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Victorian Society
'The town (Manchester) is abominably filthy,' a visitor from Rotherham wrote in 1808. 'The steam engine is pestiferous, the dyehouses noisome and offensive and the water of the river as black as ink or the Stygian Lake.' As if that was not bad enough there was bad sanitation, disease and regular epidemics. The lives of the workers in these factories were tedious with a repetitive routine that might involve sixteen hours of work a day. Many immigrated into the cities from the countryside in search of work and a better life but instead found unemployment and the squalor of the slums where they lived alongside those that did work. There were the workhouses but these were no better with Spartan buildings and harsh treatment of the inhabitants by the personnel.
Class Structure
Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister, said that England was divided into two nations, the rich and the poor. The industrial revolution had certainly created a larger gap between the extremes of the two classes and cities were divided into areas of wealth and poverty, but it was not as black and white as that. In the gap between the rich and the poor there were middle classes who had increased in number and existed at different levels of social status. At the bottom end of the scale were the lower middle class clerks who were barely discernable from skilled labourers while at the top end were the millionaire industrialists and financiers. Somewhere between the upper and lower middle classes lay the business people and professional people, the latter giving themselves a slight social edge over the former.
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