The Classic Slum: The First Quarter Of The Century

At the center of Roberts' account is the First World War. Roberts' argues that before the war, most of the slum dwellers were part of an undermass. Men and women who had unskilled work, if they had any work at all, whose lives were marked by poverty and the constant quest for money to buy food or pay the rent. He dismisses those who look back on the period as some sort of golden age, arguing instead that the grinding poverty held little rosiness for most of Salford's population. Their lives were rarely happy and many people coped simply through drink, or violence.
The First World War, Robert's suggests led to a dramatic change. This is, he argues, not simply in the way that employment patterns changed, or the fact that many men joined up, the war he says, "cracked the form of English lower-class life and began an erosion of its
Roberts states, “The First World War cracked the form of English lower-class and began an erosion of its socio-economic layers that has continued to this day” (186). Although society was beginning to change rapidly after the war, it did take some time for all the liberal ambitions to truly reach the majority of the working people in slums. Still, the Great War did begin to solve some of the problems. “By around 1916 “abject poverty began to disappear from the neighborhoods. Children looked better fed. There were far fewer prosecutions for child neglect.” (203). The people living in these slums had deserved this for all of their hard work—without them England would not have grown into the industrial and military powerhouse it was around and just after the Edwardian period. Literacy, health, and general working conditions improved and ushered in a new age in