and would apply their instinct of
self-preservation to the deliberate avoidance of disease.
It is in this point of view, gentlemen, that I would solicit your
attention to the useful and philanthropic exertions of three societies
which have been established during the last few years, with the object
of improving the condition of the labouring classes; and I would venture
to suggest that the course which those societies have adopted in various
parts of the metropolis, is one that might with the utmost advantage be
pursued within the City of London.
The establishment of _Model Dwelling_ and _Lodging-houses_, and of
_Public Baths_ and _Laundries_, for the use of the labouring population,
is now no longer a matter of recent speculation. Under the beneficent
auspices of the Societies to which I have referred, the following
experiments have been tried:--
The Committee for promoting the establishment of Baths and Wash-houses,
having at first Mr. W. Cotton, and then Sir H. Dukinfield, for its
Chairman, and including in its number, with other influential persons,
several members of this Corporation, founded, at great pains and
expense, a model institution at Goulston-square, Whitechapel. In spite
of many circumstances conspiring to render this first and experimental
establishment particularly expensive, it has more than supported itself
by the small payments of the poor; and its arrangements are sufficiently
extensive for it to have given in one day as many as 932 baths. This
fact, having occurred in the first year of its establishment, shows how
much the poor must have appreciated the additional comfort placed within
their reach; and I may add that, from the first opening of the building,
the annual receipts have been progressively on the increase. Somewhat
earlier, and under the influence of the same parent-committee, though
specially directed by a branch-committee, a similar establishment was
founded in George-street, Euston-square. During the year 1848 the number
of payments made here for bathing was 111,788; the number of payments
for washing in the laundries, 246,760. This establishment has not only
proved self-supporting, but has been enabled to accumulate a large
surplus, which is now being applied to enlarge and improve the building.
At Glasshouse-yard, near the entrance to the London Docks, there has
been founded, on the same model, a small establishment of free baths and
washhouses for the destitute poor. It was opened in May, 1845. In the
first year the baths given amounted to 27,662; the usings of the laundry
to 35,840; and its total working expenses were covered by £378.
No language, however eloquent--no comment, however instructive, could
equal the significance of the figures which I have cited as illustrating
the great utility of these institutions; and, as regards their pecuniary
success, it is impossible to furnish you with better testimony than is
comprised in the fact, that the Guardians of the Poor in a great
metropolitan parish[26] have recently, out of the poor-rates, founded an
institution of this nature. They have become witnesses to the financial
economy of that sanitary and social boon. In their establishment, which
is not only self-supporting, but amply remunerative, the poor are
enabled to have baths at an expense of a penny for a cold bath, and
twopence for a warm bath; and the women are enabled to do their washing,
ironing, and drying, with an unlimited water-supply, and with other
arrangements of most admirable completeness, at an expense of only
twopence for the first two hours, during which they occupy the separate
chambers allotted to them. A very considerable proportion of the expense
is covered by the receipts for baths given at the higher price of
sixpence, and with some additional luxuries, to persons of a higher
grade in society than those who use the ordinary baths; the former,
though used by a different class of persons, being sought with almost as
much avidity as the latter.
[26] St. Martin’s in the Fields.
In the sanitary point of view, I probably need not insist much on the
advantages which these establishments have conferred. You will hardly
doubt how good and wholesome a thing it has been for so many thousands
to have had the means of cleanliness; who, in the absence of such
facilities, must often have carried about their persons accumulations
that one sickens to think of; and whose narrow, crowded chambers must
constantly have steamed with wash-tubs, and been hung round with reeking
clothes.
* * * * *
Next, very briefly, let me allude to what has been done in respect of
the habitations of the poor; first, by the Society for the Improvement
of the Condition of the Labouring Classes, under the patronage of their
Majesties the Queen and the Queen Dowager, with the Prince Albert for
its President, and Lord Ashley for its Chairman; secondly, by the
Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious
Classes, under the Chairmanship of Sir Ralph Howard, and with a
committee which, like that of the former society, includes many of the
best and wisest, as well as the highest persons of the country. Under
the influence of these societies the following experiments have been
made:--
In the Old Pancras-road a very large building has been erected, to
accommodate 110 families separately and distinctly, in sets of two and
three rooms each. Each set of rooms has its own boiler, range, oven, and
coalbox; its separate scullery, in which are sink, cistern, and
dust-shaft; its own watercloset, its own ample supply of water, and many
other conveniences. The rents vary from 3_s._ 6_d._ to 5_s._ per week
for a set of two rooms; and from 4_s._ 9_d._ to 6_s._ 3_d._ for a set of
three rooms. The founders of this establishment have recently purchased
land at the end of Spicer-street, Spitalfields, on which to erect a
lodging-house for 300 single men, and also houses for families.
In the Lower-road, Pentonville, houses of three different classes have
been built, on the same general principle of furnishing every
convenience and sanitary requisite. They accommodate, on the whole, 23
families and 30 single women--widows, or of advanced age. The entire
houses for families, with all the above-mentioned conveniences, are at a
rent of 6_s._, having a good-sized living room, two bedrooms, with
additional enclosed recesses for children’s beds, a yard at the back of
the house, and the joint use of a wash-house and drying yard. A floor of
two rooms is rented at 3_s._ 6_d._, and a single room by a single person
at 1_s._ 6_d._
In George-street, St. Giles’s, a model lodging-house has been
established, affording accommodation to 104 single men, and combining
everything essential to such an establishment. The ventilation and
drainage have been carefully attended to; an ample supply of water is
provided, gas extends through the house, the dormitories are arranged so
as to keep their inmates private from each other; there are
washing-closets fitted up with every requisite for cleanliness; there is
a bath-room supplied with hot and cold water; there are a kitchen and
wash-house furnished with all appropriate utensils, a pantry-hatch, with
separate, ventilated, and secure compartments for the food of each
inmate; in the pay-office is a small well-selected library, for the
service of the lodgers, and the use of a spacious coffee-room is
likewise for their common convenience. Their pay is 4_d._ per night, or
2_s._ a week--an amount little above the ordinary rent paid for the most
miserable accommodation in a trampers’ lodging-house.
At 76, Hatton-garden, a lodging-house for 57 single women has recently
been opened, consisting of three floors of dormitories, divided into
separate compartments, and a basement fitted up with kitchen, washhouse,
bath, pantry, safes, &c.
In Charles-street, Drury-lane, three tenements, originally separate,
have been converted into a single lodging-house for 82 single men, on
the same general plan and at the same rent as that in George-street, St.
Giles’s.
All the lodging-houses are furnished; and the inmates are supplied with
utensils for their food and other purposes, which must be returned, or
made good, at their leaving.
In all these lodging-houses rules exist for the purpose of insuring
cleanliness, sobriety, carefulness, and general propriety of conduct;
any infraction of which subjects the offender to immediate expulsion.
For the sake of those who choose to avail themselves of the opportunity,
Scripture readings are appointed to take place in the common room every
evening at 9 o’clock; and copies of the Scriptures, with other
well-chosen books, are left in charge of the superintendent for
distribution among the lodgers, in the hope that they may thus be
induced to occupy their leisure to advantage.
In the construction of all these establishments, equally, the greatest
pains have been taken to bring sanitary science to bear on the comfort,
and convenience, and health of the inmates. Ventilation, drainage,
facilities for decency and for cleanliness, have in every instance been
made the leading considerations of the architect.[27]
[27] The advantages of these admirable institutions may now be spoken
of from longer experience. In a very remarkable pamphlet just
published by Dr. Southwood Smith, _On the Results of Sanitary
Improvement_, it is recorded that there has been no case of typhus
fever in any one of the model-dwellings since they were first opened,
and that their exemption from cholera has been as complete as from
typhus. In the Metropolitan Buildings, during three years, the average
annual mortality has been only 1·36 per cent. For a lower class of
population, very similar advantages have been procured by the
regulations of the Common Lodging-House Act. Dr. Smith mentions that
in 1308 regulated metropolitan lodging-houses (numbering at least
25,000 lodgers) there had not occurred a single case of fever during
the quarter ending the 23rd of October; yet, before they were under
regulation, twenty cases of fever have been received into the London
Fever Hospital from some one single house in the course of a few
weeks.--J. S., 1854.
* * * * *