Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE LABOURING POORgcrating. Nevertheless, the sudden upsurge of systematic temperanceagitations, both of a middle and working class character, in England,Ireland and Germany around 1840, shows that the worry aboutdemoralization was neither academic nor confined to any single class.Its immediate success was shortlived, but for the rest of the centurythe hostility to hard liquor remained something which both enlightenedemployers and labour movements had in common.*But of course the contemporaries who deplored the demoralizationof the new urban and industrialized poor were not exaggerating.Everything combined to maximize it. Towns and industrial areas grewrapidly, without plan or supervision, and the most elementary servicesof city life utterly failed to keep pace with it: street-cleaning, watersupply,sanitation, not to mention working-class housing.* The mostobvious consequence of this urban deterioration was the re-appearanceof mass epidemics of contagious (mainly waterborne) disease, notablyof the cholera, which reconquered Europe from 1831 and swept thecontinent from Marseilles to St Petersburg in 1832 and again later.To take a single example: typhus in Glasgow 'did not arrest attentionby any epidemic prevalence until 1818'. 7 Thereafter it increased.There were two major epidemics (typhus and cholera) in the city inthe 1830s, three (typhus, cholera and relapsing fever) in the 1840s,two in the first half of the 1850s, until urban improvement caught upwith a generation of neglect. The terrible effects of this neglect were allthe greater, because the middle and ruling-classes did not feel it.Urban development in our period was a gigantic process of classsegregation, which pushed the new labouring poor into great morassesof misery outside the centres of government and business and the newlyspecialized residential areas of the bourgeoisie. The almost universalEuropean division into a 'good' west end and a 'poor' east end of largecities developed in this period.f And what social institutions except thetavern and perhaps the chapel were provided in these new labourers'agglomerations except by the labourers' own initiative? Only after1848, when the new epidemics sprung from the slums began to kill therich also, and the desperate masses who grew up in them had frightened* This is not true of hostility to beer, wine or other drinks forming part of men's habitualeveryday diet. This was largely confined to Anglo-Saxon protestant sectarians.t 'The circumstances which oblige the workers to move out of the centre of Paris havegenerally, it is pointed out, had deplorable effects on their behaviour and morality. In theold days they used to live on the higher floors of buildings whose lower floorswere occupiedby businessmen and other members of the relatively comfortable classes. A sort of solidaritygrew up between the tenants of a single building. Neighbours helped each other in littleways. When sick or unemployed the workers might find much assistance within the house,while on the other hand a sort of feeling of human respect imbued working-class habits witha certain regularity.' The complacency is that of the Chamber of Commerce and the PolicePrefecture from whose Report this is quoted; but the novelty of segregation is well broughtout.'203