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Victorian Workers' Wages and the Quality of Life
Added by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History,
Brown University
[Home > Biology > Botany > Medicine and Public
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from M.W. Flynn, in Edwin Chadwick, 7, 17-18
ome historians have considered trends in real income, because
these are the only measurable
criteria, as though they are the only valid ones. But, in terms
of life itself, it really mattered little how a
labourer's wage varied between, say, 12s and 15s a week, if a
dwelling-house with water supply,
sewers and sanitation, in paved and drained streets, none
capable, in other words, of safeguarding a
normal span of human life, could not be afforded on any income
under, say, 30s a week. Other
historians have studied housing in terms of bricks and mortar
per acre, or people per house, as though a
few cubic feet more or less made all the difference. The quality
and duration of life are social variables which have
always depended upon an almost infinite range of economic and
social factors, the most important of which in modern
times are levels of real income, the degree of adulteration of
food, the quantity and quality of housing, sanitation, paving,
sewerage, water supply, open spaces, working conditions, and the
public provision of the basic social services, of which
education stands at the head of the list. Only some of these
factors are capable of statistical measurement.
. . . If the decline of the death rate had continued after the
first decade of the nineteenth century, it is just possible
that existing institutions and existing policies might have been
able to cope with the social problems of urban
development. But the earlier reduction of mortality was itself
the means of releasing upon the hapless cities a flood of
immigrants from the surrounding countryside which inflated the
subsequent difficulties beyond all hope of solution under
existing regimes. However, so inured were the men of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the toll of
disease,
to the shortness of the span of urban human life, that they were
unlikely to be moved by only a slight rise in the death
rate, which, in any case, was not easily detectable in the
short-run fluctuations produced by epidemics.
Last modifi ed 26 September 2002
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