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The saddest feature of the whole matter of housing the people was that one which I was so often obliged to deplore, namely, the disproportion between the size of the rooms and the number of their occupants. Lodgings like those I have described might serve young married people with a child or two as tolerably satisfactory and healthy dwelling-places, but when two or three more children made their appearance, and when, in order to make both ends meet, strangers must be boarded and lodged, conditions existed which can be more easily commiserated than depicted. Yet such was, I need hardly say, the rule. The great majority of families had a troop of children as well as lodgers and table boarders, and perfect domiciliary conditions were, of course, possible only where neither the one nor the other was found. When a childless couple, or an aged married pair whose children were grown and settled for themselves, had a fair or full income, they preferred to be alone, and they lived comfortably and pleasantly. Such was the case with a polisher whose youngest lad was just out of school. I visited him more than once, and found it simply delightful. There were other conditions which must still be called favourable, such as I found, for example, in the family of one of the hands in my own section, who lived in an old farm-house which had been converted into a lodging-house. Here the father, mother, grown-up step-daughter, and three little children occupied a large corner room, an “alcove” with one window, and a garret. The young girl slept alone in the garret, the others in the alcove, where the baby had a capacious cradle, and the two children occupied one bed and the parents another. It was the common practice, as far as I could observe it, for parents as well as children, even older children, and brothers and sisters, indiscriminately to sleep together in one bed. I found a better state of affairs in this respect only twice, in the case of childless couples, when husband and wife had each a bed. Less fortunate than those above-mentioned were the conditions in the family of another of my friends, consisting of the young parents, a two-year-old child, an infant, and an outsider, a factory-girl. These had to content themselves with one small room on the ground floor and the loft where the lodger slept. Into this single room, which was at once living-room, bedroom, guest-room, and kitchen, were crowded a bed for the parents, a baby-carriage, a table, some chairs, a commode, a wardrobe, and all the cooking apparatus. But even this was comparatively comfortable. There is worse to come. Another workman of my section, whom I often visited, and who had an industrious, energetic wife, a cook before her marriage, and two children, tenderly loved and cared for – a girl of nine and a boy of six years – lived, together with three young apprentices of our mill, in one small two-windowed room, one alcove, and a garret, in a crowded rear-tenement house. The parents slept in one bed, the children in another, the two beds filling nearly the whole room, the three young men in the somewhat larger garret, likewise in but two beds, so that two, strangers to each other, occupied the same bed, and only one was by himself, a privilege for which he had, of course, to pay correspondingly more. How widespread this custom was is shown by the fact that when, in my search for lodgings, I expressed a desire to sleep alone – meaning in a room by myself – I was almost always understood to mean alone in a bed.
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