A Letter to the Parishioners of Fulham — Reading Notes

There were several persons, indeed, present on the 17th inst., who were prepared and even desirous to hear another proposition brought forward, connected with the domiciliary condition of the poor, and tending to correct an evil in their present dwellings, confessedly far more difficult to reach than either their defective sewerage, or their scanty provision of water. And it is one which not only affects most seriously their sanitary state, but impairs all the decency of their daily habits of life, and nearly defeats whatever means can be attempted for the improvement of their spiritual and moral character. I allude to the crowded manner in which they live together; the landlord of the house too often entirely regardless of any rule for restricting the number of its inmates; and his tenants sometimes deriving a large profit, beyond the amount of their own rent, from the numerous under-tenants whom they admit, without scruple or restraint, to share in the occupation of them. Thus it happens not unfrequently, that into a cottage with two small bed-rooms, built and adapted only for a single family, two or even three other families, besides individual lodgers, are admitted. And from that hour must the inmates of it be compelled to abandon all the happy arrangements of household cleanliness, decency, and order. Mr. Rouse, in his faithful and elaborate MS. Report on the sanitary condition of a large part of this parish, states, that he has known in the summer twenty-six persons living in such an house: and from fifteen to twenty is the frequent number of their inmates. But while it ought to be stated that the worst cases of this kind occur among the Irish labourers, they prevail to a greater or a less extent in all the following districts, viz.: Parson’s Green Lane, Peterborough Row, Sand End, Garden Row, Carpenter’s Row, Dawe’s Lane, Wheat-Sheaf Alley, Gain’s Buildings, Bedford Place, Stanley Place, the cottages near Normand House, Orchard Place, Buckler’s Alley, the Old Greyhound Cottages, Marsh Croft, Sun Street, Star Lane, and Willow Place.

And it is a melancholy fact, that while in some other parts of Fulham a considerable number of small houses have been built within the last few years, of a more substantial and commodious style, in order to meet the increasing wants of this portion of the inhabitants, better drained, better ventilated, and in some more healthy localities, they are gradually lapsing into the same state. A very few of them once becoming occupied in this comfortless manner lower the credit of those contiguous to them. One tenant sets a bad example to the rest: and thus in the very districts where some hope had been encouraged for a time of better things, the same baneful system of crowding the houses with lodgers is spreading.

The history of these masses of ill-regulated dwellings is, alas! uniform and instructive. Some speculating builder or other, oftentimes unknown in the neighbourhood, and having no sympathy with the miseries which he inflicts upon it, becomes possessed of a narrow slip of land, the mere frontage of a road or a footpath, and erects upon it a collection of low, slightly built cottages, with windows wholly unsuited to them, with no drainage but that of cesspools, confined in their dimensions, rarely emptied, and saturating with their noxious contents not only the adjacent soil, but even the walls of the houses close to which they are often placed; with no pumps for drinking-water but such as soon become tainted by the contiguity of these very cesspools; and with no provision of other water, but that which an occasional cart, drawn by a miserable donkey, brings dear-bought to the door. High rents, far beyond the means of the tenants, but sternly collected as each week comes round, can only be met by the vicious practice of subletting each room or fraction of a room which can by any sacrifice be dispensed with. Even the essential whitewashing of the walls within is sometimes imposed as a burden upon the occupier, who of course does it in the most careless way, instead of its being undertaken by the landlord. And whenever the work of dilapidation begins in one of these tenements, each successive tenant, flying from his hard bargain, leaves it of course more dismantled than he found it; until they become utterly unfit for the occupation of human beings, whether under the summer sun, striking upon their slight and exposed roofs, or the winter wind, penetrating the settlements of their walls and the cracks of their windows.