The morality of slums (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has become fashionable of late to look back with a certain nostalgia to an age of "Victorian values". In fact, it was an age of often heartless cruelty and indifference. When it did not patronise the poor with a sickly sentimentality, it abandoned them to the cold calculus of market forces.

Underlying these attitudes there is a recurring theme: the sense of apprehension at the prospect of social disorder. Indeed, change was. to a great extent, induced by the need to evolve more effective strategies to defuse that threat as old solutions proved increasingly ineffective.

Before 1850 the threat of social disorder appeared to centre on the industrial north, not metropolitan London. The Industrial Revolution had given rise to large-scale factory production and the very methods of combination that industrialisation had promoted served in a sense to make the working class more amenable to control. It created disciplined structures through which conflict could be mediated at the same time as it enabled workers to mitigate some of the harsher consequences of industrialisation by means of mutual aid.

But just as the industrialised north seemed to project a more subdued image, so the Metropolis itself began to take on a more threatening prospect. The concern to which this gave rise needs to be set in the context of mid-Victorian optimism about the inexorable march of progress which coloured contemporary perceptions of poverty. It came to be seen as a residual feature of a bygone age. The poor, it was believed, owed their poverty to the subjective defects in their personality, rather than the structural inadequacies of the market economy. The solution to poverty, therefore, was to socialise the poor into an appropriate morality that emphasised thrift and hard work.

It was. therefore, with mounting alarm that the Victorian ruling class viewed what appeared to be a large and growing number of the underprivileged — especially the "casual poor" — slipping beyond its control. How had this situation come about?

Prior to the Industrial Revolution London contained a wide range of handicraft industries producing high value consumer goods. In addition, there was a significant semi-processing and capital goods sector. Relatively crude and costly methods of transportation ensured that proximity to the market was a vital factor and London was favoured precisely because it was such a sizeable market. As well as that it was a major port and seat of government.

The Industrial Revolution significantly altered the economic base of London. Firstly, it greatly reduced its attraction as a centre for semi-processing and capital goods production. Its distance from sources of coal and iron put it at a competitive disadvantage because of the cost of transporting these materials. In addition, London suffered from an acute shortage of space — and thus, high land values — which inhibited the growth of large-scale steam-powered factory production.

Secondly, London's role as an administrative. commercial and trading centre was considerably enhanced by the Industrial Revolution. The construction of an elaborate railway network radiating outward from the city sucked in people and products in ever greater quantities, magnifying London's importance as a market at the same time as it facilitated the relocation of low-value bulk production industries away from the city. The acquisition of colonies abroad emphasised the role of London as a port through which manufactures were exported and raw materials were imported.

Casual labour

It is against this background that the problem of casual labour in London emerged. Casual labour is closely associated with irregularity of production, with seasonality.

One way in which seasonality is manifested is in variation in demand for certain products and demand for consumer goods is inherently more volatile than that for capital goods. This poses a dilemma for the manufacturers. Production can be maintained at a steady pace but this would entail some stockpiling. Alternatively, production can be closely tailored to meet demand by reducing capital costs to a minimum and organising output on the basis of shorter production runs.

By and large, it was this latter option that London manufacturers were forced to accept. Consumer goods industries that were able to remain in London, despite intensive competition for space, were nevertheless prevented by that very competition from introducing large-scale factory-based methods of production, and the result was a particular method of production known as "sweating".

The substitution of skilled labour by sweated labour had the advantage for manufacturers of reducing labour costs. Moreover, the invention of relatively cheap hand-driven technology such as the sewing machine removed the need to employ skilled labour. Production could be concentrated in small workshops employing casual labour, thus reducing rental overheads as well. In the case of some industries, namely the clothing industry, this process was taken a stage further with work being carried out on a contract basis from the homes of the casually employed.

Another way in which seasonality manifested itself was in variation in supply. This was mainly a climatic phenomenon. Harsh winters, for example, could severely disrupt the activities of the port and the delivery of such commodities as grain and Baltic timber. This problem was largely overcome by the construction of steamships from the 1880s onwards. The building trade was also affected. By slowing down or bringing to a complete standstill all building work, bad weather not only aggravated the housing problem but caused extra distress in the form of unemployment.

The general increase in unemployment during the winter months, in conjunction with the inevitable rise in the price of fuel and foodstuffs, sharply intensified the plight of the poor. Moreover, superimposed on these annual variations was the more long-term cyclical pattern of trade itself affecting the wider economy. When a trade slump coincided with a bad winter the consequences could be catastrophic. Such a coincidence usually occasioned serious unrest, the most dramatic example of this being the 1886 Riot.

To sum up. the proportion of the workforce casually employed in Victorian London was substantial and this can be largely attributed to the fact that so much of London's economic base was subject to seasonal factors. Seasonality necessitated a large reserve army of workers which greatly undermined the bargaining position of the casually employed. Though poverty was by no means confined to casual labour, casual labour, without doubt, represented the sharp edge of poverty.

Most mid-Victorian social commentators, however, would not have concurred with such an analysis. Conventional belief affirmed, as has been stated, that poverty was simply the outward manifestation of certain moral failings. Yet such failings were themselves seen as the product of a bad environment. Above all. it was the environment of the slum that insidiously sapped the moral strength of an individual.

Victorian slums

Slum conditions existed in many parts of Victorian London. Some were reputedly the haunts of the "dangerous classes", the criminal elements in society. Law enforcement in most of these areas was minimal. To a large extent they existed as isolated islands beyond the reach of the authorities, seedbeds of vice that affronted the stern display of public morality. It was for these reasons that they were regarded as a social threat, symbolically reinforced by the festering, insanitary conditions that encouraged the spread of disease. That threat invited resolute action in the form of street clearances. Yet no sooner had a slum been pulled down than another seemed to materialise in the vicinity. It was obvious that the problem was not being solved but merely displaced from one area to another.

Casual labour did not encourage geographical mobility. Workers had to be constantly on the look-out for work which, in turn, depended on an intimate knowledge of the vicinity. Also, low and irregular wages ensured that the only mode of transport available to the casual poor was walking. This in itself removed the possibility of commuting from the suburbs. Home work, mainly by married women, put them at the mercy of contractors and compelled them to remain in the locality at the same time as it denied them the opportunity to search for work elsewhere. The system of credit used also restricted geographical mobility. It was common practice for goods to be purchased on credit during the winter and the arrears to be paid off in the more prosperous summer months. However, this arrangement depended on a degree of personal trust which meant being known in the area. Moreover, in such areas there was to be found a strong working-class culture that made for a sense of cohesion in the face of otherwise unendurable surroundings. This met with the strong disapproval of the Victorian authorities: the mores of the working class often clashed with the need for a disciplined workforce.

Working class education

This conflict was particularly apparent in the area of education. There was, before the advent of state schools and co-existing with state-aided church schools, an extensive underground network of tiny cottage schools autonomously run by the working class for the education of children. Even a kitchen might serve as a classroom and instruction was highly informal. Victorian commentators, however, were appalled by this apparent laxity. They were also utterly bemused by the fact that parents preferred by and large to send their children to such schools rather than to the local church school which charged a comparable fee.

Yet this incomprehension stemmed from an ideological perspective that refused to acknowledge the realities the working class had to contend with. Thus one of the reasons working people chose to send their children to a cottage school was the flexibility it offered. It was attuned to the rhythm of life among the casual poor.

At the beginning of the Victorian era. central London was still largely residential in character. Suburbanisation had begun in the previous century but was confined to a wealthy elite, the "carriage folk". The growth of London in the course of the nineteenth century. created and sharply intensified a central contradiction.

On the one hand, that growth both stimulated. and was stimulated by. the outward expansion of certain activities that necessitated the conversion of residential land for other purposes. On the other, the nature of their employment and the lack of access to affordable and reliable transport from the suburbs, exerted a centripetal force on casual workers — and even most skilled workers at the time — compelling them to remain within the central area. The result was a dramatic rise in levels of overcrowding right up to and beyond the 1880s when cheaper forms of mass transport became available, facilitating a spurt of working class suburbanisation.

Several factors were responsible for the demolition of housing and the resultant overcrowding. in the central area. One of these were street clearances. Another was the construction of the railway network. Likewise, the extension of the docks, particularly before 1850, was responsible for the displacement of many thousands of workers. So too was the construction of offices and workshops.

Class divisions

All these factors — street clearances, the development of the docks and the railways and the construction of offices and workshops — indicative of London's changing economic base, profoundly altered the physical structure of the city. The pattern that emerged was an increasingly polarised one. Unlike the Georgian period when rich and poor often lived in the same locality, even the same building, class divisions to an ever greater extent coincided with geographical divisions. By the mid-Victorian period this process was virtually complete. Rich and poor lived in largely separate worlds cut off from one another by a no-man's land of commercial development.

This gave rise to growing disquiet among certain sections of the Victorian elite for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was felt that the quality of administration in the poorer districts was bound to deteriorate on account of the departure of the "professional classes" to the suburbs. This would result in a more lax application of the law particularly relating to the eradication of insanitary conditions.

Secondly, the segregation of the classes completely unsettled the delicate balance between Poor Law relief and charity. Under the Poor Law. each district had its own Poor Law union responsible for the relief of the poor in that district. But the displacement of the poor from the richer vestries lightened the rate burden there as it added to the burden on poorer vestries. Indeed, this provided a further incentive for vestries to embark on a programme of slum clearance. But such a state of affairs was effectively terminated by the Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867 which spread the burden of poor relief across the metropolis as a whole. Meanwhile there was a great increase in the flow of charity to the poorer districts to compensate for the additional rate burden they had to bear.

This in fact provided a third reason for the sense of disquiet. Such charity was distributed in a wholly haphazard fashion. This, according to its critics, made the system extremely vulnerable to abuse. The vast wealth of London exerted an irresistible attraction to vagrants from far and wide. The vagrant was seen as a social parasite, corrupted by a life on charity and able to manipulate. with the practised ease of a professional. the gullible giver of alms. He set a bad example to the "honest poor" and they would find it difficult not to follow that example. Whatever other motives there may have been for charity it is clear that a major consideration was to defuse unrest. The segregation of the rich and poor was perceived by the former as a loss of control over the latter. Indiscriminate charity failed to restore this control because it depersonalised the act of giving.

Philanthropy of 5 per cent

It was precisely in order to systematise charitable relief, to circumvent the alleged machinations of the "clever pauper", that the Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity was founded in 1869 — otherwise known as the Charity Organisation Society (COS). Together with the new Metropolitan-wide Poor Law Board these bodies represented a much more centralised approach to the relief of the poor, an approach foisted on social reformers by the geographical separation of the classes. By putting charity on a "sound basis", it was hoped that the poor would come to gratefully accept their "dependence" on the rich. It was a hope that hardly squared with another Victorian ideology entertained — that workers should raise themselves up by their own bootstraps, become as bourgeois as the bourgeoisie itself.

Alongside such efforts to halt the "demoralisation of the poor", various attempts were made to improve the housing conditions they suffered.The "philanthropy at five per cent" movement represented by organisations such as the Peabody Trust was one such attempt. It led to the construction of "Model Dwellings" which were intended to house a substantial number of the poor. In fact, it failed miserably in this. By 1873. a mere 27,000 had been housed in these Model Dwellings. More importantly those who were housed were not the casual poor but the better off sections of the working class. Construction costs and the need to maintain a margin of profit, determined the level of rent which proved way beyond what the casual poor could afford.

Moreover, regulations laid down by the Peabody Trust such as an obligation on tenants to keep up with their payments or face eviction, made no allowance for the economic circumstances of the casual poor. In addition, at a time when occupancy rates were steadily rising throughout the poorer districts of London, residents were not permitted to take in lodgers — a traditional working class method of supplementing income.

Another method by which it was hoped to ameliorate the housing conditions of the poor was sanitary legislation. One example of this was the 1868 Torrens Act which enabled a vestry, on the advice of a medical officer. to declare a house unfit and order its owner to carry out the necessary repairs or have it demolished. In fact many vestries preferred by and large not to exercise such powers. Indeed, had they done so this would have aggravated housing conditions considerably by increasing local overcrowding in the remaining households.

Another piece of legislation, the 1875 Cross Act, also attempted to tackle the problem of housing. However the Act was based on the assumption that skilled workers would vacate the inner areas and move to the suburbs while the casual poor would take their place — the "levelling up theory". In the event the hopes of the reformers proved premature. Commuting from the periphery was still beyond the reach of most artisans. Of those who did relocate, many encountered intractable difficulties that forced them to return: the lack of work for spouses, unreliable trains and higher food prices. This highlighted another and much more disturbing development in the eyes of the Victorian ruling class: the gradual blurring of distinctions between skilled artisans and the casual poor.

Henry Mayhew, writing in the 1850s. observed that "in passing from the skilled operative of the West-end to the unskilled workman of the Eastern quarter of London, the moral and intellectual change is so great that it seems as if we were in a new land and among another race". It was the perception of such differences that helped to ease the passing of the 1867 Reform Bill amid the tensions of the 1860s whereby the franchise was extended to skilled workers in the towns. This was seen to provide a bulwark against social chaos. And in the 1870s it seemed as if the problem of the casual poor had been lessened by the beneficial influences of philanthropy and private enterprise.

By the 1880s. however, it was becoming apparent that something had gone badly wrong. The problem of the casual poor had not disappeared. On the contrary, as a Royal Commission on Housing revealed, it was much larger than most had expected and was steadily getting worse. Charles Booth, sceptical at first of the claims of Hyndman, the SDF leader, of widespread poverty, accepted his challenge to investigate the matter for himself and found that this was indeed the case.

Even more alarmingly, the artisans were being increasingly subjected to the same insanitary overcrowded conditions with which the casual poor had to contend, which had had such a "demoralising effect upon their character". Moreover, with the onset of a trade slump, artisans too were being made unemployed in increasing numbers, were being pushed downwards into the ranks of the casual poor. As an employer remarked to a COS Committee on Exceptional Distress: "We have always found as to the artisan, that if he happens to be out of work for three months, he is never the same man again. He becomes demoralised".

Changing perceptions

The 1880s. however, was more than just a decade scarred by economic crisis. It was a period of structural readjustment in ruling class ideology driven by the need to avert "revolution". It was a period when the increasing challenge of "collectivist" ideas could only be met by evolving a more collectivist approach to social problems, by moving away from the free market doctrines of the mid-Victorian period towards state welfare. The economic crisis of the 1880s passed and in the 1890s the tempo of working class suburbanisation began to quicken. Improved methods of mass transportation and subsidised travel began to have an effect, gradually relieving the population pressures on the inner areas.

But the perception of the casual poor also changed. Urban existence had long been seen as inimical to health and morals while the enfeeblement of the urban poor was contrasted with the robustness of the agricultural labourer. Now agricultural depression threatened to depopulate the countryside and flood the towns with yet more of the nation's poor. The theory of the "survival of the fittest" which seemed to legitimise the weeding out of the less fortunate, was now suspended by the advances in medical science and even more importantly by the improvement in sanitary conditions about which the "privileged classes" had professed such concern. The fear of national “degeneration" to which this gave rise increasingly informed the thoughts of politicians and economists against a background of Britain's declining industrial supremacy. Such a fear came to provide a rationalisation for a more statist approach to the solution of social problems, an approach that the very development of capitalism had made functionally imperative.

In Victorian London the perception of the casual poor was systematically distorted by an ideology that took little account of their needs in order to justify the need for them as cheap labour. In modern London, the "casual poor" may not be as proportionately significant as a century ago. But poverty is relative and it takes different forms. Its reality cannot be adequately encompassed by statistics or sanitised by the rhetorical claim that we have never had it so good.

Robin Cox