558 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution
assistance in addition to their salaries, seemed rare in the new factory towns.
But some manufacturers did pay slightly higher wages, provided decent
housing, and insisted that their workers’ children attend school. However,
such laudable efforts affected the lives of relatively few workers.
The nineteenth-century urban poor probably lived in more miserable
housing than their counterparts in the previous century. Buildings in indus
trial cities, built hurriedly and as cheaply as possible, quickly became dilapi
dated tenements. Many workers lived amid terrible smells from raw sewage,
garbage, industrial pollution such as sulfurous smoke, and putrid rivers and
streams. Warm summers brought outbreaks of serious diseases like typhus
and dysentery. Between 1848 and 1872 in Britain, a third of all people died
of contagious diseases. Despite attempts to improve water supplies and con
struct sewer systems in several large English cities, the decline in mortality
was barely felt in the heart of industrial cities, where tuberculosis remained
a great killer.
Many children either died or were abandoned at an early age. At mid
century, about 26,000 infants were abandoned each year in both Moscow
and Saint Petersburg, and about a fifth of all babies in Warsaw. The most
fortunate of the abandoned were left at the doors of charitable organizations
created by states, municipalities, and churches. Some babies were left with
notes such as this one found in Rouen in 1831: “It is with the greatest pain
that I separate myself from my son, after the great suffering 1 have gone
through to keep him in his present state. ... I hope to see him again as soon
as I can take him back for good.” Sadly, this would usually not be the case.