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Here is unwitting (unintended) information about the attitudes of the past. In Baker's description of the Bank area he notes the effect of having a good landlord and then presents a comparison.
...the dark and dank cellar, inhabited by Irish families, including pigs, with broken panes in every window-frame, and filth and vermin in every nook. Here with walls unwhitewashed for years, black with the smoke of foul chimneys, without water... sacking for bed-clothing, with floors unwashed from year to year, without out-offices, and with incomes of a few shillings a week, derived from the labour of half-starved children or the more precarious earnings of casual employment...
Notice the reference to the Irish. Here is the beginning of discrimination. Contemporaries saw them as outsiders - a different nationality, accent and religion, without settlement and therefore without access to Poor Law relief. Working at the lowest end of the occupational spectrum as labourers and in the flax mills of the town - those hot, dusty and humid factories avoided by all but the most desperate. Their status was linked to poverty and dirt, making it easier to regard them as separate, less deserving of a place in society and responsible for their own miserable state. Who would take action to improve the conditions of the poor and what would be their motive - religious teaching, philanthropy or the fear that polluted water and fetid air would spread its invisible dangers into everyone's lives?
Chadwick saw himself as the father of public health reform, collecting together reports from around the country and presenting them to Parliament. Its findings raised sufficient concern for trigger a Royal Commission to look in to the conditions in town in 1844, leading to the first Public Health Act four years later.
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