m., six days a week.
It was common for working class families in London to live in a
single room of their house and rent the rest, furnished, to people
of different degrees of prosperity and even of different social
grades. Servants and apprentices slept in the kitchen, the shop,
or the garret. The very poor, such as casual laborers and street
sellers, silk winders, charwomen, usually lived in damp cellars
subject to floods from excessive rain, or in cold and windy
garrets. Tenancy was usually on a weekly basis because of the
general uncertainty of life and trade. Conditions were so cramped
that cabinet makers made beds which masqueraded in the day time as
tables, bureaus, cupboards, or bookcases. The very poor slept in
common lodging houses, sleeping uncovered on the floor, twenty to
a room. Some poor families slept in small hovels made of mud and
straw with their pigs, domestic fowl, dogs, and even asses and
horses. Homeless children slept on the streets. All classes lived
so much at coffee houses, alehouses or clubs, which they often
used as their addresses, that house room was a secondary
consideration. There was an alehouse on almost every street in
London to provide cheap food and beer, lodging, employment
information, credit, newspapers, tobacco, and meeting places for
tradesmen. Some alehouses were recognized employment agencies for
certain trades, such as the hatters, smiths, carpenters, weavers,
boot and shoe makers, metal workers, bakers, tailors, plumbers,
painter and glaziers, and bookbinders.
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