There were four main types of housing in use during the 1800s; cellar dwellings, back-to-back, common lodging houses and tenement housing. Cellar dwellings were either partially or fully underground, often with unflagged floors, which were always damp, dark and badly ventilated and always overcrowded. A report published in the 1840s suggested that in Liverpool in 1842, 8000 cellars had roughly 35,000 to 40,000 inhabitants. Tenement housing, although not very common, consisted of houses separated into floors or rooms, often likely to have inadequate water supplies, poor cooking and heating facilities and also inadequate sanitation. The cheapest and quickest housing to build was back-to-back housing, but this had the most detrimental effect on peoples’ health. Each house was intended as a dwelling for a single family and so people expected them to have the appropriate amenities, but this was not the case. They were built poorly with thin walls and small badly fitted windows, and were later criticised for their lack of ventilation. This criticism was due to the fact that during the 1800s, there was no knowledge of the germ theory and so people believed that miasma was responsible for disease. The houses were constructed in courtyards with poor access, which were sometimes dark, airless, dirty and smelly, however they did provide a degree of privacy. Although the houses fulfilled their purpose, problems arose from over-crowding and lack of services.
Fresh running water was available only to the wealthier classes, so most people relied on a well, a water butt or more commonly a standpipe. Sewage was discharged into rivers, overflowing cesspits or into the streets and smoke from houses and factories filled the air. Where sewers did exist, they were incapable of dealing with the vast quantity of effluent, and frequently became blocked. Frederick Engels wrote of the conditions of the working class in England in 1845: ‘the streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead’. This demonstrates that poor living conditions were not just confined to one place, but were present throughout Britain.
Another type of housing, found in all large towns, was ‘common lodging houses’, the design of which was temporary, simply to house new arrivals or transient workers, although it did end up being a more permanent solution. They became centres of disease, crime, prostitution and immorality. Although public health was an important issue, people paid more attention to the morality of the situation because it posed massive moral questions for the Victorians, who were a nation of devout Christians. Dr.Kay commented about Manchester lodging houses: ‘the establishments thus designated are fertile sources of disease and demoralisation… here, without distinction of age and sex, careless of all decency, they are crowded in small wretched apartments; the same bed receiving a succession of tenants until too offensive even for their unfastidious senses’. A medical officer in Durham commented ‘I have known 40 persons half clothed lodged in one of those wretched dwellings, three or four lying in one bed upon straw, and only a single counterpane to cover them… excrementitious matter was allowed to accumulate and lie about the rooms in all directions, the stench being most revolting’. The underlined words in this quotation demonstrate how important moral issues were to people in the 1800s. The middle class looked down on the working classes because of where they lived, saying how they lived was immoral, but they really had no choice. Also, as people lived in such close proximity of each other in very poor conditions, disease spread quickly and sewage entered the drinking water due to the lack of a sewerage system, which consequently spread cholera to thousands of people, many of whom drank from the same pump.
During the 1800s, Manchester was regarded as the manufacturing capital of the world, but it was also described as a ‘huge overgrown village, built according to no definite plan’. The houses were described as ‘ill drained, often ill ventilated, unprovided with privies, with narrow streets, unpaved and worn into deep ruts containing heaps of refuse or stagnant pools’. Manchester is a good example of how cities coped, or in reality didn’t cope, with industrialisation, and because there were many rivers there – the Irk, Irwell and Medlock and also the Rochdale Canal, Manchester had much to offer to the textile industry who relied heavily upon hydro-power to run the machines in the factories. Many reports were published about the state of public health issues in Manchester, but the same issues were present in other cities. A sanitary report on Nottingham published in 1845 stated ‘refuse is allowed to accumulate until it has acquired volume as manure…it is common to find the privies open and exposed to the public gaze of inhabitants…the houses are three stories high, side by side, back to back.’ Similarly, James Smith wrote of Leeds ‘the most unhealthy parts of Leeds are the closed squares of houses which have been erected for working people…the privies are invariably in a filthy condition and often remain without the removal of any portion of filth for six months’.
The working peoples’ quarters were ‘sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle class’. The middle class had the advantage that they could live in the suburbs and commute by train and as they were the class empowered with the vote, they did not see why it was their prerogative to help the working class when they did not live amongst them. What they failed to see was that the working class were powerless to help themselves. They often referred to them as ‘miserable creatures’ and were afraid that if the government did actually do anything to help them, that they would become idle and depend to much upon the government.
Overall, the conditions in which the working class were living were terrible but they could not do anything to help themselves because they were powerless. The government had its policy of laissez-faire, which it rigidly stuck to, and it wasn’t until the late 1800s, during a period of Utilitarian reform, in which state intervention was a response to an ‘intensification of social ills’, that the policy, which had been sacrosanct to Britain for so long, was defeated. This was largely due to a report published by Edwin Chadwick, ‘A Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain’ in 1842. The working class would be once more treated as humans.
