The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892Engels, Friedrich
History
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892
Engels, Friedrich
Great Britain -- Economic conditions; Working class -- Great Britain
As in life, so in death. The poor are dumped into the earth like
infected cattle. The pauper burial-ground of St. Brides, London, is a
bare morass, in use as a cemetery since the time of Charles II., and
filled with heaps of bones; every Wednesday the paupers are thrown into a
ditch fourteen feet deep; a curate rattles through the Litany at the top
of his speed; the ditch is loosely covered in, to be re-opened the next
Wednesday, and filled with corpses as long as one more can be forced in.
The putrefaction thus engendered contaminates the whole neighbourhood. In
Manchester, the pauper burial-ground lies opposite to the Old Town, along
the Irk: this, too, is a rough, desolate place. About two years ago a
railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery,
how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the
desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the
outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It
was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed bodies
to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it
happened, and piles were driven into newly-made graves, so that the water
oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and
filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The
disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in
further detail.
Can any one wonder that the poor decline to accept public relief under
these conditions? That they starve rather than enter these bastilles? I
have the reports of five cases in which persons actually starving, when
the guardians refused them outdoor relief, went back to their miserable
homes and died of starvation rather than enter these hells. Thus far
have the Poor Law Commissioners attained their object. At the same time,
however, the workhouses have intensified, more than any other measure of
the party in power, the hatred of the working-class against the property-
holders, who very generally admire the New Poor Law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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