Leeds railway,
which crosses the Irk here, has swept away some of these courts and
lanes, laying others completely open to view. Immediately under the
railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which
surpass all the others by far, just because it was hitherto so shut off,
so secluded that the way to it could not be found without a good deal of
trouble. I should never have discovered it myself, without the breaks
made by the railway, though I thought I knew this whole region
thoroughly. Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines,
one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in
most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping-
room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I
found two beds--and such bedsteads and beds!--which, with a staircase and
chimney-place, exactly filled the room. In several others I found
absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned
against it. Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort
of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and
there, with the feet. This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human
beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the
third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow
doorway alone led out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept
labyrinth of dwellings.

Enough! The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless,
knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness,
whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external
surroundings. And how could the people be clean with no proper
opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants? Privies
are so rare here that they are either filled up every day, or are too
remote for most of the inhabitants to use. How can people wash when they
have only the dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps and water pipes can be
found in decent parts of the city alone? In truth, it cannot be charged
to the account of these helots of modern society if their dwellings are
not more cleanly than the pig-sties which are here and there to be seen
among them. The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six
or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors
of which stand at least two feet below the low-water level of the Irk
that fl