No community in history had ever been submitted to so searching an ...

No community in history had ever been submitted to so searching an examination.' Copied or summarized in the Press, the Blue Books created a new attitude to affairs; they provided fresh topics for novelists and fresh themes for poets.

Sybil is a Blue Book in fiction; The Cry of the Children a Blue Book in verse. With the parliamentary inquiries must be ranged the local investigations made by individuals, societies, and municipalities.

I have spoken of Kay-Shuttleworth's Report on Manchester. In a few years a score of great towns, Bristol, Westminster, Southwark, Hull, Liverpool, Leeds, had all been put through the same mill and with much the same results.' Douglas Jerrold, who had once produced an unsuccessful play called The Factory Girl, complained that in 1833 no one was

thinking about the poor

and in 1839 no one was thinking about anything else.

But in 1839 the depths had not been sounded.

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