Part 18

In my two former Reports, I have addressed you at length on those conditions relative to the dwellings and social habits of the poor which made the enactments of this clause indispensable; and I look forward to its operation with a sanguine belief that it may be rendered one of the most important boons ever conferred on the labouring classes of the community.

I subjoin to my Report the schedule which I would suggest for the registration of lodging-houses, and which (as you will observe) requires detailed information as to every sanitary particular of the dwelling.[70] I would recommend that in every case, where registration is made, the owner’s specification of these particulars should be accompanied by a written certificate from your Inspector; testifying (in some such form as that annexed to the schedule in my Appendix) first, to the accuracy of the statement, and, secondly, to the general condition of the house.

[70] Vide page 210.

With respect to the rules, which, under authority of this clause, you may find it requisite to lay down for better regulating the residences of the poor,--the conditions for which you have to legislate are so various and complicated, that no formula will apply universally; and you will often be called on to adapt special rules to particular cases as they come before you. I can therefore only venture at present to offer you general suggestions on the subject.

You will find that the houses in which your interference is required fall into three cases, characterised as follows:--(1) Where the house is let in several independent holdings (often as many holdings as rooms) each occupied by a single family and no more, and paid for at a rent not exceeding 3s. 6d. _per_ week;--(2) Where the house is thus let in several independent holdings, and where the renter of each or any portion, admits other persons to share his holding with him, on their payment to him of a sub-rent _per_ week or _per_ night, so that a room comes to be occupied by more than one family at a time;--(3) Where the entire house, or all such part as is let in lodgings is under the direct management of a single resident proprietor or keeper, where the lodgings are let at . . . . _per_ night, and where many persons not belonging to one single family are lodged together in some single room, or in various single rooms of the house.

Of the first arrangement, where a single room is the residence of a single family, you have innumerable illustrations in the City; as, for instance in the large houses of Windsor-street (to which I have recently drawn your attention) where in one house there are sixteen such holdings:--of the second arrangement--the most abominable and brutalising which can be conceived, you have sufficient illustrations in Plumtree-court:--of the third--comparatively little known in the City, there are instances in Field-lane.

In respect of the first class of houses, I should be disposed to look upon each holding as the house of its occupier, and not to interfere within his threshold, except on the ground of some commanding necessity. I would require only that the general arrangements of the house should be adapted to the number of its holdings; that, for instance, numerous families should not be left competing for the use of a single privy, but that such accommodation should be provided in strict proportion to the requirements of the inmates; that every room should be efficiently ventilated; that water should be supplied to the highest occupied part of the house, and a water-tap and sink furnished on every floor; that the dust and refuse of the house should be removed at least once daily.

In dealing with the worst specimens of this class, it may be requisite to go further than I have here intimated; and it appears to me that for this purpose your Hon. Court must address your regulations not to the tenant, but to the landlord. He, I apprehend, must be held responsible for the decent and wholesome condition of his property, and for such conduct of his tenants as will maintain that condition.

Seeing the punctuality with which weekly visitation is made for the collection of rents in these wretched dwellings, it would not be unreasonable, I think, to insist on some such regulation as the following:--The owner of the house, or his agent, or collector, shall visit each room on an appointed day, at least once weekly, between the hours of eleven and three; he shall see that the floor and other woodwork of the room have been properly washed on that day, that the room be free from all dirt, rubbish, or offensive smell, that no objectionable trade be pursued in it, and that it be generally in good and proper repair; he shall see that the premises generally[71] be in a clean and wholesome condition, that water be sufficiently supplied, and that the dustman’s work be regularly performed; and failing either of the two latter conditions, he shall forthwith lay complaint thereof before your Commission; in case of any inmate suffering from cholera, small-pox, erysipelas, or any kind of fever, the owner, or his agent or collector, shall immediately give notice of such illness to the Inspector of his district; and at the meeting of the Commission next after such notice, he shall, if required, attend your Court, to receive any order which you may issue for reducing the number of his lodgers, or for improving the condition of his house, or for employing any disinfectant process; and he shall fulfil any such order within the time therein specified.

[71] Namely--passages, staircases, area, cellar, yard, privy, &c., and if common privies and urinals exist, he shall provide for the cleansing of these, where requisite, at least once daily.

In a proceeding so experimental as the present, I cannot assure you of infallible means for meeting every evil contingency; but it seems to me that a regulation having the general tendency here indicated, enforced by moderate penalties, would work an important revolution in the economy of dwellings affected by its operation, would render it indispensable to the landlord of such holdings to promote cleanly and decent habits among his tenants--even to obtain security for their good behaviour, and it would make it difficult or impossible for persons of opposite habits to obtain holdings under a landlord who would be virtually punishable for their misconduct.

Such a regulation would apply, as I have said, to the lowest and filthiest specimens of the first class of lodging-houses; for, to the large majority of that class less stringent rules would suffice; and it would apply most usefully to the second class of lodging-houses--those in which the single rooms of a house are severally occupied by more than one family. So great are the physical and moral evils attending this indiscriminate admixture of adult persons of both sexes (as I have submitted to you in my former reports), that I entertain no doubts of the necessity for prohibiting it in the most absolute manner. A regulation to the following effect would, probably, fulfil the purpose contemplated by the law, and would disperse these loathsome heaps of disease, destitution, and profligacy: viz.--There shall not be lodged in a sleeping-room, at any one time, more than two persons over fourteen years of age, if of different sexes; nor more than[72] ---- such persons, if they be all of one sex.

[72] This number would be proportioned to the cubical contents of the room, and its facilities for ventilation, of which mention would be made in the registration-schedule of the house.

This order--in addition to its wholesome influence on the second class of lodging-houses, would apply beneficially to the third class; and, in further relation to the latter, there would probably be required various minor regulations with respect to facilities for washing, lighting, ventilation and the like, which admit of being fixed in detail, only as each particular case comes under your notice, with its deficiencies recorded in the schedule of its registration.

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11. In addition to this power of regulating lodging-houses, a further authority has been conceded you by the Legislature, for the _amendment or removal of houses presenting aggravated structural faults_. Wherever your Officer of Health may certify to you that any house or building is permanently unwholesome and unfit for human habitation, you are empowered to require of the owner (or, in his neglect, yourselves to undertake) the execution of whatever works may be requisite for rendering the house habitable with security to life.

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Finally,--under your former Act you were authorised, and indeed _required, to appoint Inspectors of Nuisances_, whose duties were to consist in the following particulars:--They were to superintend and enforce the due execution of all duties to be performed by the scavengers; to report to your Commission all breaches of your rules and regulations; to point out the existence of nuisances; to record whatever complaints might arise in relation to the supply of water, or in relation to any infraction, either of the Act, or of any of the regulations made by you under its authority for the preservation of order and cleanliness and for the suppression of nuisances.

Hitherto your Hon. Court has deemed it sufficient compliance with the terms of the Act, to engraft the functions above described on the office of your previously appointed Inspectors of Pavements; and these Officers have endeavoured very diligently to fulfil the multifarious obligations thus imposed on them. During the past year it has become obvious to me that this arrangement of their duties is inconvenient, and that the occupation of their time as Inspectors of Pavements prevents them devoting the requisite number of hours to the other important duties.

I need hardly add, for the information of your Hon. Court, that the immense increase of sanitary business implied in your new Act (an increase probably equivalent to doubling or trebling the former amount) renders a continuance of the former arrangement still less possible than heretofore; the important functions assigned to your Inspectors of Nuisances will now require to be discharged, under the superintendence of your Officer of Health, with uninterrupted assiduity and vigilance; and I would therefore take the liberty of begging your Hon. Court to refer this subject to the consideration of your Committee, together with some other points relative to the administration of your new powers.[73]

[73] Two additional Inspectors came into work, under appointment of the Commission, at Christmas, 1853. See last Annual Report.--J. S., 1854.

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Here, gentlemen, terminates my statement of the powers now vested in you for the maintenance of the public health. Authority so complete for this noble purpose has never before been delegated to any municipal body in the country. In exercising the means of such wide beneficence, your Hon. Court will be discharging duties of immeasurable importance to the public welfare; and those who have the honour and responsibility of giving you professional advice will have a task of more than ordinary difficulty.

It is easy to foresee the numerous obstacles which interested persons will set before you to delay the accomplishment of your great task. Sometimes technical objections will be raised to your proceedings: sometimes vexatious delays and evasions will occur in the fulfilment of your injunctions.

When your orders are addressed to some owner of objectionable property--of some property which is a constant source of nuisance, or disease, or death; when you would force one person to refrain from tainting the general atmosphere with results of an offensive occupation; when you would oblige another to see that his tenantry are better housed than cattle, and that, while he takes rent for lodging, he shall not give fever as the equivalent;--amid these proceedings, you will be reminded of the ‘rights of property,’ and of ‘an Englishman’s inviolable claim to do as he will with his own.’

Permit me, gentlemen, to remind you that your law makes full recognition of these principles, and that the cases in which sophistical appeal will oftenest be made to them, are exactly those which are most completely condemned by a full and fair application of the principles adverted to. With private affairs you interfere, only when they become of public import; with private liberty, only when it becomes a public encroachment. The factory chimney that eclipses the light of heaven with unbroken clouds of smoke, the melting-house that nauseates an entire parish, the slaughter-house that forms round itself a circle of dangerous disease--these surely are not private, but public affairs. And how much more justly may the neighbour appeal to you against each such nuisance, as an interference with his privacy; against the smoke, the stink, the fever, that bursts through each inlet of his dwelling, intrudes on him at every hour, disturbs the enjoyment and shortens the duration of his life. And for the rights of property--they are not only pecuniary. Life, too, is a great property; and your Act asserts its rights. The landlord of some overthronged lodging-house complains, that to reduce the numbers of his tenantry, to lay on water, to erect privies, or to execute some other indispensable sanitary work, would diminish his rental: in the spirit of your Act, it is held a sufficient reply, that human life is at stake, and that a landlord, in his dealings with the ignorant and indefensive poor, cannot be suffered to estimate them at the value of cattle, to associate them in worse than bestial habits, or let to them for hire, at however moderate a rent, the certain occasions of suffering and death.

And indeed, gentlemen, the mere pecuniary import of life thus squandered is not inconsiderable. The costs of medical attendance on these superfluities of disease are heavy items of parochial expenditure: and although much of the undue mortality is of children, and consists in the premature extinction of life that hitherto has no market value--costing only the tears that are shed for it; yet there likewise occur among your preventable deaths, very many cases in which adult life is sacrificed, with all its strength and utility; and where, besides the wasted capital which that loss implies, there often remains for the district which has poisoned the man an entailment of orphanage and widowhood.

Nor, again, can it be questioned, that year by year, as general education advances, the sanitary condition of a district will be an important element in determining the value of its property. In engaging houses, men will not only look to rent, and to rates on rent; they will look also to rates on life, and will doubt the cheapness of a town residence, however small in rental, where their lease of life must be shortened from its intended duration, and form part of an average mortality two-thirds higher than in the suburbs. It is an instinct in this direction, or perhaps the guidance of knowledge, that within late years has given so much extension to suburban residence, and has carried numbers of the wealthier inhabitants of the City to dwell so far from their places of daily business: and the same instinct or knowledge yearly acts more towards the less affluent classes, urging them to fly as far as possible beyond the smoke and crowding and unwholesome vapours of the metropolis. I entertain great hope and little doubt, that, within a few years, the working classes will have organised for themselves extensive means of suburban residence; that vast barracks of model-houses, rising on healthier soil and amid purer atmosphere, will receive hundreds of thousands of inmates from those classes of society which now throng the courts and alleys of the metropolis; and that by this spontaneous emigration, in so far as it may affect the City, great assistance will be given to those endeavours which will be made, under authority of your Act, to thin the court population of the City, and to diminish the too dense array of houses inhabited by the poor.

As I look to the poor-rates of the City of London, as well as to the other circumstances just adverted to, I feel the deepest conviction that _property_, no less than _life_, is interested in the progress of sanitary reform: and once again, most earnestly, I beg leave to congratulate your Hon. Court on the acquisition of powers, conferring on you the inestimable privilege of doing so much good for those whom you represent, and for the often unrepresented poor; of relieving so much suffering; of prolonging so much life.

That much improvement remains to be accomplished within your province, is a certainty which I have endeavoured here, as on former occasions, plainly to set before you.

But I cannot close my Report without adverting to the fact, that both within and around the City, there are sanitary evils for which you are not responsible--evils beyond your control--powerful causes of diseases in hourly operation; and that these are so extensive in their agency, as to neutralise much of the good which it lies in your competence to effect.

The mere fact, that for the metropolis generally there is hitherto no sanitary law, such as you possess for your territory, is an evil to you. When, at the commencement of next year, you will be proceeding to suppress the several nuisances against which you are armed; when the various trades of the City will have ceased to send forth smoke or stink, you can raise no barrier against invasions from around; southward, you cannot exclude the unwholesome airs wafted from the river and from across it; nor on either side, east or west, the soot that showers down from innumerable shafts encircling you; nor northward, the odours that rise from the shambles of Clerkenwell.

And likewise within the City there will be remaining--out of your control, unremedied evils, the existence of which has long been denounced, and the removal long expected.

In 1849, with the cholera amidst us, great exertions were made, and greater promises. In that dreadful week, when two thousand victims of our metropolitan population fell beneath its poison; when every household, from hour to hour, trembled at the visible nearness of death; the public were scared out of indifference. If the visitation could have been bought away, at the expense of doubling all local rates in perpetuity, no doubt the sacrifice would have been made. Public opinion was kindled to overwhelm all opposition.

The metropolis was to be drained afresh; the outfall of sewerage was no longer to be beneath our windows; the river was to be embanked; its rising tide was no longer to make our sewers disgorge their poisonous contents into our streets and houses; dead bodies in their decay, were no more to desecrate the breathing-space of the living; water was no longer to be supplied--clumsily, insufficiently, and unwholesomely, at the discretion of private capitalists: all was to be amended.

For participation in these advantages, the City had to look beyond its own representatives, and to await the more comprehensive measures of Her Majesty’s Government.

Two years have elapsed, and none of the measures referred to has made visible progress. The water question remains unsettled; arrangements for extramural interment of the dead have been disconcerted at what seemed the moment of their completion; the river still receives the entire sewage of this immense metropolis, and still at each retreating tide, spreads amid the town, as heretofore, its many miles of fetid, malarious mud.

In justice it should indeed be remembered, that any one of the required amendments could only be the result of long preparatory labour, and that its organisation would often of necessity be the travail of some single mind, not insusceptible of fatigue. Particularly as respects the scheme (now understood to approach its maturity) for the complete drainage of the metropolis, it cannot be overlooked that very extensive surveys, superficial and subterranean, with innumerable drawings and specifications, were necessary to the construction of so comprehensive a plan.

But neither can it be disguised or disregarded, that meanwhile, in the absence of these sanitary works, there are dying needlessly and prematurely thousands of the population; that preventable death, hitherto unprevented, is proceeding at its accustomed pace; that children continue to perish at three or four times their due rate; that time, which carries us from one visitation of the great epidemic and obliterates the remembrance of our alarm, also, too probably, carries us towards the day of another outbreak: that typhus--our home-bred and daily visitant, rehearses the same warnings as heretofore, moving uniformly onward like the shadow on a dial, toward the hour when that Eastern pestilence may again be here.

Therefore, gentlemen, I have felt it my duty to represent to you that, in the promotion of those metropolitan works, the population of the City of London have an incalculable interest;--that the emancipation of human life from such fetters of disease as weigh on it, can never even approximate to completion within your City, while the saturated burial-grounds still continue to receive their annual multitudes of the dead, while the administration of the water-supply interposes an effectual hindrance to your most important functions, and while the river, contaminated and unembanked, diffuses injurious miasms through the whole extent of your jurisdiction. And I would further venture to urge on the consideration of your Hon. Court, that your legitimate influence with Her Majesty’s Government and with Parliament--your influence as trustees of the Public Health for so large a constituency, exerted in furtherance of those metropolitan reforms to which I have adverted--would be tending, not only to the general good, but directly and eminently to the sanitary advantage of the City of London.

I have the honour,

&c., &c.

_Proposed Schedule of specification for the Register of Lodging-houses._

House situate at No. __________

Name and Address of Owner _________

Number of Floors (including Cellars and Lofts) ____

„ Rooms „ „ ____

+-------+------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ | | No. | | | | | | | | on | Situation. |Height. |Length. |Breadth.|Windows.| | |door. | | | | | | | | +-------------+--------+--------+--------+ | |Account| |Floor, Aspect|ft. in.|ft. in.|ft. in.| | | +------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ | of | 1 | | | | | | | +------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ | Rooms | 2 | | | | | | | +------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ |separ- | 3 | | | | | | | +------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ |ately. | 4 | | | | | | | +------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ | | 5 | | | | | | | +------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+ | |6, &c.| | | | | | +-------+------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+