The problem of how, where, and on what terms to house the urban
masses in an industrial society remains unresolved to this day. In
nineteenth-century Victorian England, overcrowding was the most
obvious characteristic of urban housing and, despite constant
agitation, it remained widespread and persistent in London and
other great cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool well
into the twentieth century.
"The Eternal Slum" is the first full-length examination of
working-class housing issues in a British town. The city
investigated not only provided the context for the development of a
national policy but also, in scale and variety of response, stood
in the vanguard of housing reform. The failure of traditional
methods of social amelioration in mid-century, the mounting storm
of public protest, the efforts of individual philanthropists, and
then the gradual formulation and application of new remedies,
constituted a major theme: the need for municipal enterprise and
state intervention. Meanwhile, the concept of overcrowding, never
precisely defined in law but based on middle-class notions of
decency and privacy, slowly gave way to the positive idea of
adequate living space, with comfort, as much as health or morals,
the criterion.
Not just dwellings but people were at issue. There is little
evidence in this period of the attitude of the worker himself to
his housing. Wohl has extensively researched local archives and, in
particular, drawn on the vestry reports which have been relatively
neglected. Profusely illustrated with contemporary photographs and
drawings, this book is the definitive study of the housing reform
movement in Victorian and Edwardian London and suggests what it was
really like to live under such appalling conditions. This important
study will be of interest to social historians, British historians,
urban planners, and those interested in how social policies
developed in previous eras.
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