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The workhouses are already over-crowded, and the “improvements” already sanctioned by
Parliament are only just begun. If labourers are driven away by the demolition of their old houses,
they do not leave their old parish, or at most they settle down on its borders, as near as they can
get to it.
“They try, of course, to remain as near as possible to their workshops. The
inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish, parting their two-room
tenements into single rooms, and crowding even those.... Even at an advanced
rent, the people who are displaced will hardly be able to get an accommodation so
good as the meagre one they have left.... Half the workmen ... of the Strand ...
walked two miles to their work.”
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This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea of the wealth of
London, may serve as an example of the packing together of human beings in that town. In one of
its parishes, the Officer of Health reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half the width of the
Thames was reckoned in. It will be self-understood that every sanitary measure, which, as has
been the case hitherto in London, hunts the labourers from one quarter, by demolishing
uninhabitable houses, serves only to crowd them together yet more closely in another.
“Either,” says Dr. Hunter, “the whole proceeding will of necessity stop as an
absurdity, or the public compassion (!) be effectually aroused to the obligation
which may now be without exaggeration called national, of supplying cover to
those who by reason of their having no capital, cannot provide it for themselves,
though they can by periodical payments reward those who will provide it for
them.”
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Admire this capitalistic justice! The owner of land, of houses, the businessman, when
expropriated by “improvements” such as railroads, the building of new streets, &c., not only
receives full indemnity. He must, according to law, human and divine, be comforted for his
enforced “abstinence” over and above this by a thumping profit. The labourer, with his wife and
child and chattels, is thrown out into the street, and – if he crowds in too large numbers towards
quarters of the town where the vestries insist on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of
sanitation!
Except London, there was at the beginning of the 19th century no single town in England of
100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there are 28 towns with more than
50,000 inhabitants.
“The result of this change is not only that the class of town people is enormously
increased, but the old close-packed little towns are now centres, built round on
every side, open nowhere to air, and being no longer agreeable to the rich are
abandoned by them for the pleasanter outskirts. The successors of these rich are
occupying the larger houses at the rate of a family to each room [... and find
accommodation for two or three lodgers ...] and a population, for which the
houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings
are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children.”
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The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town, the more rapidly flows
the stream of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the improvised dwellings of the
labourers.
Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district of growing productiveness, takes the
next place after London in the housing inferno. Not less than 34,000 persons live there in single
rooms. Because of their absolute danger to the community, houses in great numbers have lately
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been destroyed by the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new houses
progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town was, therefore, in 1865, more full than
ever. Scarcely a room was to let. Dr. Embleton, of the Newcastle Fever Hospital, says:
“There can be little doubt that the great cause of the continuance and spread of the
typhus has been the over-crowding of human beings, and the uncleanliness of
their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated in
confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and
cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any
civilised community; in them men, women, and children lie at night huddled
together: and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and the
day-shift the night-shift in unbroken series for some time together, the beds
having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with water and
worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous.”
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The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s.
“The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,” says Dr. Hunter, “contains a sample of the
finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk by external circumstances of house and
street into an almost savage degradation.”
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As a result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour, the state of the dwellings of an
industrial town may today be bearable, tomorrow hideous. Or the aedileship of the town may
have pulled itself together for the removal of the most shocking abuses. Tomorrow, like a swarm
of locusts, come crowding in masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural
labourers. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or the hitherto respectable labourer’s
dwelling is transformed into a lodging house whose personnel changes as quickly as the billets in
the 30 years’ war. Example: Bradford (Yorkshire). There the municipal philistine was just busied
with urban improvements. Besides, there were still in Bradford, in 1861, 1,751 uninhabited
houses. But now comes that revival of trade which the mildly liberal Mr. Forster, the negro’s
friend, recently crowed over with so much grace. With the revival of trade came of course an
overflow from the waves of the ever fluctuating “reserve army” or “relative surplus population.”
The frightful cellar habitations and rooms registered in the list,
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which Dr. Hunter obtained from
the agent of an Insurance Company, were for the most part inhabited by well-paid labourers.
They declared that they would willingly pay for better dwellings if they were to be had.
Meanwhile, they become degraded, they fall ill, one and all, whilst the mildly liberal Forster, M.
P., sheds tears over the blessings of Free Trade, and the profits of the eminent men of Bradford
who deal in worsted. In the Report of September, 1865, Dr. Bell, one of the poor law doctors of
Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality of fever-patients in his district to the nature of their
dwellings.
“In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet ... there are ten persons ....
Vincent Street, Green Aire Place, and the Leys include 223 houses having 1,450
inhabitants, 435 beds, and 36 privies.... The beds
‒ and in that term I include any
roll of dirty old rags, or an armful of shavings
‒ have an average of 3.3 persons to
each, many have 5 and 6 persons to each, and some people, I am told, are
absolutely without beds; they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards –
young men and women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely add
that many of these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit for
human habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are
distributed amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to
fester in our midst.”
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