Can we believe Robert Baker?
As a local doctor Robert Baker had experienced the severe cholera outbreak of 1832, by 1838 as a town councillor, had contributed to a statistical survey of the town and went on to become a factory inspector by 1858. A middle-class professional expressing his social class's concern and desire for environmental and spiritual improvement, but perhaps also with that paternalistic role of one looking in from the outside.
One cannot but notice the moral and social as well as the physical effect which an attention to the architecture and order of cottage houses and the good arrangement of the streets has upon the health and habits of the people.
His report contains a variety of information - case studies, statistics, tables, descriptions and anecdotes, as well as analysis and personal comment. For example notice here the general comments, the assumption of the basic standards expected of housing and the detail of street life:
In the manufacturing towns of England... additions have been made without regard to either the personal comfort of the inhabitants or the necessaries which congregation requires... neighbourhoods have arisen in which there is neither water nor out-office, not any conveniences for the absolute domestic wants of the occupiers... the streets present architecture of various orders, causeways, dangerous on account of steps, cellar windows without protection, here and there posts and rails, and everywhere clothes lines intersecting them, by which repeated accidents have been occasioned... many cases of broken legs by these unprotected cellars, and by horsemen dismounted by neglected clothes-lines hanging across the streets, were recorded.
Baker was not the only person writing about Leeds. Victorian journalists, social commentators such as Engels, novelists (Dickens found it a very unpleasant place), and travellers who kept diaries have all left accounts which have much in common with that of Baker. Then there were illustrators and mapmakers providing another perspective. There is very little of the voice of the poor themselves. Only with increased literacy and the popularity of oral history in the last 50 years have personal stories become more widely accessible.
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