Leafing through Sir Edwin Chadwick’s Report to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), Dalrymple lights upon illustrations of workmen’s housing. It is, he writes,
infinitely better, aesthetically speaking, than almost anything built for the last hundred years. If there is one thing that has not improved, it is architecture.
