[The following passage comes from M.W. Flynn's Edwin Chadwick, 7, 17-18 — George P. Landow]
ome
historians have considered trends in real income, because these are the only
measurable criteria, as though they are the only valid ones. But, in terms of
life itself, it really mattered little how a labourer's wage varied between,
say, 12s and 15s a week, if a dwelling-house
with water supply, sewers and sanitation, in paved and drained streets, none
capable, in other words, of safeguarding a normal span of human life, could
not be afforded on any income under, say, 30s a week. Other historians have
studied housing in terms of bricks and mortar per acre, or people per house,
as though a few cubic feet more or less made all the difference. The quality
and duration of life are social variables which have always depended upon an
almost infinite range of economic and social factors, the most important of
which in modern times are levels of real income, the degree of adulteration
of food, the quantity and quality of housing, sanitation, paving, sewerage,
water supply, open spaces, working conditions, and the public provision of the
basic social services, of which education stands at the head of the list. Only
some of these factors are capable of statistical measurement.
. . . If the decline of the death rate had continued after the first decade of the nineteenth century, it is just possible that existing institutions and existing policies might have been able to cope with the social problems of urban development. But the earlier reduction of mortality was itself the means of releasing upon the hapless cities a flood of immigrants from the surrounding countryside which inflated the subsequent difficulties beyond all hope of solution under existing regimes. However, so inured were the men of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the toll of disease, to the shortness of the span of urban human life, that they were unlikely to be moved by only a slight rise in the death rate, which, in any case, was not easily detectable in the short-run fluctuations produced by epidemics.
Links to Related Material
- What Daily Life is Life for Unskilled Workers and Their Families
- Five Alternating Periods of Want and Comparative Plenty in the Labourer’s Life
Last modified 26 September 2002