James Greenwood

“ It is no less marvellous than monstrous that such an appalling condition of things should have been permitted to exist so long, especially when, as is evident, the sanitary authorities have long had the matter in hand. I did not pursue my investigation beyond Dudley Street, but it is fair to assume that in the surrounding vile courts and alleys - Dudley Street is a broad and busy thoroughfare - the evil is just as prevalent. ”

“ The excavations under the ancient houses of Dudley Street possess no windows at all, and the only way in which light and ventilation can be conveyed to the wretched inhabitants is through a hole in the pavement - a narrow opening, no larger than might be made by removing an ordinary paving-stone.
Leading down into the cellar is a ladder or a flight of wooden steps protected by a handrail. The roof of the cellar is level with the common roadway, and its floor must be several feet below the sewage and gas pipes. ”

“ To bring it to the surface as a shoulder-load in the ordinary way would, under the circumstances, be impossible; there could be nothing for it but to haul it up with a rope, tearful mourners clambering up in the wake and lending a steadying hand. ”

“ Maybe it is taken for granted that because everything in the shape of sleeping convenience is absent from a cellar, the inhabitants by day do not pass the night there. This, however, is a view of the matter scarcely likely to be taken by the authorities of a district hundreds of the population of which sleep in their rags and on the bare boards as many nights in the year as they are not more decently lodged in prison or the casual ward of a workhouse. ”

“ Giles's cellars were still in use as human habitations, and that, after the manner of rats and other burrowing animals, as many families, consisting of mother, father, and a more or less numerous swarm of big and little children, passed their lives in these dismal holes under the houses, working, eating, dunking, and sleeping all in the damp and dirt and dark. ”

“ Here was another inhabited cellar of precisely the same pattern as that already described, and next door another, and again next door still another, this time with half-a-dozen nearly nude and hideously dirty children wriggling up and down the ladder, and larking in and out of the cellar darkness below, like rabbits in a warren. More inhabited cellars on the right hand side, on the left hand side-sometimes two and three together, sometimes with half-a-dozen houses between. From one end to the other of Dudley Street, which be it borne in mind, is but a small portion of the district of St. ”