What were the living

conditions like for the poor

in the 19 century?
th
Take a look at this picture and write a sentence to
describe what you can see.
Learning Objectives:
• To learn about the living conditions of the
poor in the 19th Century.
•To examine a number of different sources
and reflect on what life must have been like
for our ancestors.
Go to Active page
 The
The new factories
were like magnets.
development Made small towns
overcrowded cities
of factories due to the knock on
effect.

Led to poor
conditions
As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, housing was
needed for more and more workers. Some landlords
seized the opportunity to exploit this situation. They
made their profits by cramming as many poorly-built
houses into as small a space as possible. Such
cramped, squalid living conditions proved the perfect
breeding ground for disease.
 What were Slum houses like
inside?
There was no toilet, no running
water – sometimes not even
windows or a fireplace! Rooms
were cold, badly ventilated and
running with damp. Worst of all
were the cellar and attic
dwellings in which the poorest
families lived. Cellar rooms
flooded in bad weather and
might be an inch or so deep in
stagnant water the whole year
round. Attic rooms were
cramped and stuffy, with no way
of escaping if the building
caught fire.
Many of the houses built in the
time of the Industrial
Revolution had no sewerage
system. Instead, each court or
street shared a communal
privy.
The waste from the privy was
tipped into a cesspit – and
many landlords would not pay
for the cesspits to be emptied
until they were overflowing.
This meant that human waste
could filter through into the
water supply that people drank
from.
Some houses only had a
bucket in the corner as a toilet.
Problems with Slum
housing
Poor ventilation
Sewage

Damp
Rubbish

Dirty drinking
Hygiene water
Slum housing
 Types of housing
Cellar dwellings Back to back housing

• One-room cellars below • Built in a court grid system.

ground level.
• As a result the small rooms • The rows of houses were
were damp and poorly literally built 'back to back'
ventilated one room deep.
Task 1
Identify as many features in
these plans that show us why
living conditions in towns
were terrible for the working
class during the Industrial
Revolution and explain why.
Questions-
1, Why were back to back
houses unhealthy?
2, Were cellar dwellings the
worst type of housing?
Explain why
 Diseases
Cholera Typhoid

Diseases &
Influenza killer Tuberculosis
conditions

Pneumonia

Dirty drinking water; poor cramped housing; lack of toilets;

damp rooms, rubbish and filth lining the streets resulted in
diseases.
 Task 2
This short clip will allow you to see just how poor living
conditions really were.
Draw this table in your books and fill it in as you watch
the clip.

Working class living conditions Results of these living conditions

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/sanitation-and-the-working-
poor-in-19th-century-england/11067.html
Source A: A sketch of Silvester Court, Liverpool, 1843.
Source B
A cross-section of back-to-back houses, Emily Place, Liverpool.

‘In Emily Place there are two rows of houses with a street 15 feet
wide between them. The houses are built back-to-back. Each room
in the house is about 3 feet wide and 5 feet long.’
Source C
A sketch of the interior of a house in Chorley Court, Liverpool.

D
‘There is one outside privy (toilet) for a whole street. Filth builds up at
the back of the privy and is often not removed for up to 6 months.
Men from the council are sent round with a horse and cart and a
couple of shovels to remove it.’
E
‘There are 39,000 people living in 7860 cellars which were dark, damp,
dirty and unventilated. In one cellar there was a large hole in the floor.
This hole was above a sewer. The mother who lived there feared for her
baby as rats came up in the night, sometimes up to 20 at a time.’
Source F
‘We saw drains and sewers emptying into a stream. Also in this
stream had been thrown dead dogs and cats and other offensive
articles. Downstream women filled buckets to use as drinking water,
for cooking, washing and cleaning their clothes’
Source G
‘Few back streets are paved at all. Dungheaps are found in several
parts of the streets, and sewage is seen running down the gutter in
the middle of the street.’

Source H
‘The homes of 3000 families were visited. In 773 of them the families
slept 3 and 4 to a bed, in 209 families 4 and 5 slept in a bed and in 15
families 6 and 7 slept in a bed. In one cellar we found a mother and
her two grown up daughters sleeping on a bed of straw in one corner
and 3 sailors slept in the other corner’
 TASK 3

Produce a government
report

In pairs you need to read over the

sources an produce an official report
on living conditions based on what
you find in the sources and what we
have discussed in lesson today.
 Government Report on
living conditions
Inspector………………………… Date 30/1/1842
Housing

Toilets/ sanitary conditions

Water supply

Disease
 What was life like in industrial towns?
• Robert Southey wrote: • Friedrich Engels wrote:
• "The dwellings of the laboring • ‘The irregular cramming
manufacturers are in narrow together of dwellings in ways
streets, blocked up from light which defy all rational plan.
and air, crowded together They are crowded literally
because every inch of land is one upon the other.
of such value that room for
• At the end of the court
light and air cannot be
passage is a privy without a
afforded them.
door, so dirty that the
• Here in Manchester, a great inhabitants can pass into and
proportion of the poor lodge in out of the court only by
cellars, damp and dark, where passing through foul pools of
every kind of filth is left to stagnant urine and
accumulate.” excrement.”
Imagine that you and your family have just moved
from the countryside to a big industrial town or city
to find a job. Write a letter home to your relatives
describing what the conditions you live in are like.
Use the sources on page 52 and 53 to help you.
Things to think about;
• Smells / Sounds
• Size of room
• Emotions you would be
feeling
• Use the list you wrote
earlier to help you
explain your
surrounding.
What would they be thinking?
Homework research task:

Cholera was one of the main killers

during the nineteenth century. Your
homework is to research Cholera
and tell me why it spread so
rapidly around the slums.
DUE NEXT THURSDAY!