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~ WHO'S WHO ~
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Joseph Dare
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Continued:
We normally tend to think of pious Victorian Nonconformists, or Evangelical Churchmen, as sanctimonious, bigoted, and narrow-minded. We take our view of them from Dickens, with his comically repulsive Mr. Chad band in Bleak House, or from Matthew Arnold, who treated them in Culture and Anarchy with chilly dislike. But they were not all of the same stamp, by any means; and Joseph Dare is most strikingly unlike them. Though his strong religious conviction shines out plainly enough in what he wrote and did, it was a quiet religion of good humour and a profound charity. He was perfectly willing to recognize the good works of people of other denominations. "The schools belonging to the Establishment [i.e. the Anglican Church]", he writes in 1849, " are the most numerous and the most efficient." When he had a long illness, twenty years later, Ministers of other denominations joined together to carryon his work.
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And, at the same time, he shows his intense, humane disapproval of the activities of hell-fire missionaries, instancing one who visited an invalid and "left a little work for the sick person to read which seemed to be full of the terrible, such words as 'God is angry! God is angry!' occurring six or eight times in a small page." "The idea," Dare remarks in deep indignation, "of putting such a book into the hands of a person whose brain was racked with fever!" No, Dare represents, in his quiet, modest way, the well-doing Nonconformist of Victorian England at his best. And, minister of religion though he was, he did not regard unbelief as the principal force he was fighting. He summed up his enemies once in a single phrase: "ignorance and filth and fatalism." He used these words in 1864, in an account of his activities during one of the worst epidemics of smallpox in the town.
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He shows us, with a horrible clarity, why the disease spread so fast. In one house he finds a father of a family who dies of it, and his body is then kept in a small room, the only sleeping apartment, for three days before it is buried. In another he comes upon three children in bed, together with smallpox and one who dies from contact with the next-door neighbour's child who has the disease. The mother has made no attempt whatever to stop the children from meeting. "I did not think it any use to keep my chi away," she tells him, "for God could find him out wherever he was, as well as He did the other."
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Throughout his work his attitude towards illness was that it was something be fought, that it could be remedied; above all that it could be remedied by better housing and sanitation. Again and again he emphasizes one simple cause of ill-health: the persistent habit in Leicester of building houses with windows, on the upper floors, that were not made to open. As late as 1864 he was complaining that new houses were still going up with this disgraceful defect. But it was not on bad builders and bad landlords that he attacked; he showed himself no less indignant at working conditions in factories. In 1862 he remarked on the heavy incidence of consumption, especially among young girls, brought on in particular by the intolerable atmosphere in which they worked. He mentions a conversation with a hosiery worker who spent fourteen to sixteen hours a day in a shop where forty men were employed "without any ventilation except opening the window which was next to impracticable, and always dangerous. In the depth of winter forty gas-lights would be burning for six hours without any outlet for the smoke until the place was like the Black Hole of Calcutta." No wonder that in the morning the man had been coughing up matter tinged with soot.
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Things showed signs of improvement after 1867, when small workshops came under government inspection on the same terms as factories. But the improvement was very gradual. There were not enough inspectors, for one thing. Moreover the number of these establishments was estimated at 5,000, and in the maze of back streets, alleyways, and courts in the Old Town it was not easy for the inspectors to find them. They were steadily disappearing, like the old dwellin houses in the district. In the 1870s the change to the large factory grew more rapid, and by the close of the century the whole of the town's industries - including the ancient hosiery industry, which had always been organized on a 'domestic' basis - had come to be centred in factories. By 1892 it could be claimed that the sanitary conditions in Leicester were excellent; and it was particularly noted that the local authority insisted on approving the plans of every new factory that was built.
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From the sixties onwards Leicester became a very much healthier place to live in; in the next fifty years the death-rate was almost halved, so that by the beginning of the twentieth century the health of Leicester, taken as a whole, was better than that of most other towns of the same size and kind in Great Britain. But it enjoyed one bad distinction: its people suffered, worse than almost any where else, from a virulent diarrhoea in the summer, which was especially dangerous to young children. In the sixties and seventies this one disease caused more than a tenth of all the deaths in the town. Much later, in the nineties, nearly 300 babies under a year old were dying of it every year. I t was not until well into the new century, in 1912, that the Medical Officer of Health could at last claim that the disease had been conquered. The causes of it, and its treatment, were extensively discussed in official reports and pamphlets.
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It was coming to be observed that the disease raged most fiercely in St Margaret's Parish, in the low-lying districts close to the river. Dr. William Johnson noted that a heavy rainfall raised the number of deaths from this diarrhoea, and he made some pertinent inquiries into the town's sewers. He found that many of them were entirely blocked with silt. As for domestic drainage - one has only to note the case of a house in a high and healthy part of the town, west of the river, in which a mother died while expecting her sixth child; its drains led into the garden and remained totally unconnected with the sewer into which they were supposed to run.This example is a good one to remember; for it shows that malignant - and, as we can now see, preventable - illnesses did not occur only in the slums. Until the fundamental principles of sanitation were understood, and effectively put into practice, all houses alike were dangerous, for rich and poor.
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The foregoing was taken verbatim (well almost) from the book "Life In Victorian Leicester" by Jack Simmons, ISBN: 0950043516, Leicestershire Museums, Art Galleries & Records Service 1976. The book is available through amazon.co.uk - just click on the following link:
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Working Class Life in Victorian Leicester:
Joseph Dare was born at Titchfield, Hampshire, in 1800. He was one of two pairs of twins in addition to twelve other children. His mother, Hannah Isaacs, was Jewish, whilst his father, Thomas Dare, came from traditional rural stock, his father having been a miller at Bramshott. The family moved to Hinckley, Leicestershire, whilst Joseph was still young and became attached to the Unitarian congregation there. Only scanty information regarding Joseph's education survives, but it seems probable that it was elementary and received locally. Family tradition speaks of Joseph sacrificing higher learning in order to enable three of his brothers to emigrate to America. Joseph's parents and five of their children joined them in 1841. What is clear, however, is that Joseph loved reading and writing. Throughout his life he wrote poetry, and a book of his verse, The Garland of Gratitude, was published in 1849.
In 1830, Joseph married a local girl, Mary Collington. They were to have nine children, though the two eldest daughters both died of fever in 1836. Joseph became a respected member of the Hinckley community as secretary of the Widows and Orphans Society, the Horticultural Society, and other voluntary bodies, in addition to running a boys' school in a room attached to the Unitarian chapel. He also acquired a reputation as an efficient accountant. In 1845, the Unitarian congregation of the Great Meeting Chapel on East Bond Street, Leicester, was about to establish a Domestic Mission in the town, and required a missionary to work amongst the town's poor. Joseph's reputation was well known to one of the leading figures in the congregation, Thomas Paget, the surgeon, and he was accordingly offered the position at a salary of �75 per annum. He accepted and the family took up residence in a house belonging to the Great Meeting, at 122 Churchgate, almost directly opposite St Margaret's Church. Joseph remained in the position of domestic missionary till 1876, when ill-health forced his retirement. He died in 1883.
The foregoing is from "Working Class Life in Victorian Leicester" by Barry Haynes, Paperback (June 1991) Leicestershire Museums, Arts & Records Service; ISBN: 085022294X. This book is available through Amazon.co.uk. Just follow the second link below.
The URL following will take you to a website that presents an account of Working-class life in Victorian Leicester. It is based on, and taken from, the detailed Annual Reports of the Leicester Domestic Mission, written by Joseph Dare between 1846-77. Working-class life in Leicester - The Joseph Dare Reports:
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