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History of English Literature

Notes are all stopped up at their outlet; and, in many parts of their course also, if there were an outlet, or
if it could be said that they had any course at all. Two or three yards of clay pipe “drain” each house
into the open cesspool under its back windows, when it does not happen that the house is so built
as to overhang it.
In winter time every block becomes now and then an island, and you may hear a sick man, in an
upper room, complain of water trickling down over his bed. Then the flood cleans the ditches,
lifting all their filth into itself, and spreading it over the land. No wonder that the stench of the
marsh in Hallsville and Canning Town of nights is horrible”.

Disease

“Ague [a form of malaria] is one of the most prevalent diseases of the district: fever abounds. When
an epidemic comes into the place, it becomes serious in its form, and stays for months. Disease
comes upon human bodies saturated with the influences of such air as this breathed day and night,
as a spark upon touchwood. A case or two of small-pox caused, in spite of vaccination, an epidemic
of confluent small-pox, which remained three or four months upon the spot”.

Child of the Docks
Canning Town is the child of the Victoria Docks. The condition of this place and of its neighbour
prevents the steadier class of mechanics from residing in it. They go from their work to Stratford
or to Plaistow.
Many select such a dwelling-place because they are already debased below the point of enmity to
filth; poorer labourers live there, because they cannot afford to go further, and there become
debased. The Dock Company is surely, to a very great extent, answerable for the condition of the
town they are creating”.

Life and Labour of the London Poor
Not all writing on the slums was as sensationalist as Mearns’s. The first volume of Life and Labour of
the London Poor, Charles Booth’s 17-volume study, appeared in 1892.
Booth’s study was the first to examine the problems of poverty in general rather than by looking at
specific individual harrowing cases as Mearns had done.

Notes Booth divided the poor into different categories depending on earnings and occupation.
Booth’s surveys caused a storm in liberal circles. His scientific cold approach left the public in no
doubt about the degradation that existed in the East End. In one part of the survey he described a
typical dock labourer’s family, in the following words.

Historical Summary

The period we are considering begins in the latter half of the reign of George III and ends with the
accession of .Victoria in 1837. When on a foggy morning in November, 1783 King George entered
the House of Lords and in a trembling voice recognized the independence of the United States of
America, he unconsciously proclaimed the triumph of that free government by free men which
had been the ideal of English Literature for more than a thousand years: though it was not till 1832.
When the Reform Bill became the law of the land, that England herself learned the lesson taught
her by America, and became the democracy of which her writers had always dreamed.

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