The Sun.
London, England, 1844-10-19 00:00:00

-

.gJ ..

~ __

t

!BATHS AND WASHIMUSES,,FOR
THE LA BOURING CLASSES.
(From !he Times.)
The meeting At the Mansionehouse on Wednesday,
for prennating the establishment of baths and wash-
houses for the labouring classes, will, N;" .q can have
little doubt, lead to beneficial consequences teihe
poor far beyond the limits of the metropolis. The
scheme, which recclved so cordial an approbation from
that meeting, has the advantage of being eminently
practical, and, as experience has already shown, de-
cidedly practicable. There is a vile notion enter-
tained by some that " the poor love dirt." A fouler
slander on the poor was never perpetrated. The poor
endure dirt, they exist under the misery of dirt ; but
they do so in those situations, and, as a general rule,
in those situations alone, in which dirt is inevitable.
Step into a cottage in the country, where its tenant
is in the receipt of wages sufficient for his respectable
order scanty,;
butth e
there is maintenance, and what is tee first thing that strikes
the eve ? The furniture may e
accom-
modation may be of the homeliest
an air of cleanliness over everything, which will be
sought for in vain in the habitations of far ,richer men
in large town, The rural poor, in genera..'; love
cleanliness. They put up with dirt, when they do :o,
because they cannot help it; and it is not till years of
hard necessity have made them forget the delight of
being clean in the anxious daily care of seeking how
they may gain the means of bare existence, that dirt,
rendered 1'2,5 offensive to them by long suffering,
comes to be disregarded. The rich, when they pro-
fess their belief that " the poor love dirt," entirely
forget why they themselves are so much cleaner.
Your fastidious fine gentleman, with his ample supply
of the finest linen, and the most luxurious appliances
of the bath and the toilet, with the necessity upon
him from his position in society of being scru-
pulously clean, and habitually regarding the slightest
want of cleanliness as tarnishing his social reputation,
finds his daily ablutions to be equally a duty and a
pleasure. But condemn him for a single twelvemonth
to hardships in any way approaching those under
which many of the labouring classes constantly suffer,
and how great would not be the change of at any
rate his outward man! Take, for instance, thm
House of Lords, probably the cleanest assemblage
of men which could be found ; condemn them to
cold water and no soap, and to wash all their own
clothes with their own hands in their own
drawing-rooms for a single twelvemonth, and how
would they look at its termination ? Isabella-
colour would, we saspect, become fashionable for
shirt fronts, and white would yield to drab of
divers shades. Can there be any- doubt .on
this point ? Can any one man, whether peer or
commoner, maintain that he, or any other in his
station in life, would make any approach to
his present cleanliness under the stafe Of things
which we have suggested ? The belief that ht. could
do so, however good his will might be, would be
preposterously absurd. We do not go so far as to assert
that the rich would, under such circumstances, love.
dirt; but any man of plain common sense must see
that they would learn to bear a far greater amount
of it than they can now conceive it possible to en-
dure. The necessity which, amidst a choice of evils,
compels dirt to be put up with, must be admitted by
all to be a most important consideration in estimating
the probabilities of the proposed baths and wash-
houses being resorted to by the labouring classes.
Our attention has been called by a correspondent to
the propriety of exposing the fallacy that they
" love dirt ;" but, except as regards those whose ac-
quaintance with the poor is simply theoretical, we
should think more than we have said on the subject a
waste of words.
That old habits of tolerance of dirt can easily be
broken ; that men whose whole day is devoted to
slaving for meat and drink, and who can scarcely find
a spare copper once a-month for anything like an
indulgence, will throng to the proposed baths from
admiration of cleanliness in the abstract; or, that the
evil consequences of long neglect of the poor by the
rich can suddenly be remedied, we do not believe,
and we should be far from readily anticipating; but
that it is the duty of the rich, whose luxuries are the
result of the poor men's needs, to make every effort
towards mitigating the wretchedness under which
they pine, we strenuously maintain ; and because we
entertain a confident expectation that no endeavour
to benefit them, which proceeds on an accurate ac-
quaintance with their wants, and is reasonably calcu-
lated to meet them, can fail of producing some good,
we give our suffrage in favour of the establishment
of the proposed baths and washhouses. But let not
the gentlemen who are engaged in promoting their
establishment flatter themselves that they are doing
anything worth a name for the very abject poor. So
long as the belly is pinched, the condition of the skin
is a matter of mere secondary importance. The man
who is half-starved will not give up twopennyworth
of potatoes for the sake of a warm bath. The family
which has nothing but rags to cover, and, perhaps,
scarcely cover their nakedness, will give little trouble
to what the Committee call ‘, washhouses," but for
which we think they would do well to substitute the
far less equivocal, and equally well-known name,
laundries." By degrees, but werking downwards
in the scale of society, the practice of bathing may
extend. At first, we can have little doubt, the baths
will be resorted to principally by mechanics whose
wages allow them to indulge in some trifling super-
fluities. Still, to such men, pent up in the midst of a
large city, and deprived of many of the facilities for
cleanliness which can be enjoyed by the country, a
cheap is-arm bath once or twice a-week will be a
great comfort ; and, even if no others should avail
themselves of the establishment, for their sakes it 44.
would be worth founding.
The " laundries," as we beg permission to call thesis,
may afford temptation to a more numerous class.
The cost of firing for a washing day, and the trouble,
and frequently the expense of obtaining the needful
supply of water—to the rich perhaps apparently
light, but to the poor really heavy evils; but, above
all, the constant serious inconvenience, and, according
to the reports on the health of the poor, often the
danger to health occasioned by all the processes of
washing being performed in the one close room in
which the poor man's family too frequently dwell—
these distresses will, in all probability, send a far
larger proportion of poor women to the laundries
than of men, women, and children, to the baths. Even
at the small and inconvenient establishment in Liver-
pool it appears that more than 305,000 articles of
clothing and domestic use have been washed in the
course of the year; and the applicants at that esta-
blishment are so much increasing that another is about
to be formed in a different quarter of the town.
We augur well from the spirit with which the
matter has been taken up in the City. There was
something far better in the meeting on Wednesday
than we can find in the run of rpeeti9gs for-consider-
Inetheeondition—Of the poor which haze ,bed held
it cguntry. There was pa talk of driaing tlse poor
4,0 ensigiation.witk;a,bell-wetelierpVisglesessfarmer's
soti at their'head. Instead.of telling them to go to
Canada and wash in Lake Erie, it was determined
that means should be provided by the richfertnabling
the poor to wash and make themselves more comfort-
able at home, and a handsome subscription was imme-
diately set on foot. Cheques for ten and twenty gui-
neas were immediately handed in by bankerpi mer-
chants, clergymen, aldermen, and common Council-
men, instead of wordy resolutions by magistrates, de-
puty-lieutenants, and sporting country gentlemen.
The City meeting was held for doing, and not for mere
palaver, and we shall rejoice to see the example set
by men of business widely followed out of London by
those. who have equal means and more time at their
command. For the erection of the four baths and
laundries which the Committee propose to establish in
the metropolis—three in Middlesex and one on the
Surrey side of the Thames—large funds will of course
be required, but we cannot anticipate that any diffi-
culty will be found in raising them.
Why should not the Fleet Prison be converted into
one ? The street is of such ample width there that
the opposite residents would not be exposed to any
perceptible annoyance, and the gift of such a building
would greatly facilitate the progress of the scheme.

FATAL ACCIDENT ON THE MANCHESTER AND
LEEDS RAILWAV.—On Friday an inquest W&s held
before Mr. Chapman, at the Atlas Rotel, Oxford-
road, Manchester, on the body of James Curse, a
map dealer, of Mount Pleasant, Rochdale, whose
death resulted from the injuries received on the Old-
hambheet h
and l d wife Cars( ef
branch of the Manchester and Leeds Railway.
on
but Wednesday
on
the arr i
ve
avle r::f
Williaml t
Leigh,f r from the t
et
rh,e 0
fe evidence 1 ofe,h
tElaitzas
igotng , into
and w
a railwaye
r
e gom raing to at
Rochdale,
the train at the Middleton junction, Curse opened the
door of the carriage, which was a third-class, as the trail.'
tOoeldhdhaalme,
was slackening its pace, and tried to get out, when hi
i on
nly half
till a an hour
.do
Thursday
ytThnhe
night,
cjhcuti:dy‘evnfhote'unbnudh but lie
ah died i.
ees
rud
ir aboutNi.eitv e
foot slipped, and he fell across the rail. The off-whet.'
of the succeeding waggon passed over the unfortunate
man's thighs, and he was removed to the Manchester infir-
mary
past itrt3h' seven
ceased was in liquor at the time of the accident, and the
unchester Courier.
,f,aAulctel•aesnetsltidreealythh:Ls oilNsir
A splendid brown horse, rising 5
years old, has
been purchased from Mr. Joseph Clay,
Mr. Reynolds, groom to her Majesty
Dowager, by orders of Earl II her ostt'ythits htow4n, by
M
berw
ain. This beautiful animal° ise' Majesty's
intended
b.
ye herc Cham-
berlain.
Ma-
jesty as a present to his Royal Highness the Duke of
Saxe Weimar, and was yesterday sent off to Witl, y
Court, Worcestershire, for her Majesty's inspection
previous to its being forwarded to Germany.—Shrewsbury
Chronicle.

The rate in Christ Church, Blackfriars, has beta
carried by a majority of 129.
EASTERN UNION RAILWAY.—The works on this
line have been commenced at Great Bentley; wbc
there are about 100 men at work, the operations extetz.t•
ing to nearly a mile.—Suffolk Chronicle.
A block of porphyry, weighing upwards of
50,000 lbs. has been taken from the quarries at Morlaix,
to be used the sarcophagus of the Emperor Napolectt.