Great towns frederick engels biography
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The obscured streets lead into knotted chaos of one storeyed neighbourhoods, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness; which were mostly one storied huts having no artificial floor; kitchen, living room and sleeping all in one as this is the case with contemporary Industrial and Primate cities of India. And this series does not fall into fixed classes, so that one can say, this fraction of the working-class is well off, has always been so, and remains so.
Dr. Kay, himself a member of this Commission, who visited in person every separate police district except one, the eleventh, quotes extracts from their reports: There were inspected, in all, 6,951 houses – naturally in Manchester proper alone, Salford and the other suburbs being excluded. Further, a large retail dealer who has extensive capital invested in his business is ruined with his ruined credit if detected in a fraudulent practice; but what harm does it do a small grocer, who has customers in a single street only, if frauds are proved against him?
The background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings.
These three different forms of cottage building are found all over Manchester and throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire, often mixed up together, but usually separate enough to indicate the relative age of parts of towns.
Guardian, June 26, Ashton Sessions.– Fourteen dealers and farmers fined two shillings and sixpence to one pound.
Such are the various working-people's quarters of Manchester as I had occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. Everywhere heaps of débris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilised to live in such a district. But all this is nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the same time.
Enjoyment the most absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more innocent pleasures of sense can supply to man's craving, brought in close contact with the most unmitigated misery! These frauds are naturally not restricted to articles of food, though I could mention a dozen more, the villainy of mixing gypsum or chalk with flour among them.
As with clothing, so with food. and badly drained, containing from eight to twenty houses each, the houses being built against some other tenement and the end of the courts being pretty constantly occupied by ashpits, etc., the filth of which would defy description. They wear, as Thomas Carlyle says, [14]
"a suit of tatters, the getting on or off which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar."
The Irish have introduced, too, the custom, previously unknown in England, of going barefoot.
The higher or western districts are clean for so large a town, but the lower parts contiguous to the river and its becks or rivulets are dirty, confined, and, in themselves, sufficient to shorten life, especially infant life; add to this the disgusting state of the lower parts of the town about Kirk-gate. Let us take Dublin first, a city the approach to which from the sea is as charming as that of London is imposing.
As a result of this, the city was laid out to keep the lower ranked individuals from mixing with the sophisticated classes.
The residences and few shops of the working class individuals are found in areas nearer to the warehouses and factories. The poorest workers are forced to use still another device to get together the things they need with their few pence.
"This is truly horrible! But the poor, the working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are important, who must buy many things with little money, who cannot afford to inquire too closely into the quality of their purchases, and cannot do so in any case because they have had no opportunity of cultivating their taste – to their share fall all the adulterated, poisoned provisions.