Beneath the Surface: Social Reports as Primary Sources

Page 3 of 5

• 1. The background
• 2. Can we believe Robert Baker?
• 3. Who was interested in the information?
• 4. What can interest you?
• 5. Find out more
• Print entire article

Who was interested in the information?

Baker presents a vivid picture, designed to arouse not merely disgust but also stimulate public demands for improvement.

In one cul-de-sac... there are 34 houses, and in ordinary times, there dwell in these houses 340 persons, or ten to every house; but as these houses are many of them receiving houses for itinerant labourers, during the periods of hay-time and harvest and the fairs, at least twice that number are then here congregated. The name of this place is the Boot and Shoe-yard, in Kirkgate, a location from whence the Commissioners removed, in the days of cholera, 75 cart-loads of manure, which had been untouched for years, and where there now exists a surface of human excrement of very considerable extent, to which these impure and unventilated dwellings are additionally exposed.

He also highlighted the offensive smells from bone mills and slaughterhouses, the smoke from dye-houses, engine-furnaces and tobacco-pipe furnaces, and the effect on health from cesspools and uncollected rubbish. It was the concern about 'exhalations' from these that alert the reader to the state of medical knowledge. Cholera caused the most panic, but typhus, or 'fever', and tuberculosis were the more common, with their origin and infection patterns only gradually becoming understood.

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