The courageous clergyman who exposed London's dirty, downtrodden underbelly

Andrew Mearns's shocking report shamed the nation into action

By DAVID MYTON

In the 1880s London was a booming city, home to 3.8 million people and a world-leading hub of commerce and industry.

It was the place to be if you wanted to make some money and get on in the world.

But there was another side to the city: a dirty downtrodden underbelly of the broke and the broken, the homeless, workhouses, crime and criminals, violence and brutality, a seething mess of poverty and privation.

Those of you familiar with Charles Dickens’s novels such as Bleak House and Oliver Twist will get the picture.

And then in mid-October 1883 an unassuming, mild-mannered Scottish clergyman, the Reverend Andrew Mearns, dropped a bomb that rocked the city and the nation.

It came in the form of a short report entitled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor – a 20-page, one-penny pamphlet that scandalised and shamed much of London society.

Mearns had explored the physical and moral condition of London’s slums, particularly overcrowding and its consequences.

But Mearns had burrowed beneath the surface to reveal a sordid horror story – shocking and appalling English bourgeois sensibilities with its frank revelations of incest, prostitution, starvation, the mutilation of children, depravity, drunkenness and disease.

It was all eyewitness material – Mearns was a brave and acute observer, shedding the light on England’s dark side.

He says this of the slums:

“Seething in the very centre of our great cities, concealed by the thinnest crust of civilization and decency, is a vast mass of moral corruption, of heart-breaking misery and absolute godlessness …“The vilest practices are looked upon with the most matter-of fact indifference.

“The low parts of London are the sink into which the filthy and abominable from all parts of the country seem to flow. Entire courts are filled with thieves, prostitutes and liberated convicts

“Tens of thousands are crowded together in rookeries amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship.

“To get into them you have to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse …

“Walls and ceiling are black with the accretions of filth which have gathered upon them through long years of neglect. It is exuding through cracks in the boards overhead; it is running down the walls; it is everywhere.

“Who can wonder that every evil flourishes in such hotbeds of vice and disease?

“The vilest practices are looked upon with the most matter-of fact indifference.

“The low parts of London are the sink into which the filthy and abominable from all parts of the country seem to flow. Entire courts are filled with thieves, prostitutes and liberated convicts.”

Mearns’s fearless revelation of hitherto “unmentionables” such as incest and child prostitution ensured the report grabbed the attention of public and politicians.

Crucially, it attracted the attention of the campaigning journalist W T Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, who had gone in to print with the story on October 23, 1883.

Stead, the son of a Congregationalist minister, saw another big story lurking in Mearns’s report, and that was – Who was to blame? Who owned the slums? What kind of people made a fortune out of the suffering and degradation of their fellow-creatures?

He wrote:

“The man who lives by letting a pestilential dwelling-house is morally on a par with a man who lives by keeping a brothel, and ought to be branded accordingly.”

Mearns was not the only person in England to highlight the atrocious conditions of the poor.

Some 40 years earlier a 22-year-old Prussian man had taken it upon himself to investigate the lives of the poor – this time in northern England.

Enter Friedrich Engels, the son of the wealthy owner of a cotton textile mill in Salford, near Manchester, in Lancashire.

He wanted his boy to get some experience in the family firm.

Young Engels, who would later team up with a certain Karl Marx – becoming the Lennon and McCartney of socialism - desired to find out what life was like for those at the bottom of the rung.

What he found shocked him – and helped to set him on the path to a politics that would rock the world: Communism.

His book The Conditions of the Working Class in England was first published in German in 1845.

It was not until 1887 that the English language edition came out, some four years after the Mearns report.

Engels wrote that every working-man in England was “constantly exposed to loss of work and food, that is to death by starvation, and many perish in this way.

“The dwellings of the workers are everywhere badly planned, badly built, and kept in the worst condition, badly ventilated, damp, and unwholesome.”

The inhabitants are confined to the smallest possible space, and at least one family usually sleeps in each room. Working and living conditions were horrendous, said Engels.

He adds: “During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter.

“Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation.”

The English working-classes, says Engles, call this "social murder", and “accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually”.

Who was the blame for all of this? It was the Bourgeoisie, he declared.

“I have never seen a class … so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie … It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold.”

I’ve provided a link to Engels’s book below – if you haven’t read it, take a look. Whether you agree with his politics or not, it is clear that this experience among the poor working classes was instrumental in shaping his future outlook.

Both Mearns and Engels, and many other campaigners besides, helped to shape a future in which decent homes became more widely available for working-class people.

A huge breakthrough took place in 1885 with the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes chaired by Sir Charles Dilke and including the Prince of Wales.

The Commission’s report has been described as  “the most important and comprehensive statement on the reform of public health and housing to emerge from Parliament in the late nineteenth century”.

In 1890 Parliament passed the resultant Housing of the Working Classes Act, which allowed London’s local councils to build houses as well as clear away slums.

And in 1896 London County Council developed the first council housing in Bethnal Green.

The 1900 Housing of the Working Classes Act extended the 1890 Act to places outside London and by the outbreak of WWI about 24,000 units had been built.

All local authorities have been required by law to provide council housing since the 1919 Housing Act.

I plan to examine the growth – and decline – in social housing in the UK in a later post.

Check out my YouTube podcast below for more on this story.

REFERENCES

Reverend Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor, - https://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/related/outcast.php

Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England - https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/index.htm