Parliament failed to interfere with any effect; and as to the landlords or house-owners, their interest ran all the other way.
Few persons of large capital built houses as a speculation, or had anything to do with them. Many, however, who were desirous of making the highest possible interest on their money acquired either freehold or leasehold land, and built cheap and ill-constructed houses upon it without the least regard to the health of the future inmates.
And the small landlords were often the most unscrupulous with regard to the condition of the houses they let, and exacted the highest rents.
Inasmuch as this freedom as regarded house construction had been going on almost from time immemorial, it was not only the newly-built houses which were bad. Earlier built houses had rapidly fallen into disrepair and semi-ruin, and were steadily going from bad to worse, and becoming ever less and less suitable for human dwellings.
The following description[19] of parts of St. Giles’ and Spitalfields shows what, under a state of freedom as to building, had been attained to in 1840, and is typical of what so extensively prevailed in the central parts of London:—
“Those districts are composed almost entirely of small courts, very small and very narrow, the access to them being only under gateways; in many cases they have been larger courts originally, and afterwards built in again with houses back to back, without any outlet behind, and only consisting of two rooms, and almost a ladder for a staircase; and those houses are occupied by an immense number of inhabitants; they are all as dark as possible, and as filthy as it is possible for any place to be, arising from want of air and light.”
Here is another description—that of “Christopher Court,” a cul-de-sac in Whitechapel—given, in 1848, by Dr. Allison, one of the surgeons of the Union:—
“This was one of the dirtiest places which human beings ever visited—the horrible stench which polluted the place seemed to be closed in hermetically among the people; not a breath of fresh air reached them—all was abominable.”
It is needless to multiply instances. There is a dreadful unanimity of testimony from all parts of London as to the miserable character and condition of the houses in which in the middle of the nineteenth century the industrial and the lower classes were forced to live; the deficiency or total absence of drainage, the universal filth and abomination of every kind, the fearful overcrowding, the ravages of every type of disease, and the absolute misery in which masses struggled for existence.