These wretched places and their inhabitants do not obtrude themselves on the public eye. They are not seen in our common thoroughfares, nor in our splendid streets and squares. They are not known. The medical man knows them, the minister of religion knows them, the relieving officer knows them, a few dispensers of voluntary charity know them. They are not known to any one else.
Let me then describe one.
It is a small room, say twelve feet square; an inner room; no chimney, no window that will open, no inlet for fresh air, no outlet for foul air. There, on a miserable bed, lies a woman ill of typhus fever; a child at her side on the same bed is dying of that fever; a child already dead of it is stretched out on a table at the bed-side.
I could not breathe the air of that room. I could not remain in it long enough to write a prescription for the poor patients. As I was writing it at the street-door I shivered and felt sick. I knew that I had taken fever. I passed through a very severe form of it. I could take you to hundreds of such houses in every part of London; to hundreds of courts and lanes wholly consisting of such houses.
In such houses, with the conditions of the 15th and 16th centuries, Cholera, in the middle of the 19th, found and exerted a power similar to that which characterized the epidemics of the middle ages, and here Typhus and its kindred diseases continually hold their undisputed reign: houses whose unhealthfulness is increased by the only marks of the age which attach to them, their brick construction and their glass windows; those bricks and windows more effectually than the ancient wattles excluding the external, and confining the internal air, and thereby fostering the generation and spread of typhus. It is remarked by Dr Macculloch, in his account of the Hebrides, that while the inhabitants had no shelter but huts of the most simple construction which afforded free ingress and egress to the air, they were not subject to fevers, but when such habitations were provided as seemed more comfortable and commodious, but which afforded recesses for stagnating air and impurities, then febrile infection was generated. Houses in this state, without ventilation, without the means of cleanliness, worse than the huts of the savage, exist in great numbers in all our towns, and too truly merit the name they have acquired of “fever nests.”
I once took a distinguished statistician of France to some of these places in London, and showed him the sick with typhus lying in their wretched beds; for the sick with typhus may be seen there every day of every year. After the painful inspection he exclaimed—“England is indeed adorned with a splendid mantle, but under it are concealed the greatest horrors.”
Determined that this eminent person should see both sides of the picture, I next took him to the Model Dwellings.
What are the Model Dwellings? Small plots of civilization cultivated in the midst of a wide waste of barbarism.
In what does their civilization consist? In very simple matters.
The subsoil drainage of the site of the building;