The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844: with a Preface written in 1892Engels, Friedrich
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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
"It contains 1,400 houses, inhabited by 2,795 families, or about
12,000 persons. The space upon which this large population dwells, is
less than 400 yards (1,200 feet) square, and in this overcrowding it
is nothing unusual to find a man, his wife, four or five children,
and, sometimes, both grandparents, all in one single room, where they
eat, sleep, and work. I believe that before the Bishop of London
called attention to this most poverty-stricken parish, people at the
West End knew as little of it as of the savages of Australia or the
South Sea Isles. And if we make ourselves acquainted with these
unfortunates, through personal observation, if we watch them at their
scanty meal and see them bowed by illness and want of work, we shall
find such a mass of helplessness and misery, that a nation like ours
must blush that these things can be possible. I was rector near
Huddersfield during the three years in which the mills were at their
worst, but I have never seen such complete helplessness of the poor as
since then in Bethnal Green. Not one father of a family in ten in the
whole neighbourhood has other clothing than his working suit, and that
is as bad and tattered as possible; many, indeed, have no other
covering for the night than these rags, and no bed, save a sack of
straw and shavings."
The foregoing description furnishes an idea of the aspect of the interior
of the dwellings. But let us follow the English officials, who
occasionally stray thither, into one or two of these working-men's homes.
On the occasion of an inquest held Nov. 14th, 1843, by Mr. Carter,
coroner for Surrey, upon the body of Ann Galway, aged 45 years, the
newspapers related the following particulars concerning the deceased: She
had lived at No. 3 White Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London, with her
husband and a nineteen-year-old son in a little room, in which neither a
bedstead nor any other furniture was to be seen. She lay dead beside her
son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked
body, there being neither sheet nor coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast
over the whole body that the physician could not examine the corpse until
it was cleansed, and then found it starved and scarred from the bites of
vermin. Part of the floor of the room was torn up, and the hole used by
the family as a privy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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