“When you ask why so many of the working men betake themselves to the ale-house or gin-palace, the answer lies in the detestable state of their homes.
“I have had it from hundreds of both women and men that this cause, and this cause alone, has driven them to the use of ardent spirits…. Nine-tenths of our poverty, misery, and crime, are produced by habits of intoxication, and I trace those habits, not altogether, but mainly, to the pestilential and ruinous domiciliary condition of the great mass of the population of this metropolis and the large towns of the country.”[96]
“No bodily labour induces an exhaustion of the vital powers comparable to that resulting from the habitual breathing of air contaminated by the overcrowding of human beings.”[97]
For children born under such circumstances of overcrowding and filth, and in such insanitary surroundings, birth was mostly followed by an early death.
“Infancy in London has to creep into life in the midst of foes,” as the Times truly remarked in 1861.
Among the greatest of these foes was overcrowding. The statistics of infantile mortality are fairly reliable, and, so far as there are errors, those errors were in understating and not overstating it.
In St. Giles’, in 1861, 43½ per cent. of the total number of deaths were of children under five years of age.
“This enormous infantile mortality,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health, “is unfortunately only what is customary in our district.”
In the Strand, 1861, the percentage of deaths under five annually exceeded 45 per cent. of the total deaths. In Westminster, in 1861, there were 1,685 deaths, 770 being those of children under five—of which in St. John’s parish, out of 834 deaths, 427 were under five—or over 50 per cent.