ABSTRACT
Mounting discontent with housing conditions and the growing strength of left-wing opinion combined in the late-Victorian period to produce the first specifically working-class housing reform movement. For the first time the working man himself emerged to take a leading part in the agitation for better housing. Hitherto he had been a very shadowy figure, spoken for rather than speaking on his own behalf. The scraps of evidence that we can pick up about the attitudes of the working man towards his housing are few indeed-the occasional men tion in the press of working men attending a protest meeting held by a slum clergyman, a casual reference to sporadic rent riots, a letter to the editor from 'an artisan', the stoicism and compliance of Octavia Hil l ' s tenants, the energy and resilience of Sims's, Besant's, and Morrison's fictional slum dwellers, the tone of natural resentment and bewilderment at being harried from pillar to post which emerges from the medical officers of health reports. These somewhat frag mented images do emerge, but the working man had few leaders or spokesmen who can be heard with any clarity today and our informa tion unfortunately comes mainly from observers from outside, whose attitudes towards the slums were coloured by their background and their middle-class notions of comfort and decency.
