The state of population and health at Warrington was peculiar, and is given fully in another chapter. There could be no more striking instance of the growth of what the foreign writers call the proletariat; an old market-town, with a small sail-cloth industry from Elizabethan times, it became a busy weaving town owing to the demand for sail-cloth during the war with the American colonies. The whole population of some 9000 men, women and children, were wage-earners; the women were all the while unusually prolific, and the sacrifice of infant life was enormous, especially by smallpox. We have no particular accounts of fevers; but in the bill of mortality for 1773, the year of a disastrous smallpox epidemic, there were 25 deaths from fever, of which 10 were of “worm fever,” or the remittent of children[261].
By the year 1790, when Ferriar’s accounts of fever in Manchester begin, the industrial revolution had been accomplished, mills were everywhere, and the characteristic hardships and maladies of a prolific working class in a time of slack trade were already much the same as we find them pictured with fidelity and pathos in the pages of Mrs Gaskell half a century after.
But, so as not to exaggerate the ill health of the working class in Manchester at the end of the 18th century, let us compare the births with the deaths according to the doubtless imperfect registers[262]:
Manchester, Births and Deaths, 1770-91.
| Year | Births | Deaths | ||
| 1770 | 1050 | 988 | ||
| 1771 | 1169 | 993 | ||
| 1772 | 1127 | 904 | ||
| 1773 | 1168 | 923 | ||
| 1774 | 1245 | 958 | ||
| 1775 | 1359 | 835 | ||
| 1776 | 1241 | 1220 | ||
| 1777 | 1513 | 864 | ||
| 1778 | 1449 | 975 | ||
| 1779 | 1464 | 1288 | ||
| 1780 | 1566 | 993 | ||
| 1781 | 1591 | 1370 | ||
| 1782 | 1678 | 984 | ||
| 1783 | 1615 | 1496 | ||
| 1784 | 1958 | 1175 | ||
| 1785 | 1942 | 1734 | ||
| 1786 | 2319 | 1282 | ||
| 1787 | 2256 | 1761 | ||
| 1788 | 2391 | 1637 | ||
| 1789 | 2487 | 1788 | ||
| 1790 | 2756 | 1940 | ||
| 1791 | 2960 | 2286 |
The mean lodging-houses in the outskirts of the town, says Ferriar, in 1790[263], were the principal nurseries of febrile contagion: some of these were old houses with very small rooms, into each of which four or more people were crowded to eat, sleep, and frequently to work. They commonly bore marks of a long accumulation of filth, and some of them had been scarcely free from infection for many years past. As soon as one poor creature dies or is driven out of his cell he is replaced by another, generally from the country, who soon feels in his turn the consequences of breathing infected air. There was hardly any ventilation possible, many of these old houses being in dark narrow courts or blind alleys. In other parts of the town the lodging-houses were new, and not yet thoroughly dirty; but in these there was a long garret under the tiles, in which eight or ten people often lodged, the beds almost touching. Again, many lived in cellars, sleeping on the damp floor with few or no bedclothes; the cellars of Manchester, however, were better ventilated than those of Edinburgh, and freer from fever. These cellar-tenants were subject to the constant action of depressing passions of the mind. “I have seen patients,” says Ferriar, “in agonies of despair on finding themselves overwhelmed with filth and abandoned by everyone who could do them any service, and after such emotions I have seldom found them recover.” Addressing the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester previous to 1792, he pointed out in an argumentum ad hominem that “the situation of the poor at present is extremely dangerous, and often destructive to the middle and higher ranks of society[264].” And again, “the poor are indeed the first sufferers, but the mischief does not always rest with them. By secret avenues it reaches the most opulent, and severely revenges their neglect or insensibility to the wretchedness surrounding them[265].”
In an address to the Committee of Police in Manchester, he instances the following cases:
A family of the name of Turner in a dark cellar behind Jackson’s Row: they have been almost constantly patients of the Infirmary for three years past on account of disorders owing to their miserable dwelling. There are other instances of the same kind in Bootle Street.
In Blakely Street, under No. 4, is a range of cellars let out to lodgers, which threatens to become a nursery of disease. They consist of four rooms communicating with each other, of which the two centre rooms are completely dark; the fourth is very ill-lighted and chiefly ventilated through the others. They contain four or five beds in each, and are already extraordinarily dirty.
In a nest of lodging-houses in Brook’s entry near the bottom of Longmill-gate, a very dangerous fever constantly subsists, and has subsisted for a considerable number of years. He had known nine patients confined in fevers at the same time in one of those houses and crammed into three small dirty rooms without the regular attendance of any friend or of a nurse. Four of these poor creatures died, absolutely from want of the common offices of humanity and from neglect in the administration of their medicines. Another set of lodging-houses constantly infected is known by the name of the Five Houses, in Newton Street[266].