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LECTURE
READINGS
Friedrich
Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844)
The
Great Towns
A few miles
north-east of Stockport is Ashton-under-Lyne, one of the newest factory
towns of this region. It stands on the slope of a hill at the foot of
which are the canal and the river Tame, and is, in general, built on the
newer, more regular plan. Five or six parallel streets stretch along the
hill intersected at right angles by others leading down into the valley.
By this method, the factories would be excluded from the town proper, even
if the proximity of the river and the canal-way did not draw them all into
the valley where they stand thickly crowded, belching forth black smoke
from their chimneys. To this arrangement Ashton owes a much more
attractive appearance than that of most factory towns; the streets are
broad and cleaner, the cottages look new, bright red, and comfortable. But
the modern system of building cottages for working men has its own
disadvantages; every street has its concealed back lane to which a narrow
paved path leads, and which is all the dirtier. And, although I saw no
buildings, except a few on entering, which could have been more than fifty
years old, there are even in Ashton streets in which the cottages are
getting bad, where the bricks in the house-corners are no longer firm but
shift about, in which the walls have cracks and will not hold the chalk
whitewash inside; streets, whose dirty, smoke-begrimed aspect is nowise
different from that of the other towns of the district, except that in
Ashton, this is the exception, not the rule.
A mile eastward lies Stalybridge, also on the Tame. In coming over the
hill from Ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right and left, fine
large gardens with superb villalike houses in their midst, built usually
in the Elizabethan style, which is to the Gothic precisely what the
Anglican Church is to the Apostolic Roman Catholic. A hundred paces
farther and Stalybridge shows itself in the valley, in sharp contrast with
the beautiful country seats, in sharp contrast even with the modest
cottages of Ashton! Stalybridge lies in a narrow, crooked ravine, much
narrower even than the valley at Stockport, and both sides of this ravine
are occupied by an irregular group of cottages, houses, and mills. On
entering, the very first cottages are narrow, smoke-begrimed, old and
ruinous; and as the first houses, so the whole town. A few streets lie in
the narrow valley bottom, most of them run criss-cross, pell-mell, up hill
and down, and in nearly all the houses, by reason of this sloping
situation, the ground floor is half-buried in the earth; and what
multitudes of courts, back lanes, and remote nooks arise out of this
confused way of building may be seen from the hills, whence one has the
town, here and there, in a bird's-eye view almost at one's feet. Add to
this the shocking filth, and the repulsive effect of Stalybridge, in spite
of its pretty surroundings, may be readily imagined.
But enough of these little towns. Each has its own peculiarities, but in
general, the working people live in them just as in Manchester. Hence I
have especially sketched only their peculiar construction, and would
observe, that all more general observations as to the condition of the
labouring population in Manchester are fully applicable to these
surrounding towns as well.
Manchester lies at the foot of the southern slope of a range of hills,
which stretch hither from Oldham, their last peak, Kersallmoor, being at
once the racecourse and the Mons Sacer of Manchester. Manchester proper
lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two
smaller ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell.
On the right bank of the Irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river,
lies Salford, and farther westward Pendleton; northward from the Irwell
lie Upper and Lower Broughton; northward of the Irk, Cheetham Hill; south
of the Medlock lies Hulme; farther east Chorlton on Medlock; still
farther, pretty well to the east of Manchester, Ardwick. The whole
assemblage of buildings is commonly called Manchester, and contains about
400,000 inhabitants, rather more than less. The town itself is peculiarly
built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily
without coming into contact with a working-people's quarter or even with
workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to
pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious
tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the
working-people's quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the
city reserved for the middle class; or, if this does not succeed, they are
concealed with the cloak of charity. Manchester contains, at its heart, a
rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as
broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses. Nearly the
whole district is abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at
night; only watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their
dark lanterns. This district is cut through by certain main thoroughfares
upon which the vast traffic concentrates, and in which the ground level is
lined with brilliant shops. In these streets the upper floors are
occupied, here and there, and there is a good deal of life upon them until
late at night. With the exception of this commercial district, all
Manchester proper, all Salford and Hulme, a great part of Pendleton and
Chorlton, two-thirds of Ardwick, and single stretches of Cheetham Hill and
Broughton are all unmixed working-people's quarters, stretching like a
girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around the commercial
district. Outside, beyond this girdle, lives the upper and middle
bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid out streets in the
vicinity of the working quarters, especially in Chorlton and the lower
lying portions of Cheetham Hill; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas
with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of Cheetham
Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air, in fine,
comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibuses
going into the city. And the finest part of the arrangement is this, that
the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through
the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business,
without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that
lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the
Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with
an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the
middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a
decent and cleanly external appearance and can care for it. True,
these shops bear some relation to the districts which lie behind them, and
are more elegant in the commercial and residential quarters than when they
hide grimy working-men's dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from the
eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the
misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth. So, for
instance, Deansgate, which leads from the Old Church directly southward,
is lined first with mills and warehouses, then with second-rate shops and
alehouses; farther south, when it leaves the commercial district, with
less inviting shops, which grow dirtier and more interrupted by beerhouses
and gin palaces the farther one goes, until at the southern end the
appearance of the shops leaves no doubt that workers and workers only are
their customers. So Market Street running south-east from the Exchange; at
first brilliant shops of the best sort, with counting-houses or warehouses
above; in the continuation, Piccadilly, immense hotels and warehouses; in
the farther continuation, London Road, in the neighbourhood of the Medlock,
factories, beerhouses, shops for the humbler bourgeoisie and the working
population; and from this point onward, large gardens and villas of the
wealthier merchants and manufacturers. In this way any one who knows
Manchester can infer the adjoining districts, from the appearance of the
thoroughfare, but one is seldom in a position to catch from the street a
glimpse of the real labouring districts. I know very well that this
hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities; I know, too,
that the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business to take
possession of the great highways; I know that there are more good
buildings than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value
of land is greater near them than in remoter districts; but at the same
time I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class
from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might
affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester. And
yet, in other respects, Manchester is less built according to a plan,
after official regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident, than any
other city; and when I consider in this connection the eager assurances of
the middle class, that the working class is doing famously, I cannot help
feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the 'Big Wigs' of Manchester, are
not so innocent after all, in the matter of this sensitive method of
construction.
I may mention just here that the mills almost all adjoin the rivers or the
different canals that ramify throughout the city, before I proceed at once
to describe the labouring quarters. First of all, there is the Old Town of
Manchester, which lies between the northern boundary of the commercial
district and the Irk. Here the streets, even the better ones, are narrow
and winding, as Todd Street, Long Milgate, Withy Grove, and Shude Hill,
the houses dirty, old, and tumbledown, and the construction of the side
streets utterly horrible. Going from the Old Church to Long Millgate, the
stroller has at once a row of old-fashioned houses at the right, of which
not one has kept its original level; these are remnants of the old
pre-manufacturing Manchester, whose former inhabitants have removed with
their descendants into better-built districts, and have left the houses,
which were not good enough for them, to a working-class population
strongly mixed with Irish blood. Here one is in an almost undisguised
working-men's quarter, for even the shops and beerhouses hardly take the
trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness. But all this is
nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which
access can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human
beings can pass at the same time. Of the irregular cramming together of
dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which
they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey
an idea. And it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of
Manchester which are to blame for this; the confusion has only recently
reached its height when every scrap of space left by the old way of
building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is
left to be further occupied. . . .
. . . . The south bank of the Irk is here very steep and between 15 and
30, feet high. On this declivitous hillside there are planted three rows
of houses, of which the lowest rise directly out of the river, while the
front walls of the highest stand on the crest of the hill in Long Millgate.
Among them are mills on the river, in short, the method of construction is
as crowded and disorderly here as in the lower part of Long Millgate.
Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street
into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and
disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found -- especially in
the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the
most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts
there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage,
a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and
out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and
excrement. This is the first court on the Irk above Ducie Bridge -- in
case anyone should care to look into it. Below it on the river there are
several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of
animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of the
houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and
filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge, known as Allen's Court, was in
such a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered
it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. Dr Kay gives a
terrible description of the state of this court at that time.[1] Since
then, it seems to have been partially torn away and rebuilt; at least
looking down from Ducie Bridge, the passer-by sees several ruined walls
and heaps of debris with some newer houses. The view from this bridge,
mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as
a man, is characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or
rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream,
full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank.
In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green,
slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which
bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench
unendurable even on the bridge 40 or 50 feet above the surface of the
stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by
high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick
masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from
which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives
further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be
easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits.
Below the bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse, filth, and
offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here each house is packed
close behind its neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all black,
smoky, crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window-frames. The
background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. On the
lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house
being a ruin without a roof, piled with debris; the third stands so low
that the lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or
doors. Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station
of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the
Workhouse, the 'Poor-Law Bastille' of Manchester, which, like a citadel,
looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the
hilltop, upon the working-people's quarter below.
Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank
steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both banks grows worse
rather than better. He who turns to the left here from the main street,
Long Millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns
countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys,
until after a few minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not whither to
turn. Everywhere half or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually
uninhabited, which means a great deal here; rarely a wooden or stone floor
to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting windows and
doors, and a state of filth! Everywhere heaps of debris, refuse, and
offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which alone would make it
impossible for a human being in any degree civilized to live in such a
district. The newly built extension of the Leeds railway, which crosses
the Irk here, has swept away some of these courts and lanes, laying others
completely open to view. Immediately under the railway bridge there stands
a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass all the others by far,
just because it was hitherto so shut off, so secluded that the way to it
could not be found without a good deal of trouble. I should never have
discovered it myself, without the breaks made by the railway, though I
thought I knew this whole region thoroughly. Passing along a rough bank,
among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small
one-storeyed, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial
floor; kitchen, living- and sleeping-room all in one. In such a hole,
scarcely 5 feet long by 6 broad, I found two beds -- and such bedsteads
and beds! -- which, with a staircase and chimneyplace, exactly filled the
room. In several others I found absolutely nothing, while the door stood
open, and the inhabitants leaned against it. Everywhere before the doors
refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be
seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet. This whole collection
of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and
a factory, and on the third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up
the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into another almost equally
ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings.
Enough! The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless,
knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness,
whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external
surroundings. And how could the people be clean with no proper opportunity
for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants? Privies are so rare
here that they are either filled up every day, or are too remote for most
of the inhabitants to use. How can people wash when they have only the
dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps and water-pipes can be found in
decent parts of the city alone? In truth, it cannot be charged to the
account of these helots of modem society if their dwellings are not more
clean than the pigsties which are here and there to be seen among them.
The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six or seven
cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors of which
stand at least 2 feet below the low-water level of the Irk that flows not
6 feet away from them; or like the upper floor of the corner-house on the
opposite shore directly above the bridge, where the ground floor, utterly
uninhabitable, stands deprived of all fittings for doors and windows, a
case by no means rare in this region, when this open ground floor is used
as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for want of other facilities!
If we leave the Irk and penetrate once more on the opposite side from Long
Millgate into the midst of the working-men's dwellings, we shall come into
a somewhat newer quarter, which stretches from St Michael's Church to
Withy Grove and Shude Hill. Here there is somewhat better order. In place
of the chaos of buildings, we find at least long straight lanes and alleys
or courts, built according to a plan and usually square. But if, in the
former case, every house was built according to caprice, here each lane
and court is so built, without reference to the situation of the adjoining
ones. The lanes run now in this direction, now in that, while every two
minutes the wanderer gets into a blind alley, or, on turning a corner,
finds himself back where he started from; certainly no one who has not
lived a considerable time in this labyrinth can find his way through it.
If I may use the word at all in speaking of this district, the ventilation
of these streets and courts is, in consequence of this confusion, quite as
imperfect as in the Irk region; and if this quarter may, nevertheless, be
said to have some advantage over that of the Irk, the houses being newer
and the streets occasionally having gutters, nearly every house has, on
the other hand, a cellar dwelling, which is rarely found in the Irk
district, by reason of the greater age and more careless construction of
the houses. As for the rest, the filth, debris, and offal heaps, and the
pools in the streets are common to both quarters, and in the district now
under discussion, another feature most injurious to the cleanliness of the
inhabitants is the multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys,
rooting into the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens. Here, as
in most of the working-men's quarters of Manchester, the pork-raisers rent
the courts and build pigpens in them. In almost every court one or even
several such pens may be found, into which the inhabitants of the court
throw all refuse and offal, whence the swine grow fat; and the atmosphere,
confined on all four sides, is utterly corrupted by putrefying animal and
vegetable substances. Through this quarter, a broad and measurably decent
street has been cut, Millers Street, and the background has been pretty
successfully concealed. But if anyone should be led by curiosity to pass
through one of the numerous passages which lead into the courts, he will
find this piggery repeated at every twenty paces.
Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on rereading my description, I am
forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black
enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and
uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness,
ventilation, and health which characterize the construction of this single
district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And
such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the
first manufacturing city of the world. If anyone wishes to see in how
little space a human being can move, how little air -- and such
air! -- he can breathe, how little of civilization he may share and yet
live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old
Town, and the people of Manchester emphasize the fact whenever anyone
mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but what
does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is
of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The couple of
hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long since
abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has
crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the
industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between these old houses to
win a covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the
agricultural districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone
enables the owners of these cattlesheds to rent them for high prices to
human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the
health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich.
In the industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the worker
scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere material, a
mere chattel; that he must let himself be crowded into a dwelling too bad
for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys the right to let
go utterly to ruin. This manufacture has achieved, which, without these
workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have lived. True, the
original construction of this quarter was bad, little good could have been
made out of it; but, have the landowners, has the municipality done
anything to improve it when rebuilding? On the contrary, wherever a nook
or corner was free, a house has been run up; where a superfluous passage
remained, it has been built up; the value of land rose with the blossoming
out of manufacture, and the more it rose, the more madly was the work of
building up carried on, without reference to the health or comfort of the
inhabitants, with sole reference to the highest possible profit on the
principle that no hole is so bad but that some poor creature
must take it who can pay for nothing better. However, it is the
Old Town, and with this reflection the bourgeoisie is comforted. Let us
see, therefore, how much better it is in the New Town.
The New Town, known also as Irish Town, stretches up a hill of clay,
beyond the Old Town, between the Irk and St George's Road. Here all the
features of a city are lost. Single rows of houses or groups of streets
stand, here and there, like little villages on the naked, not even
grass-grown clay soil; the houses, or rather cottages, are in bad order,
never repaired, filthy, with damp, unclean, cellar dwellings; the lanes
are neither paved nor supplied with sewers, but harbour numerous colonies
of swine penned in small sties or yards, or wandering unrestrained through
the neighbourhood. The mud in the streets is so deep that there is never a
chance, except in the driest weather, of walking without sinking into it
ankle deep at every step. In the vicinity of St George's Road, the
separate groups of buildings approach each other more closely, ending in a
continuation of lanes, blind alleys, back lanes, and courts, which grow
more and more crowded and irregular the nearer they approach the heart of
the town. True, they are here oftener paved or supplied with paved
sidewalks and gutters; but the filth, the bad order of the houses, and
especially of the cellars remain the same.
It may not be out of place to make some general observations just here as
to the customary construction of working-men's quarters in Manchester. We
have seen how in the Old Town pure accident determined the grouping of the
houses in general. Every house is built without reference to any other,
and the scraps of space between them are called courts for want of another
name. In the somewhat newer portions of the same quarter, and in other
working-men's quarters, dating from the early days of industrial activity,
a somewhat more orderly arrangement may be found. The space between two
streets is divided into more regular, usually square courts.
These courts were built in this way from the beginning, and communicate
with the streets by means of covered passages. If the totally planless
construction is injurious to the health of the workers by preventing
ventilation, this method of shutting them up in courts surrounded on all
sides by buildings is far more so. The air simply cannot escape; the
chimneys of the houses are the sole drains for the imprisoned atmosphere
of the courts, and they serve the purpose only so long as fire is kept
burning.[2] Moreover, the houses surrounding such courts are usually built
back to back, having the rear wall in common; and this alone suffices to
prevent any sufficient through ventilation. And, as the police charged
with care of the streets does not trouble itself about the condition of
these courts, as everything quietly lies where it is thrown, there is no
cause for wonder at the filth and heaps of ashes and offal to be found
here. I have been in courts, in Millers Street, at least half a foot below
the level of the thoroughfare, and without the slightest drainage for the
water that accumulates in them in rainy weather! More recently another
different method of building was adopted, and has now become general.
Working-men's cottages are almost never built singly, but always by the
dozen or score; a single contractor building up one or two streets at a
time. These are then arranged as follows: One front is formed of cottages
of the best class, so fortunate as to possess a back door and small court,
and these command the highest rent. In the rear of these cottages runs a
narrow alley, the back street, built up at both ends, into which either a
narrow roadway or a covered passage leads from one side. The cottages
which face this back street command least rent, and are most neglected.
These have their rear walls in common with the third row of cottages which
face a second street, and command less rent than the first row and more
than the second. . . .
By this method of construction, comparatively good ventilation can be
obtained for the first row of cottages, and the third row is no worse off
than in the former method. The middle row, on the other hand, is at least
as badly ventilated as the houses in the courts, and the back street is
always in the same filthy, disgusting condition as they. The contractors
prefer this method because it saves them space, and furnishes the means of
fleecing better paid workers through the higher rents of the cottages in
the first and third rows. These three different forms of cottage building
are found all over Manchester and throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire,
often mixed up together, but usually separate enough to indicate the
relative age of parts of towns. The third system, that of the back alleys,
prevails largely in the great working-men's district east of St George's
Road and Ancoats Street, and is the one most often found in the other
working-men's quarters of Manchester and its suburbs.
In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats,
stand the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six-and
seven-storeyed buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above
the low cottages of the workers. The population of the district consists,
therefore, chiefly of mill-hands, and in the worst streets, of
hand-weavers. The streets nearest the heart of the town are the oldest,
and consequently the worst; they are, however, paved, and supplied with
drains. Among them I include those nearest to and parallel with Oldham
Road and Great Ancoats Street. Farther to the north-east lie many newly
built-up streets; here the cottages look neat and cleanly, doors and
window's are new and freshly painted, the rooms within newly whitewashed;
the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant building lots between
them larger and more numerous. But this can be said of a minority of the
houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every
cottage; many streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all,
this neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes within the
first ten years. For the construction of the cottages individually is no
less to be condemned than the plan of the streets. All such cottages look
neat and substantial at first; their massive brick walls deceive the eye,
and, on passing through a newly built working-men's street, without
remembering the back alleys and the construction of the houses themselves,
one is inclined to agree with the assertion of the Liberal manufacturers
that the working population is nowhere so well housed as in England. But
on closer examination, it becomes evident that the walls of these cottages
are as thin as it is possible to make them. The outer walls, those of the
cellar, which bear the weight of the ground floor and roof, are one whole
brick thick at most, the bricks lying with their long sides touching but I
have seen many a cottage of the same height, some in process of building,
whose outer walls were but one-half brick thick, the bricks lying not
sidewise but lengthwise, their narrow ends touching. The object of this is
to spare material, but there is also another reason for it; namely, the
fact that the contractors never own the land but lease it, according to
the English custom for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or ninety-nine years,
at the expiration of which time it falls, with everything upon it, back
into the possession of the original holder, who pays nothing in return for
improvements upon it. The improvements are therefore so calculated by the
lessee as to be worth as little as possible at the expiration of the
stipulated term. And as such cottages are often built but twenty or thirty
years before the expiration of the term, it may easily be imagined that
the contractors make no unnecessary expenditures upon them. Moreover,
these contractors, usually carpenters and builders, or manufacturers,
spend little or nothing in repairs, partly to avoid diminishing their rent
receipts, and partly in view of the approaching surrender of the
improvement to the landowner; while in consequence of commercial crises
and the loss of work that follows them, whole streets often stand empty,
the cottages falling rapidly into ruin and uninhabitableness. It is
calculated in general that working-men's cottages last only forty years on
the average. This sounds strangely enough when one sees the beautiful,
massive walls of newly built ones, which seem to give promise of lasting a
couple of centuries; but the fact remains that the niggardliness of the
original expenditure, the neglect of all repairs, the frequent periods of
emptiness, the constant change of inhabitants, and the destruction carried
on by the dwellers during the final ten years, usually Irish families, who
do not hesitate to use the wooden portions for firewood-all this, taken
together, accomplishes the complete ruin of the cottages by the end of
forty years. Hence it comes that Ancoats, built chiefly since the sudden
growth of manufacture, chiefly indeed within the present century, contains
a vast number of ruinous houses, most of them being, in fact, in the last
stages of inhabitableness. I will not dwell upon the amount of capital
thus wasted, the small additional expenditure upon the original
improvement and upon repairs which would suffice to keep this whole
district clean, decent, and inhabitable for years together. I have to deal
here with the state of the houses and their inhabitants, and it must be
admitted that no more injurious and demoralizing method of housing the
workers has yet been discovered than precisely this. The working man is
constrained to occupy such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for
others, and because there are no others in the vicinity of his mill;
perhaps, too, because they belong to the employer, who engages him only on
condition of his taking such a cottage. The calculation with reference to
the forty years' duration of the cottage is, of course, not always
perfectly strict; for, if the dwellings are in a thickly built-up portion
of the town, and there is a good prospect of finding steady occupants for
them, while the ground rent is high, the contractors do a little something
to keep the cottages inhabitable after the expiration of the forty years.
They never do anything more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and
the dwellings so repaired are the worst of all. Occasionally when an
epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary police
is a little stirred, raids are made into the working-men's districts,
whole rows of cellars and cottages are dosed, as happened in the case of
several lanes near Oldham Road; but this does not last long: the condemned
cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much better off by
letting them, and the sanitary police won't come again so soon. These east
and north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on which the
bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the year the
west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither, and
that the working-people alone may breathe.
Southward from Great Ancoats Street ties a great, straggling,
working-men's quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by
detached, irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these,
empty building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable
in wet weather. The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New
Town to mind. The stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the
most thickly built-up and the worst. Here flows the Medlock with countless
windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the valley
of the Irk. Along both sides of the stream, which is coal-black, stagnant,
and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men's dwellings,
the latter all in the worst condition. The bank is chiefly declivitous and
is built over to the water's edge, just as we saw along the Irk; while the
houses are equally bad, whether built on the Manchester side or in Ardwick,
Chorlton, or Hulme. But the most horrible spot (if I should describe all
the separate spots in detail I should never come to the end) lies on the
Manchester side, immediately southwest of Oxford Road, and is known as
Little Ireland. In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and
surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments,
covered with buildings, stand two groups of about 200 cottages, built
chiefly back to back, in which live about 4,000 human beings, most of them
Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets
uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of
refuse, offal, and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all
directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and
laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde
of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that
thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole
rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be
equalled in the worst court on the Irk. The race that lives in these
ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung
doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless
filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this
race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. This is the
impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district
forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in
each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a
cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole region,
for each 120 persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided; and that
in spite of all the preachings of the physicians, in spite of the
excitement into which the cholera epidemic plunged the sanitary police by
reason of the condition of Little Ireland, in spite of everything, in this
year of grace 1844, it is in almost the same state as in 1831! Dr Kay
asserts[3] that not only the cellars but the first floors of all the
houses in this district are damp; that a number of cellars once filled up
with earth have now been emptied and are occupied once more by Irish
people; that in one cellar the water constantly wells up through a hole
stopped with clay, the cellar lying below the river level, so that its
occupant, a hand-loom weaver, had to bale out the water from his dwelling
every morning and pour it into the street!
Farther down, on the left side of the Medlock, lies Hulme, which, properly
speaking, is one great working-people's district, the condition of which
coincides almost exactly with that of Ancoats; the more thickly built-up
regions chiefly bad and approaching ruin, the less populous of more modern
structure, but generally sunk in filth. On the other side of the Medlock,
in Manchester proper, lies a second great working-men's district which
stretches on both sides of Deansgate as far as the business quarter, and
in certain parts rivals the Old Town. Especially in the immediate vicinity
of the business quarter, between Bridge and Quay Streets, Princess and
Peter Streets, the crowded construction exceeds in places the narrowest
courts of the Old Town. Here are long, narrow lanes between which run
contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so
irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps,
or comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and
every alley exactly and separately. According to Dr Kay, the most
demoralized class of all Manchester lived in these ruinous and filthy
districts, people whose occupations are thieving and prostitution; and, to
all appearance, his assertion is still true at the present moment. When
the sanitary police made its expedition hither in 1831, it found the
uncleanness as great as in Little Ireland or along the Irk (that it is not
much better today, I can testify); and among other items, they found in
Parliament Street for 380 persons, and in Parliament Passage for thirty
thickly populated houses, but a single privy.
If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the
river, a town of 80,000 inhabitants, which, properly speaking, is one
large working-men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue. Salford,
once more important than Manchester, was then the leading town of the
surrounding district to which it still gives its name, Salford Hundred.
Hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty, and ruinous
locality is to be found here, lying opposite the Old Church of Manchester,
and in as bad a condition as the Old Town on the other side of the Irwell.
Farther away from the river lies the newer portion, which is, however,
already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage life, and therefore
ruinous enough. All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow,
that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the little lanes of
Genoa. The average construction of Salford is in this respect much worse
than that of Manchester, and so, too, in respect to cleanliness. If, in
Manchester, the police, from time to time, every six or ten years, makes a
raid upon the working-people's districts, closes the worst dwellings, and
causes the filthiest spots in these Augean stables to be cleansed, in
Salford it seems to have done absolutely nothing. The narrow side lanes
and courts of Chapel Street, Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly
never been cleansed since they were built. Of late, the Liverpool railway
has been carried through the middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has
abolished many of the filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? Whoever
passes over this viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness
enough; and, if anyone takes the trouble to pass through these lanes, and
glance through the open doors and windows into the houses and cellars, he
can convince himself afresh with every step that the workers of Salford
live in dwellings in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible. Exactly
the same state of affairs is found in the more distant regions of Salford,
in Islington, along Regent Road, and back of the Bolton railway. The
working-men's dwellings between Oldfield Road and Gross Lane, where a mass
of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state, vie with
the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding. In this district
I found a man, apparently about 6o years old, living in a cow-stable. He
had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had neither
windows, floor, nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there,
though the rain dripped through his rotten roof This man was too old and
weak for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a
hand-cart; the dung-heaps lay next door to his palace!
Such are the various working-people's quarters of Manchester as I had
occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. If we briefly
formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit that 350,000 working
people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in
wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are
usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the
slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit
secured by the contractor. In a word, we must confess that in the
workingmen's dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and
consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such
dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity,
degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel
comfortable and at home. And I am not alone in making this assertion. We
have seen that Dr Kay gives precisely the same description; and, though it
is superfluous, I quote further the words of a Liberal, recognized and
highly valued as an authority by the manufacturers, and a fanatical
opponent of all independent movements of the workers:[4]
As I passed through the dwellings of the mill-hands in Irish Town, Ancoats,
and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it is possible to maintain a
reasonable state of health in such homes. These towns, for in extent and
number of inhabitants they are towns, have been erected with the utmost
disregard of everything except the immediate advantage of the speculating
builder. A carpenter and builder unite to buy a series of building sites
(i.e. they lease them for a number of years), and cover them with
so-called houses. In one place we found a whole street following the
course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be secured
without the cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but
for dwellings for human beings. Not one house of this street
escaped the cholera. In general, the streets of these suburbs are
unpaved with a dungheap or ditch in the middle; the houses are built back
to back, without ventilation or drainage, and whole families are limited
to a corner of a cellar or a garret.
I have already referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police
manifested during the cholera visitation. When the epidemic was
approaching, a universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city. People
remembered the unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before the
certainty that each of these slums would become a centre for the plague,
whence it would spread desolation in all directions through the houses of
the propertied class. A Health Commission was appointed at once to
investigate these districts, and report upon their condition to the Town
Council. Dr Kay, himself a member of this Commission, who visited in
person every separate police district except one, the eleventh, quotes
extracts from their reports: There were inspected, in all, 6,951 houses --
naturally in Manchester proper alone, Salford and the other suburbs being
excluded. Of these, 6,565 urgently needed whitewashing within; 960 were
out of repair; 939 had insufficient drains; 1,435 were damp; 452. were
badly ventilated; 2,221 were without privies. Of the 687 streets
inspected, 248 were unpaved, 53 but partially paved, 112 ill-ventilated,
352 containing standing pools, heaps of debris, refuse, etc. To cleanse
such an Augean stable before the arrival of the cholera was, of course,
out of the question. A few of the worst nooks were therefore cleansed, and
everything else left as before. In the cleansed spots, as Little Ireland
proves, the old filthy condition was naturally restored in a couple of
months. As to the internal condition of these houses, the same Commission
reports a state of things similar to that which we have already met with
in London, Edinburgh, and other cities.[5]
It often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed; often
a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in an
indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, stolidity, and
wretchedness. Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families
in two rooms. All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and
dining-room in common. Often more than one family lived in a single damp
cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were
crowded together. To these and other sources of disease must be added that
pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind
were found.
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