Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State For the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; With AppendicesChadwick, Edwin
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Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State For the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; With Appendices
Chadwick, Edwin
Housing -- Great Britain; Public health -- Great Britain
“It is impossible to give a proper representation of the wretched
state of many of the inhabitants of the indigent class, situated in
the confined streets called Pipewellgate and Killgate, which are kept
in a most filthy state, and to a stranger would appear inimical to the
existence of human beings, where each small, ill ventilated apartment
of the house contained a family with lodgers in number from seven to
nine, and seldom more than two beds for the whole. The want of
convenient offices in the neighbourhood is attended with many very
unpleasant circumstances, as it induces the lazy inmates to make use
of chamber utensils, which are suffered to remain in the most
offensive state for several days, and are then emptied out of the
windows. The writer had occasion a short time ago to visit a person
ill of the cholera; his lodgings were in a room of a miserable house
situated in the very filthiest part of Pipewellgate, divided into six
apartments, and occupied by different families to the number of 26
persons in all. The room contained three wretched beds with two
persons sleeping in each: it measured about 12 feet in length and 7 in
breadth, and its greatest height would not admit of a person’s
standing erect; it received light from a small window, the sash of
which was fixed. Two of the number lay ill of the cholera, and the
rest appeared afraid of the admission of pure air, having carefully
closed up the broken panes with plugs of old linen.”
The _Rev. Dr. Gilly_, the vicar of Norham and canon of Durham, in an
appeal in behalf of the border peasantry, describes their dwellings as
“built of rubble or unhewn stone, loosely cemented; and from age, or
from badness of the materials, the walls look as if they would scarcely
hold together.” The chinks gape in so many places as admit blasts of
wind:—
“The chimneys have lost half their original height, and lean on the
roof with fearful gravitation. The rafters are evidently rotten and
displaced; and the thatch, yawning to admit the wind and wet in some
parts, and in all parts utterly unfit for its original purpose of
giving protection from the weather, looks more like the top of a
dunghill than of a cottage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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