Read Online A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain by Michael Paterson - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Paterson
Ads: Link
Queen Victoria’s subjects were poor. Though her realm saw a vast increase in wealth during the course of her reign, with the already-comfortable becoming better off and social mobility greater than it had ever been – the middle class quintupled in size – this still left many millions who were impoverished, barely able to earn a living or destitute.
The problem of mass poverty was exacerbated by the steady increase in numbers of people (the population of London, for instance, increased fourfold between 1800 and 1900; Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham all doubled in size during the century’s first decades) and the strain this put on resources. The supply of housing could not keep up with the demand, and led to intense overcrowding in the cities, which in turn brought higher mortality from disease. Funding fromcharities and from local authorities had to be stretched further. The workhouses that provided relief for the homeless and workless might be overwhelmed if there were a succession of bad harvests or some equivalent disaster. The sheer scale of the task faced by those who wished to help the poor was unprecedented in history, and there was no single body – governmental, religious or social – whose responsibility it was to address these issues.
Most town-dwellers of the labouring class lived in lodging-houses, crammed together in rooms without privacy, or in rooms or cellars of larger houses, often built around a court, in which whole families – together with their own lodgers – might occupy a single room. One such place was described by a Dr Lethaby, the compiler of a report on living conditions for the Commissioner of Sewers in London. He spoke of:
The too frequent occurrence of necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife, and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably small and ill-conditioned room . . . there are numerous instances where adults of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children, are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages. I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and females of different families; where birth and death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation from each other, or from the rest of the inmates.
He gave an example, in case it should be thought that he was exaggerating:
I visited the back room on the ground floor of No 5. I found it occupied by one man, two women, and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the living. 1
Though the doctor, and those who commissioned his report, may have been shocked by these conditions, there was nothing in the least unusual about them, for millions lived this way. The rooms he described would have had no furniture, the inhabitants sleeping on straw and rags, which might not necessarily be uncomfortable (the Russian tsar, Nicholas I, chose to sleep the same way!) but which was a breeding-ground for lice and other vermin. There would be no running water, as a consequence of which neither bodies nor clothing could be kept clean. There would be no means of removing sewage, with the result that the bodily waste of a building’s inmates would be left in corners and on staircases. Even to those who knew no other way of life these must have seemed difficult circumstances. It was some compensation that they would be off the premises for much of the
The problem of mass poverty was exacerbated by the steady increase in numbers of people (the population of London, for instance, increased fourfold between 1800 and 1900; Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham all doubled in size during the century’s first decades) and the strain this put on resources. The supply of housing could not keep up with the demand, and led to intense overcrowding in the cities, which in turn brought higher mortality from disease. Funding fromcharities and from local authorities had to be stretched further. The workhouses that provided relief for the homeless and workless might be overwhelmed if there were a succession of bad harvests or some equivalent disaster. The sheer scale of the task faced by those who wished to help the poor was unprecedented in history, and there was no single body – governmental, religious or social – whose responsibility it was to address these issues.
Most town-dwellers of the labouring class lived in lodging-houses, crammed together in rooms without privacy, or in rooms or cellars of larger houses, often built around a court, in which whole families – together with their own lodgers – might occupy a single room. One such place was described by a Dr Lethaby, the compiler of a report on living conditions for the Commissioner of Sewers in London. He spoke of:
The too frequent occurrence of necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife, and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably small and ill-conditioned room . . . there are numerous instances where adults of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children, are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages. I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and females of different families; where birth and death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation from each other, or from the rest of the inmates.
He gave an example, in case it should be thought that he was exaggerating:
I visited the back room on the ground floor of No 5. I found it occupied by one man, two women, and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the living. 1
Though the doctor, and those who commissioned his report, may have been shocked by these conditions, there was nothing in the least unusual about them, for millions lived this way. The rooms he described would have had no furniture, the inhabitants sleeping on straw and rags, which might not necessarily be uncomfortable (the Russian tsar, Nicholas I, chose to sleep the same way!) but which was a breeding-ground for lice and other vermin. There would be no running water, as a consequence of which neither bodies nor clothing could be kept clean. There would be no means of removing sewage, with the result that the bodily waste of a building’s inmates would be left in corners and on staircases. Even to those who knew no other way of life these must have seemed difficult circumstances. It was some compensation that they would be off the premises for much of the
Similar Books
