How dirty were towns in the 1800s

• Towns and cities grew massively in population, because the promise of good jobs and better pay was too good to resist
• Many people found work in factories
• most People lived in slums, with overcrowded housing, poor sanitation and shared facilities
• Disease was common, but there was no understanding on how they were caught, and people were too poor to see a doctor
• The governments lassez-faire meant that the government didn’t do anything to improve conditions for poor people until 1842, when the Chadwick report came in
• Most families drank from, bathed in, and washed clothes and pots in the same body of water that their waste was disposed into