Chapter I (2)

Here is another description--that of "Christopher Court," a cul-de-sac in Whitechapel--given, in 1848, by Dr. Allison, one of the surgeons of the Union:--

"This was one of the dirtiest places which human beings ever visited--the horrible stench which polluted the place seemed to be closed in hermetically among the people; not a breath of fresh air reached them--all was abominable."

It is needless to multiply instances. There is a dreadful unanimity of testimony from all parts of London as to the miserable character and condition of the houses in which in the middle of the nineteenth century the industrial and the lower classes were forced to live; the deficiency or total absence of drainage, the universal filth and abomination of every kind, the fearful overcrowding, the ravages of every type of disease, and the absolute misery in which masses struggled for existence.

The density of houses upon an area has long been recognised as one of the great contributing causes to the ill-health of a community, but when coupled with the overcrowding of human beings in those houses, the combined results are always disastrous in the extreme.

Overcrowding had been a long-standing evil in London; had existed far back in history.

As London had grown, the evil had grown; and about the middle of the last century it was immeasurably greater than ever before, and its disastrous consequences were on a vastly larger scale.

The great economic forces which resulted, in certain districts of London, in the destruction of houses and great clearances of ground, had largely reduced the available accommodation for dwellings, and the expelled inhabitants, chained to the locality by the fact of their livelihood being dependent upon their residence being close by, were forced to invade the yet remaining places in the neighbourhood suited to their means. As the circle of possible habitations contracted, while the numbers seeking accommodation therein increased, a larger population was crowded into an ever-diminishing number of houses.

It was also a most unfortunate but apparently inevitable consequence that once a beginning was made to improve some of the streets and thoroughfares of London, and to substitute in any district a better class of houses and shops for those actually existing, the improvements necessarily involved increased overcrowding in that particular locality and in those adjoining it. But so it was.

Thus, in the eighteen hundred and forties a new street--New Oxford Street--was formed. It was driven through "a hive of human beings, a locality overflowing with human life." Evidence given before the Commission in 1847 described the results:--

"The effect has been to lessen the population of my neighbourhood by about 5,000 people, and therefore to improve it at the expense of other parts of London. Some have gone to the streets leading to Drury Lane, some to St. Luke's, Whitechapel, but more to St. Marylebone and St. Pancras. The vestries of St. Marylebone and St. Pancras disliked this very much. Places in the two latter parishes which were before bad enough are now intolerable, owing to the number of poor who formerly lived in St. Giles'."

And a year or so later, from across the river, came the complaint from Lambeth that "owing to the number of houses pulled down in Westminster and other places, there had been a great influx of Irish and other labourers which necessarily caused a great overcrowding of the miserable domiciles already overfull."

This Lambeth complaint is specially interesting, as it refers to another great cause of overcrowding--the constant immigration into London of labourers and poor people in search of work or food.

Owing to the ever increasing and urgent demand for house accommodation for the working and poorer classes, it became a very remunerative proceeding for the occupier of a house to sub-let it in portions to separate families or individuals, and the practice gradually extended to and absorbed streets hitherto belonging to the better class. The owner of a property let his whole house to a tenant; this tenant, seeing an easy way of making money, sub-let the rooms in it in twos or threes, or even separately, at a very profitable rate to individual tenants. Nor did the sub-letting end here, for these tenants let off even the sides or corners of their room or rooms to individuals or families who were unable to bear the expense of a whole room. And so the house sank at once into being a "tenement house"--that prolific source of the very worst evils, sanitary, physical, and moral, to those who inhabited them.

Even the underground kitchens and cellars, which were never intended for human habitation, were let to tenants, and thus turned to financial profit.[20] It mattered not that they were without air or ventilation, or even light; it mattered not that they were damp, or sometimes even inundated with the overflow of cesspools; it mattered not that they were inhabited contrary to the provisions of Section 53 of the Building Act of 1844, for that section was of no operative effect whatever. It is true that "Overseers" were to report to the "Official Referees," who were to give notice to and inform the owners and occupiers of such dwellings as to the consequences of disobeying the Statute, and the "District Surveyor" was to carry out the directions of the Referees. But nothing was ever done--Overseers, District Surveyors, and Referees, all neglected their duties.

Overcrowding was usually at its worst in one-room tenements, and in an immense number of cases in the metropolis one room served for a family of the working or of the labouring classes. It was their bedroom, their kitchen, their wash-house, their sitting-room, their eating-room, and, when they did not follow any occupation elsewhere, it was their workroom and their shop. In this one room they were born, and lived, and slept, and died amidst the other inmates.

And still worse, in innumerable cases, more than one family lived in one room.

When this one room was in a badly drained, damp, ill-constructed, and unventilated house, reeking with a polluted atmosphere, and that house was in a narrow and hemmed-in, unventilated "court" or "place" or "alley"--as an immense number of them were--the maximum of evil consequences was attained.

The evils of overcrowding cannot be summed up in a phrase, nor be realised by the description, however graphic, of instance upon instance. The consequences to the individual living in an overcrowded room or dwelling were always disastrous, and, through the disastrous consequences to great masses of individuals, the whole community was affected in varying degree.

Physically, mentally, and morally, the overcrowded people suffered. Not a disease, not a human ill which flesh is heir to, but was nurtured and rendered more potent in the human hothouse of the overcrowded room; and the ensuing ill-health and diseases not alone doubled the death rate, but increased from ten to twenty-fold, at least, the number of victims of disease of one sort or another--diseases dealing rapid death, or slowly but surely sapping human strength and vitality.

In the report of the London Fever Hospital for 1845 a certain overcrowded room in the neighbourhood was described--a room which was filled to excess every night, sometimes from 90 to 100 men being in it; a room 33 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 7 feet high. From that one room alone no fewer than 130 persons affected with fever were received into the hospital in the course of the year.[21]

One, whose very close experience of the conditions of life and circumstances of the poorer classes of London at the time of the cholera epidemic of 1848-9 entitled him to speak with special authority on the subject, thus summed up his views and conclusions:--

"The members of the medical profession, in the presence of these physical evils, when they are, as so often happens, concentrated, find their science all but powerless; the minister of religion turns from these densely crowded and foul localities almost without hope; whilst the administrators of the law, especially the chaplains and governors of prisons, see that crime of every complexion is most rife where material degradation is most profound."[22]

And he quoted from the report of the Governors of the Houses of Correction at Coldbath Fields and Westminster the following passage:--

"The crowning cause of crime in the metropolis is, in my opinion, to be found in the shocking state of the habitations of the poor, their confined and foetid localities, and the consequent necessity for consigning children to the streets for requisite air and exercise. These causes combine to produce a state of frightful demoralisation. The absence of cleanliness, of decency, of all decorum--the disregard of any needful separation of the sexes--the polluting language and the scenes of profligacy hourly occurring, all tend to foster idleness and vicious abandonment. Here I beg emphatically to record my conviction that this constitutes the _monster mischief_."

And then he himself adds:--

"If to considerations like these regarding the moral and religious aspect of this great question, be added those suggested by the indescribable physical sufferings inflicted on the labouring classes by the existing state of the public health in the metropolis, the conviction must of necessity follow, that the time is come when efforts in some degree commensurate with these great and pervading evils can no longer with safety be deferred."[23]

This opinion was expressed three years after the Royal Commissioners of 1847 had said in their report:--

"There appears to be no available (legal) means for the immediate prevention of overcrowding; all we can do is to point it out as a source of evil to be dealt with hereafter."

One gets a clue to the unceasing insanitary condition of the greater part of London and to the inhuman conduct of so many tenement house-owners when one realises that there was no legal punishment whatever for the perpetration and perpetuation of the insanitary abominations, no matter how noxious or dangerous they were, nor how rapidly or directly they led to disease or death. An order to abate a nuisance (which usually was not obeyed) appears to have been the only penalty, and it was only obtainable at great trouble and after great delays; and, even if obtained and the nuisance abated, there was nothing to prevent the offender at once starting the nuisance again. Offences of the most heinous description--amounting morally to deliberate murder--were perpetrated with absolute impunity. Houses which were scarcely ever free from fever cases were allowed to continue year after year levying their heavy death tax from the unfortunate inhabitants.

In Whitechapel one house, inhabited by twelve or fourteen families, was mentioned as scarcely free from fever cases for as many years.

"It is also a fearful fact that in almost every instance where patients die from fever, or are removed to the hospital or workhouse, their rooms are let as soon as possible to new tenants, and no precautions used, or warning given; and in some houses, perfect hotbeds of fever probably, where a patient dies or is removed, the first new-comer is put into the sick man's bed."

Sanitary improvement was almost a hopeless task. There was a dead weight of opposition to it in the ignorance and recklessness and indifference of the poorer classes, the very hopelessness of being able to improve their condition. And there was an active and bitter opposition from those house-owners or lessees who for their own financial profit exploited the poorer classes.

"There is one house in Spitalfields," said Dr. Lynch, "which has been the constant habitation of fever for fifteen years. I have enforced upon the landlord the necessity of cleansing and lime-washing it, but it has never been done!!... There are many landlords with whom nothing but immediate interest has any effect."[24]

The favourite principle that an Englishman's house was his castle was used as a defence against any suggestion that the malpractices committed therein should be curbed.

Others argued, "I am entitled to do what I like with my own."

"We everywhere find people ready to declare in respect to every evil: There is not any law that could compel its removal, the place complained of being private property."

All sorts of far-fetched and strained arguments were devised by them in the efforts to evade responsibility for the infamous condition of their property, and to defend and justify inaction.

Fortunately some voices began to be raised as to the persons upon whom both equitably and morally the responsibility lay of improving the condition of things.

"I would suggest," said a voice in 1837, "the idea of the landlords of many of the wretched filthy tenements being held responsible for their being tenantable, healthy, and cleanly."

And the Commissioners in 1844 reported:--

"There are some points on which the public safety demands the exercise of a power on the part of a public authority to compel attention to the internal condition of houses so as to prevent their continuance in such a filthy and unwholesome state as to endanger the health of the public."

And they recommended that:--

"On complaint of the parish, medical, or other authorised officer, that any house or premises are in such a filthy and unwholesome state as to endanger the health of the public, the local authority have power to require the landlord to cleanse it properly without delay."

But ideas or recommendations were alike ignored by the Government and Parliament, and several years were to pass before any legislation was attempted which would make owners responsible for their misdeeds in matters affecting the public health, and would subject them to penalties for their misconduct.

There were many other causes contributing largely to the insanitary condition of the people of the metropolis, prominent, if not most deleterious, amongst them being the widely-prevalent practice of interring the dead in the already overcrowded churchyards or burial grounds in the midst of the most densely populated districts of London--a practice resulting in "the slaughter of the living by the dead."

Burial grounds long since utilised to their utmost for the disposal of the dead were utilised over and over again for graves which could only be dug in the débris of human remains, until the soil reeked with human decomposition; the surrounding atmosphere was polluted by the horrible process, and they became monstrous foci of infection.

How extensive this evil was may be realised from figures given by Mr. Chadwick in a report to the Government:--

"In the metropolis, on spaces of ground which do not exceed 203 acres, closely surrounded by the abodes of the living, layer upon layer, each consisting of a population numerically equivalent to a large army of 20,000 adults, and nearly 30,000 youths and children, is every year imperfectly interred. Within the period of the existence of the present generation upwards of a million of dead must have been interred in those same spaces."

And he asserted that:--

"The emanations from human remains are of a nature to produce fatal disease, and to depress the general health of whoever is exposed to them; and interments in the vaults of churches, or in graveyards surrounded by inhabited houses, contribute to the mass of atmospheric and other impurities by which the general health and average duration of life of the inhabitants is diminished."

Too horribly gruesome and revolting are the descriptions of these graveyards--places where the dead were, so to speak, shovelled in as the filth of the streets is into scavengers' carts, and which "gave forth the mephitical effluvia of death"; such a one as that in Russell Court, off Drury Lane, where the whole ground, which by constant burials had been raised several feet, was "a mass of corruption" which polluted the air the living had to breathe, and poisoned the well water which in default of other they often had to drink. Or those in Rotherhithe, where "the interments were so numerous that the half-decomposed organic matter was often thrown up to make way for fresh graves, exposing sights disgusting, and emitting foul effluvia."

The master hand of Dickens has given a more vivid picture of one of these places than any to be found in Parliamentary Blue Books:--

"A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed.... Into a beastly scrap of ground, which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life--here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together."

Interments in the vaults of the churches--then a common practice--were also a fruitful source of sickness and death. It mattered not whether or not the bodies were hermetically closed in leaden coffins, for "sooner or later every corpse buried in the vault of a church spreads the products of decomposition through the air which is breathed, as readily as if it had never been enclosed"; thus adding to the contamination of the atmosphere.

The death-roll from this horrible condition of things cannot be gauged, but those most conversant with the matter were firmly convinced that it was the direct cause of fevers, and of all kinds of sickness among the people.

Pollution of the atmosphere which people had to breathe, and upon the purity of which the public health in varying degree depended, was caused also by various businesses and processes of manufacture grouped together under the name of "noxious trades," such as bone-boilers, india-rubber manufacturers, gut-scrapers, manure manufacturers, slaughterers of cattle, and many others.

In 1849[25] a description had been given of a street in Shoreditch which shows to what extent this evil had attained:--

"It is impossible to believe, passing through this main street, that so great a number of pigsties, bone-boileries, dog-and-cat's meat manufactories, and tallow-melting establishments, on a large scale ... should exist in a densely-crowded and closely-built locality. The noxious trades and occupations which so greatly abound here exerted a most deleterious influence upon the health of the inhabitants."

Parliament, in 1844, had enacted with regard to several of these that it should not be lawful for any person to establish any such business at a less distance than 40 feet from the public way, or than 50 feet from any dwelling-house; and that it should not be lawful to erect a dwelling-house within 50 feet of such businesses.

But these legislative restraints were utterly inadequate as any sort of check upon the evil; for, even if a nuisance were abated, there was no law to prevent its repetition, and so the evil promptly re-appeared. The stenches did not limit their sphere of action by feet, but distributed their abominations over large areas; and the manufacturers cared not what nuisances they subjected people to, nor how far the horrid smells were wafted by the winds, so long as they themselves could carry on a profitable business. And the intentions of Parliament were wholly frustrated by the District Surveyors, who were charged with the enforcement of the Act, and who wholly failed in their duty.

As for slaughter houses, until 1851 any person could start one who pleased, and practically where he pleased, subject only to the shadowy restriction of the common law as to doing anything which might be considered a nuisance.

And so these numerous and various abominations, mixed with the impurity of the atmosphere caused by the masses of smoke emitted from the chimneys of factories and private houses, and with the sickening smell from the Thames, spread sickness and death throughout great portions of the metropolis, and were one of the great causes of its insanitary condition.