Cities, Class, and the Working Day

Before industrialization, cities grew slowly because farming could only support so many non-farmers and transport was slow. Steam power broke that limit. Factories needed workers concentrated near machines and coal, so people left the countryside for cities like Manchester, which held about 18,000 people in 1750 and over 500,000 by 1900. Housing, water, and waste systems never caught up with the arrivals. Families crowded into cheap row housing near the factories where they worked, often a single room per family, with no running water and no sewers.

That overcrowding made disease catastrophic. Human waste went into the same rivers and wells that supplied drinking water, so a single contaminated pump could sicken an entire neighborhood within days. Cholera outbreaks killed thousands before anyone understood the cause. John Snow's 1854 map of London cholera deaths, plotted against the locations of water pumps, showed cases clustering tightly around one pump on Broad Street. That spatial pattern pointed straight to contaminated water as the cause, not the bad air theory doctors had assumed, and let officials shut down the pump and start building real sewer systems.

Wages told the same story of a life with almost no cushion. A typical worker's family might earn around 20 to 25 shillings a week, with 15 or more going straight to rent, bread, and coal, leaving only a few shillings for clothing, illness, or savings. That tight margin, combined with filthy, disease-ridden housing, created the working-class misery that thinkers like Karl Marx pointed to as proof capitalism exploited labor, and that pushed workers toward unions and strikes to demand better wages and conditions.