“Some time ago I visited a poor woman in distress, the wife of a labouring man. She had been confined only a few days, and herself and infant were lying on straw in a vault through the outer cellar, with a clay floor, impervious to water. There was no light nor ventilation in it, and the air was dreadful. I had to walk on bricks across the floor to reach her bed-side, as the floor itself was flooded with stagnant water. This is by no means an extraordinary case, for I have witnessed scenes equally wretched; and it is only necessary to go into Crosby-street, Freemason’s row, and many cross streets out of Vauxhall-road, to find hordes of poor creatures living in cellars, which are almost as bad and offensive as charnel houses. In Freemason’s-row I found, about two years ago, a court of houses, the floors of which were below the public street, and the area of the whole court was a floating mass of putrefied animal and vegetable matter, so dreadfully offensive that I was obliged to make a precipitate retreat. Yet the whole of the houses were inhabited!”
Think what materials for every species of comfort and luxury, are perpetually circulating through Liverpool. If there had not been, for many a day, a sad neglect of supervision on the part of the employers, and great improvidence on that of the employed, we should not see the third part of the working population of such a town immersed in the most abject wretchedness, and all this wealth passing through and leaving so little of the comforts of life in the active hands through which it has passed. It may be said, however, that a considerable part of the population of Liverpool is immigrant, and Irish. Turn then to Nottingham, or York, or Preston, it is the
same story. Mr. Hawksley, the engineer, says of Nottingham:
“With few exceptions the houses of Nottingham and its vicinity are laid out either in narrow streets, or more commonly are built in confined courts and alleys, the entrance to which is usually through a tunnel from 30 to 36 inches wide, about 8 feet high, and from 25 to 30 feet long, so that purification by the direct action of the air and solar light is in the great majority of these cases perfectly impracticable. Upwards of 7000 houses are erected back to back and side to side, and are of course by this injurious arrangement deprived of the means of adequate ventilation and decent privacy.”
Dr. Laycock says of York,
“From these inquiries it appears that in the parish of St. Dennis, in which strict accuracy was observed, from 8 to 11 persons slept in one room in 4½ per cent. of the families resident there; in 7½ per cent. from 6 to 8 persons slept in one room; of the total 2195 families visited by the district visitors, 26 per cent. had one room only for all purposes.”
The Rev. Mr. Clay gives an account of an examination of a part of Preston,
“The streets, courts, and yards examined contain about 422 dwellings, inhabited at the time of the inquiry by 2400 persons sleeping in 852 beds, i.e. an average of 5.68 inhabitants to each house, and 2.8 persons to each bed.
“In 84 cases 4 persons slept in the same bed.
„ 28 „ 5
„ 13 „ 6
„ 3 „ 7
„ 1 „ 8“And, in addition, a family of 8 on bed stocks covered with a little straw.”
The results of statistical investigations, with respect to the duration of life, are in unison with the inferences that we should naturally make from the facts before us. Dr. Laycock shows us that in York, in the best drained parishes, where the population to the square rood is 27, and the mean altitude above the sea in feet is 50, the mean age at death is 35.32; in intermediate parishes, where the population is denser and the altitude less, the mean age at death is 27.29; in the worst drained, worst ventilated, and lowest situated parishes, the mean age at death is 22.57. He mentions a fact well worth noticing, that the cholera in 1832 broke out in the court called “the Hagworm’s nest,” which is in the same spot
where the pestilences of 1551 and 1604 had dwelt. Surely, in these last two hundred years, we might have drained and ventilated a locality which experience had shown to be so attractive to epidemics. The Rev. Mr. Clay has furnished a table, subjoined in the Appendix, showing the progressive diminution of vitality in the respective classes of gentry, tradesmen, and operatives, at Preston. Dr. Duncan says respecting the mortality of Liverpool,