The Housing of the Working Classes and of the Poor (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I PAST EFFORTS AND PRESENT NEEDS The danger of overcrowding came first before the public mind when, in 1837, Dr. Arnott and Dr. Sutherland Smith reported on the sanitary condition of London. This Report revealed a state of things as sensational as anything published in recent years. It speaks of dwellings of the poor on the very edge of a drain, described as a river of filth; of cottages built over stagnant pools of water; of dwellings of wood inferior to common cattle-sheds; of a case where six persons--two in bed with fever--occupied one small room; and others of an equally startling character. Another Report followed, drawn up by Mr. E. Chadwick, on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, which the Poor-Law Commissioners published in 1842. It attracted considerable attention and produced a greater effect than any other document of the same nature, and ten thousand copies of it were sold or officially circulated. Social distress among the labouring population, causing popular outbreaks in Manchester and the North, had produced an excited state of the public mind. It was then that Lord Ashley (afterwards the Earl of Shaftesbury) warned the country in one of his speeches in Parliament, as the author of Perils of the Nation had done in the volume under this title, of a coming social catastrophe, if not prevented by some measure of administrative reform in favour of the poor. Four years later Charles Kingsley in one of his letters speaks of the poor of the counties of Devon and Dorset as "sheltered with no more regard, nay with less regard, to decency than farm beasts; that they are paid wages that keep them in a condition of scarcely intermittent pauperism; that their village greens and common rights are fast being taken from them; that...