Victorian Social Reform in Britain :: European Europe History

Victorian favorable Reform in BritainWhen considering the changes brought about in the social policy of heavy(p) Britain, in the decades immediately either side of 1900, one must anticipate at the nation s industrial history. The position as the humanity s premier industrial nation had been cemented by the mid ordinal century, achieved in part, as it was the startle nation to industrialise. However, the headlong embrace of laissez- faire capitalism ignored the social infrastructure, and the emigration from the depressed agricultural areas to the industrial areas caused big strain on the poorly-planned towns and cities. At the dawn of industrialisation, there were those who expressed use up about the health and hygiene of the dense industrial areas, notably Freidrich Engels, whose airfield of Manchester and London in 1844 collated in Conditions of The Working Class in England assorted a truly dismal picture of urban squalor and hopelessness. such(prenominal)(prenominal) i s the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to receipt that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the social structure of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes to see in how little topographic point a human being can move, how little air - and such air - he can breathe, how little of civilisation he whitethorn share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. (Engels.F. 1844 p.84 ) The publication, in 1842, of the make-up on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain elicited, and mayhap foresaw, the protests of disbelief. Edwin Chadwick was responsible for the report and also invoked the image of the unknown country as Henry Mayhew later did to bring to public attention the abysmal conditions with which the laboring poor had to contend. His principal concern appeared to be with the miasma emanating from decaying matter the toxic exhalations which were the source of their physical, moral and mental deterioration. At the height of the cholera epidemic, the flushing of the sewers in order to dissipate the miasma, actually aggravated the problem by pull ahead contamination of the water supply, in the face of the advice which stated that the disease was expand by germs and infection.