“There are forty-four houses in the two rows, and twenty-two cellars, all of the same size. The cellars are let off as separate dwellings; these are dark, damp, and very low, not more that six feet between the ceiling and floor. The street between the two rows is seven yards wide, in the centre of which is the common gutter, or more properly sink, into which all sorts of refuse is thrown; it is a foot in depth. Thus there is always a quantity of putrefying matter contaminating the air. At the end of the rows is a pool of water very shallow and stagnant, and a few yards further, a part of the town’s gas works. In many of these dwellings there are four persons in one bed.”
We might have hoped that country districts at least would have been free from the evils occasioned by contracted building, want of ventilation, want of drainage, and the like; but this is far indeed from being the case. The following is from the report of Mr. Aaron Little, the medical officer of the Chippenham Union:
“The parish of Colerne, which, upon a cursory view, any person (unacquainted with its peculiarities) would pronounce to be the most healthy village in England, is in fact the most unhealthy. From its commanding position (being situated upon a high hill) it has an appearance of health and cheerfulness which delights the eye of the traveller, who commands a view of it from the Great Western road; but this impression is immediately removed on entering at any point of the town. The filth, the dilapidated buildings, the squalid appearance of the majority of the lower orders, have a sickening effect upon the stranger who first visits this place. During three years’ attendance on the poor of this district, I have never known the small pox, scarlatina, or the typhus fever to be absent. The situation is damp, and the buildings unhealthy, and the inhabitants themselves inclined to be of dirty habits. There is also a great want of drainage.”
Mr. John Fox, the medical officer of the Cerne Union, Dorsetshire, gives the following evidence:
“In many of the cottages, where synochus prevailed, the beds stood on the ground-floor, which was damp three parts of the year; scarcely one had a fire place in the bed-room, and one had a single small pane of glass stuck in the mud wall as its only window, with a large heap of wet and dirty potatoes in one corner. Persons living in such cottages are generally very poor, very dirty, and usually in rags; living almost wholly on bread and potatoes, scarcely ever tasting animal food, and consequently highly susceptible of disease and very unable to contend with it. I am quite sure if such persons were placed in good, comfortable, clean cottages, the improvement in themselves and children would soon be visible, and the exceptions would only be found in a few of the poorest and most wretched, who perhaps had been born in a mud hovel, and had lived in one the first thirty years of their lives.”
Mr. James Gane, the medical officer of the Uxbridge Union, says,
“I attribute the prevalence of diseases of an epidemic character, which exists so much more among the poor than among the rich, to be, from the want of better accommodation as residence, (their dwellings instead of being built of solid materials are complete shells of mud on a spot of waste land the most swampy in the parish; this is to be met with almost everywhere in rural districts) to the want of better clothing, being better fed, more attention paid to the cleanliness of their dwellings, and less congregated together.”
Mr. Thomas H. Smith, the medical officer of the Bromley Union, states:
“My attention was first directed to the sources of malaria in this district and neighbourhood when cholera became epidemic. I then partially inspected the dwellings of the poor, and have recently completed the survey. It is almost incredible that so many sources of malaria should exist in a rural district. A total absence of all provisions for effectual drainage around cottages is the most prominent source of malaria; throughout the whole district there is scarcely an attempt at it. The refuse vegetable and animal matters are also thrown by the cottagers in heaps near their dwellings to decompose; are sometimes not removed, except at very long intervals; and are always permitted to remain sufficiently long to accumulate in some quantity. Pigsties are generally near the dwellings, and are always surrounded by decomposing matters. These constitute some of the many sources of malaria, and peculiarly deserve attention as being easily remedied, and yet, as it were, cherished. The effects of malaria are strikingly exemplified in parts of this district. There are localities from which fever is seldom long absent; and I find spots where the spasmodic cholera located itself are also the chosen resorts of continued fever.”
It appears from the Sanitary Report, from which I have made the above extracts, and which was presented to Parliament in 1842, that there were then 8000 inhabited cellars at Liverpool; and that the occupants were estimated at from 35,000 to 40,000. Liverpool is called a prosperous town. People point with admiration to its docks, and its warehouses, and speak of its wealth and grandeur in high terms. But such prosperity, like the victory of Pyrrhus, is apt to suggest the idea of ruin. Thirty-five thousand people living in cellars! Surely such things as these demonstrate the necessity there is for making great exertions to provide fit habitations for the poor. Each year there is required in Great Britain, according to the Sanitary Report, an increase of 59,000 new tenements, “a number equal to that of two new towns such as Manchester proper, which has 32,310 houses, and Birmingham, which has 27,268 houses.” In these large increments of building, is it not essential that there should be some care for the health and