“The courts and culs-de-sac exist everywhere. The building of houses back to back occasions this in a great measure. It is in fact part of the economy of buildings that are to pay a good per centage. In one cul-de-sac, in the town of Leeds, there are 34 houses, and in ordinary times, there dwell in these houses 340 persons, or ten to every house; but as these houses are many of them receiving houses for itinerant labourers, during the periods of hay-time and harvest and the fairs, at least twice that number are then here congregated. The name of this place is the Boot and Shoe-yard, in Kirkgate, a location from whence the Commissioners removed, in the days of the cholera, 75 cart-loads of manure, which had been untouched for years, and where there now exists a surface of human excrement of very considerable extent, to which these impure and unventilated dwellings are additionally exposed. This property is said to pay the best annual interest of any cottage property in the borough.”
Mr. Shaw, the medical officer of the Hindley district of the Wigan union, after giving a similar description of the streets of that town, adds:—
“The greater number of cases of fever in Tuce is in a great degree to be accounted for from the extremely filthy state of those places where it has been worst. Some of the cases were much worse than others, several being of the malignant kind of typhus. Most of the cases happened in Broom-street, in Tuce, a very uncleanly place, whole pools of stagnant water, decayed animal and vegetable matter, and many other nuisances of alike description lying in heaps from one end of the street to the other. It is extremely probable a little attention to these matters would save the inhabitants from many of the diseases with which they are now continually affected.”
Dr. Waite, in his report on the condition of the population at Lynn, states:—
“I have seen typhus fever rage in families, where the refuse of a market-gardener was suffered to accumulate in a hole, immediately before three or four houses, whilst families at fifty yards distant from it were perfectly free.”
The report by Mr. Anderson, solicitor, on the sanitary condition of Inverness, exhibits the external features of the condition in which large proportions of the town population in Scotland are still allowed to remain in respect to all these defects:—
“From the very open or porous character of the subsoil, the grounds in and around Inverness are seldom retentive of surface-water; and as there is also a considerable inclination of the plain towards the river, a good drainage could be easily procured from almost every part of the town. With the exception, however, of the principal streets or thoroughfares, in which the best houses and shops are situated, there are but few covered common sewers; and in the suburbs generally, and from all the side alleys and closes, rain-water and other accumulations pass away only by means of surface or open drains. Hence among the dwellings of the poorer classes stagnant pools very frequently occur, and the drainage in these places, naturally bad enough, is often purposely obstructed by the people, for the purpose of adding to their dunghill heaps or middens, which, as manure for their potatoe-grounds, form the chief treasures of the poorer cottagers and labourers. A gas and water company, established some years ago, has afforded a great increase of comfort and cleanliness to the buildings along the main thoroughfares; but to the back closes and suburbs such luxuries have not yet been extended, and hence the want of order, decency, and comfort are painfully observable among them. Water-closets and public privies are both rare, the consequences of which, morally as well as physically, may be easily imagined, and no doubt much infectious disease, if not occasioned, is harboured and perpetuated by the want of them. The disgusting state of all the bye-lanes and roads about Inverness proves what the people must suffer on this account.
“As already stated, the dwellings of the humbler classes are in general only one story high, that is, they consist of a ground-floor divided into two or three small apartments, with two or three garret-rooms in the roof above, which is covered externally with turf or straw thatch. Such buildings are often intermixed with houses of a better description, and from being but seldom painted or whitewashed, they have not a cheerful nor cleanly aspect. Most of them are provided with small back courts or gardens, in which a few common vegetables are grown; but their principal value is as stances for pig-houses and dunghills, which in many instances are improperly allowed to rest upon or touch the dwelling-houses; while it is not to be disguised that cases exist where the pig, the horse, and the cow all live under the same roof with their owners, and the manure allowed to accumulate there also. It is very common for a labourer’s family to have only a single apartment, or a room and a closet, while one room is the usual accommodation rented by single persons, and that frequently without a particle of ground attached.
“Amidst such a combination of unwholesome circumstances, it is rather wonderful that malignant fever does not very greatly prevail in this town. It is scarcely ever entirely free of it, and occasionally it breaks out in some of its most contagious and dangerous forms, such as measles, scarlet and typhus fever, and sometimes even small-pox, spreading upwards among all classes of the community. The writer is strongly inclined to believe that the comparative healthiness of Inverness, notwithstanding its low and undrained position, is owing chiefly to the salubrity of its climate, as influenced by its situation, and the natural porousness of the soil.”
The Provost of Inverness, at the time the report was made, gives the following description of the town:—