Leeds had a population of some six or seven thousand at the time of the Civil Wars, and lost 1325 in nine months of the year 1645 from plague, all of them the poorer class. A generation or two later, in the time of Thoresby’s ‘Diary,’ it was a centre of the cloth trade; and it appears to have grown steadily throughout the 18th century. In 1775 it had a population of 17,117. We hear from Lucas of an epidemic typhus in it previous to 1779[258]. Eighty persons had died of that fever in one year, and many who struggled through the disease died afterwards of lingering complaints. In two courts or yards (such as might have been the Lantern Yard which Silas Marner found pulled down when he revisited Leeds) forty persons were affected with the fever; some families had received ten shillings a week from the assessment for the poor. As early as 1779 Lucas proposed a house of reception for contagious fever, a proposal which was carried into effect in 1804, after a whole generation of typhus and at a time when there was little fever in Leeds or elsewhere. The infectious fevers, being chiefly confined to the poor, often prevailed, says this writer, for a length of time without exciting much alarm, or without their fatality being attended to; but, he adds about the year 1790, “should a few of the higher rank receive the infection, then the disease is described in most exaggerated terms.” Carlisle was a good instance of the increase of urban population and the breeding of typhus. In seventeen years, from 1763 to 1780, the inhabitants had increased from 4158 to 6229, many of the immigrants being Scots and Irish with their families. The chief industry was the making of calico, in which the women and children were employed as well as the men. When Dr Heysham surveyed the town and suburbs for his census of 1779, he had “opportunity of seeing many scenes of poverty and filth and nastiness[259]”; and in the bill of mortality for that year he confesses himself astonished that there should be so little fever.