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Town Life In Perspective
To the modern reader, the early Victorian town may well appear as a nightmarish
creation, a horrendous mixture of noise, dirt, and smells in which even the main
streets were befouled with horse manure, thus necessitating the services of a
crossings sweeper if one was to cross the road with clean boots. From this point
of view, life at home must have been of a very poor standard, lived in by
wretchedly unhygienic surroundings. That there is a strong element of truth in
this cannot be denied, but it is essential to see the facts in perspective. In
the first place, although no one denies that conditions could be very bad, it is
wrong to suppose that noisome (harmful, objectionable) slums did not exist in
London and other cities in the previous century - they certainly did, but in the
nineteen century the difference is that the pressure of numbers made the scale
of the problem far greater than ever before, and indeed made it quite
intolerable. The result was the movement for public health reform. It would be
equally wrong (as we have seen) to imagine that all the working classes lived in
filth and disorder - this is not true of the better-paid, skilled workman whose
wife took pride in her house and its furnishing, and in the cleanliness of her
children. Admittedly, such households often had to put up with unpleasant odours
from earth privies and middens (cesspits, dung-hills, refuse-heaps), but so did
many middle-class families who also lacked water closets, and in the smaller
industrial towns, frequently lived as near the works as their work people.
Middle-class houses sometimes had cesspits in their own cellars into which
chamber pots were emptied, and the resulting stench was accepted cheerfully
enough. Victorians of all classes were surprisingly robust in their attitude to
the excretory processes. Perhaps this helps to explain why it was that in spite
of all the insanitary horrors, the new towns still attracted immigrants in such
large numbers, for many must have considered life in them with all the drawbacks
still preferable to life in the countryside.
There is another point to consider: it has often been alleged by liberal
historians that the bad state of the towns was due to the greed of landlords and
builders who exploited the working-class demand for housing. As one historian
put it: "the avarice of the jerry-builder catering for the avarice of the
capitalist." In fact, houses were not everywhere noticeably worse in
quality than they had been before, though in big towns they certainly were more
congested. One comes back again to the basic causes of discomfort and disease -
the lack of deep drainage, the absence of a piped water supply, and the failure
to provide scavenging (cleaning by carrying away refuse), all characteristic of
town life in the previous century, and not especially the responsibility of the
individual landlord in the early nineteenth century. The greed of landlords
cannot be made to bear the blame for all this, unless indeed landlords are
deemed always to be exploiters by the very fact they are capitalist owners of
property.
Lastly, it is worth reiterating that life at home for the working classes in
this period was not uniform in nature or quality. The major determining factor
was always the trade of the worker, for the skilled worker, the aristocrat of
labour, enjoyed a higher and steadier income and could live in a better home
than the unskilled labourer. Life at home was also influenced by the trade
cycle, for in times of prosperity even the labourer would find it easier to keep
his job and could eat a little better; whereas in times of depression he might
be near starving and faced with the workhouse. Yet whether skilled or unskilled,
the background to life in the town for the industrial worker was one of noise,
dirt, and inconvenience unthinkable at the present day. In the countryside the
environment was admittedly better, but housing was still very bad. Work took up
so much time in the lives of both industrial and agricultural workers that there
was not a great deal of time left for leisure and recreation. Nevertheless,
being human and adaptable, they used their leisure time as best they could, and
life had its moments of enjoyment even in the grim surroundings of the towns.