As late as 1854 a gentleman who commenced a religious service in one of the largest cottages on his estate for the benefit of the dense population around him of miners, had to give up the good work, as he was threatened with a prosecution for the breach of the Conventicle Act. Churchyards in overcrowded districts were allowed to spread disease and death all around. The houses in which the poor were forced to herd were almost destitute of sewage drainage and water supply.
It was found that in the fourteen houses of which Wild Street, Drury Lane, for example, consisted, nearly one thousand persons found shelter, and that the very staircases were crowded nightly with poor wretches, to whom even the pestilential accommodation of the rooms was an unattainable luxury. It was said that more beggars were to be encountered in a walk from Westminster Abbey to Oxford Street than in a tour from London to Switzerland, whether by Paris or the Rhine. There were 80,000 in the common lodging-houses of the City, and no authority to see that decency and proper sanitary conditions were applied to any of them. Nor were the homes of the agricultural peasants much better.
When Lord Ashley became Earl of Shaftesbury, and took possession of the family estate, he writes: ‘Inspected a few cottages—filthy, close, indecent, unwholesome.’ All England was a whited sepulchre, full of dead men’s bones. But the climax of wickedness was only to be seen in a low London lodging-house; let us enter one.
Mint Street, Borough, was better known than trusted some years not very long ago. It was a nasty place to go down of a night, especially if you happened to be the owner of a watch or had a sovereign or two in your pocket, nor did the police much care to explore its mysteries. Somehow or other the place bore a bad name, and has ever done so since the days of Jonathan Wild and his merry men, who at one time are reported to have resided there. In its low lodging-houses were to be found the very scum of the earth—the virtuous and deserving poor, as they would have us believe they are, always in search of employment, which they unfortunately never find—who are dishonest, and lazy, and improvident, and drunken, and dissolute, very much against their own inclination, and to their own intense disgust—the victims of the wicked landlord or wickeder capitalist. They live in the lodging-houses of the district, which are generally pretty full, at the rate of fourpence a night, except when the hop-picking is on, when away the inmates tramp by the hundred down to the pleasant hop-gardens of Kent, or Sussex, or Hampshire, carrying with them all the filth and squalor of the town, tainting the air and polluting the fair face of Nature as they pass along. It is true that now the city missionary follows in their steps, otherwise it would be a bad look-out indeed.