Thirty years ago Raphael Samuel, in a famous essay on migrants and wayfarers, evoked the life of the army of ‘comers and goers’ who were a crucial part of the labour supply of nineteenth-century cities and so predominant in their social life. [Raphael Samuel ‘Comers and Goers’ in H. J. ...
(Show more)Thirty years ago Raphael Samuel, in a famous essay on migrants and wayfarers, evoked the life of the army of ‘comers and goers’ who were a crucial part of the labour supply of nineteenth-century cities and so predominant in their social life. [Raphael Samuel ‘Comers and Goers’ in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (Eds) The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1973) Volume 1, 123-160] Yet, implied Samuel, ‘the migrating classes’ left few memorials to their anonymous, often furtive, existence beneath the arches, in night-shelters, in free-dormitories, and most of all in countless common lodging-houses. They fell into several categories and the published census tabulations make it impossible to distinguish the numbers lodging, with or without payment, by the night from the even great army of lodgers in rented (or sub-let) rooms in regular dwellings. In Britain the size and significance of these groups of migrants varied considerably from town to town; some places had economies which depended heavily on mobile day labourers, not least those which employed thousands of Irish immigrants and their children. Whatever their numbers they presented a challenge to the emerging regulators of public health.
This paper has three parts. First, I will attempt some summary of the evidence as to the number of lodgers of various kinds in British cities in the mid-nineteenth century. Secondly, I will discuss the emergence of lodging house regulation and especially how and why it was regarded as a significant battle in the campaign for better public health. Thirdly, I will discuss the case of Liverpool where in 1847 the Medical Officer, supported by a powerful Health Committee, established an elaborate system of licensing and regulation of lodging-houses. In 1861 Liverpool had over 700 licensed lodging houses. Some comparisons will be drawn with other cities, notably Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester. The first two parts will be necessarily briefer than the third. Among the questions to be addressed are the following. Were the differences in the approach to lodging-houses between cities more significant than the general moral climate of the times in determining the balance between environmental regulation for demonstrable sanitary benefits and policing an underclass for social or moral purposes? Is there any evidence (in epidemiological or mortality data) that lodging-house regulation had any significant health benefits?
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