Historical story

Land of hovels and enslavement

In connection with the theme Poor &Rich for the Month of History, an interview with historian Auke van der Woud, author of the groundbreaking book Kingdom full of slums. “I was struck by the sheer scale. The slums occurred in all cities and in the countryside.'

The predominant image is that the Netherlands was a respectable, bourgeois society in the 19th century. With his book Kingdom full of slums. Slums and Dirt in the Nineteenth Century Van der Woud rejects this idea. The Netherlands was a hard-line society in which almost half of the population languished in slums and cellars. On the contrary, he shows the dark side of industrial growth and mass migration to the cities. After 1850, the Netherlands changes into a slum:a segregated society in which half the population languishes in draughty slums, cellars and people's warehouses, with jenever as the only distraction. Around 1900, two of the total five million Dutch people live in conditions that are not inferior to the modern slums from Mumbai or Lagos. Only then did the government step in.

‘My book shows the dark side of progress,’ says Van der Woud in a café in the center of Amsterdam – one of the worst slums in the Netherlands more than a century ago. During his research, De Groninger discovered that dilapidation was not a major city problem. ‘I wanted to make a book about the 19th-century city. My plan was to describe it from the outside in, peel by peel. But when I started, I was shocked by the sheer size of the slums. I was familiar with literature, such as the 1901 book by the journalist Louis Hermans, Slums and slums. But when I started calculating how many Dutch people lived in one-room houses, I was struck by the enormous scale:it was a national problem. The slums occurred in all cities and in the countryside. And it wasn't new:it had been around since the 17th century. The point was:the figures were available, but there was no matching historical picture yet.'

Lease arrears

“If a tenant was unable to pay, appropriate measures were taken. A journalist from the Deventer Dagblad conducted research in the middle of winter and reported on January 6, 1894:“In the courtyard in the Walstraat, the residents of a house had to sleep that night, while the front door had been removed by the owner. (…) The box bed was right in front of the front door at a distance of 3 to 4 meters, while there was only a single blanket in the house and that on a night of 27 to 28 degrees of frost. The cause is the non-payment of rent.”' Fragment from Kingdom full of slums.

Is that image, that a very large part of the population languished in one-room houses in 1900, insufficiently recognized in the Netherlands? 'Yes. In my book I mention Huizinga, who said that we Dutch were all bourgeois and clean, from high to low. But the reality is different. The poor were not “citizens” by 19th-century standards. They did not belong to the "thinking part of the nation". They were working people who had to shut up. The Netherlands was a class society. But that fact did not fit with our 20th-century self-image. Huizinga made a moral judgment about that period from a later perspective.'

On the other hand:the poor did not resist their misery. “Poverty was taken for granted. The socialist sources may have wanted an uprising, but other sources indicate:the masses are not moving. One suffered his fate. I recently saw a TV interview with some country boys about the budget cuts of the new cabinet. They shrugged their shoulders:'we have to pay anyway'. That is defeatism and that is timeless:accepting your subordination. In 1897 the journalist Pieter Brooshooft did not believe the misery he found in the slums of The Hague. But there was also an atmosphere of resignation. Not like:we're going to do something about it!'

Spoiled food

The lesser man, with his perpetually empty stomach and lack of money for traders in spoiled food, became the ideal loyal customer. Amsterdam judges pointed out that it was unimaginable for the more affluent what was sold and eaten in some neighborhoods. The inspectors had noted "that rotten fruits thrown away on dung heaps, including China's apples, are still sought out and eaten by the meager part of the residents, especially poor children." (…) When a judge was nearby, spoiled butter was offered on the market as wagon grease, but as soon as he had lifted his heels, it was sold again as butter.' Fragment from Kingdom full of slums.

To what extent can you compare the favelas of the Third World with the Dutch slums of 1900? "There is a clear analogy. I recently read a report in NRC Handelsblad about Nairobi in Kenya. It reminded me strongly of the Dutch situation a century ago. First, the accumulation of dirt in the streets. The people had only shelter, otherwise there was absolutely nothing to facilities or schools. At the same time, in the slums of the 19th century, all kinds of poor lived together. It was not just antisocial families or fringe figures without work or structure that lived there. There were also educated workers who read newspapers and books. People who fought in 'neat poverty' to give their children a more dignified existence. You see that in the Third World as well. A colleague of mine lived in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She knew someone from university who lived in the slums with his family. Every day he put on smart clothes and had to walk a long way to the bus. Such people show the idea of ​​progress in a nutshell.'

Could the 19th-century Dutch slum dweller rise up the social ladder? Social stratification in 1850 was still very static. Marriage was one of the few ways to move up. The demographer Frans van Poppel told me that the marriage market expanded as travel became easier and cheaper at the end of the 19th century. By 1900 it had become easier to break through segregation. In Amsterdam, the worst slums were in the Jordaan, in the Jewish quarter around Waterlooplein and in the city center. The alleys were teeming with one-room houses. I deliberately did not mention the other districts. De Pijp, for example, was not a typical poor neighbourhood. Around 1900 it was said that the houses here were deficient and noisy due to the revolutionary construction, but the journalist Louis Hermans wrote:“For the Jordanians they are palaces”. For the vast majority of them, rents in De Pijp were far too high.'

Help the Church alleviate the plight of the poor? "I didn't specifically look for it, but I didn't come across it among Catholics. I did occasionally find something about Protestant ministers going into the slums, into the other world. There were also notables, such as Van Eeghen, who undertook something for the poor on the basis of Christian values:noblesse oblige (nobility obliged to good deeds). Louis Hermans thought it a scandal that the church did so little. But that's easy to say. Everything was done on a voluntary basis. For a long time there was no legislation to tackle poverty. Poverty was a really difficult issue.”

'Kingdom of the slums'

Hermans called the Jordaan 'the kingdom of the slums' in 1901. There was no other place in the Netherlands with such a high concentration of corridors that ended at run-down rooms. The Jordaan was constructed in the seventeenth century; then the houses had small gardens. At the end of the nineteenth century, these had been used up to the last square meter for rental purposes. Helena Mercier gave her readers an impression of the dim Hades hidden behind the street facades. (...) "The filthy walls are full of doors and windows on one or both sides." (…) Here and there (although it is only just in the afternoon) one sees a burning kerosene lamp, in which a shabby figure is bent over sewing.' Fragment from Kingdom full of slums.

The citizens who were involved in the slums were journalists and researchers. What drove them? ‘Around 1850 there was already an undercurrent of people who thought:it cannot be like this with our fellow man. At the World's Fair in London, small, affordable model homes designed especially for workers were shown for the first time. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, had committed himself to that. In the Netherlands, the Royal Institute of Engineers, KIVI, also wanted to do something similar. In 1854, therefore, the condition of the workers' houses was mapped out, which were already very bad at the time. On paper, the research was done at the request of King William III, but he showed no apparent interest in the report.'

When was the government going to tackle the dilapidation? ‘The turning point in the Netherlands came after 1880. Partly due to the publications of journalists, young liberal and Christian MPs in particular started to press for tackling the dilapidation. At the time, this was mainly a legal, constitutional debate. It took a long time before concrete steps were taken. First there were associations that started with social housing for workers. An example of this is the barracks at the end of the Marnixstraat in Amsterdam, which started after 1877. There they built rooms of 4 by 5 meters, with running water, a toilet and a box bed. That was not a crazy room for a working-class family with three children! That became the model for the whole street. The landlord did make demands:the house had to be clean and you couldn't just hammer a nail into the wall. There was a supervisor who supervised the discipline.'

The Boldoot Wagon

Amsterdam started in 1870 with the construction of a sewer system. But it took until 1934 before poor neighborhoods such as the Jordaan were also connected. Until then, the 'Boldootwagen' drove by in the evening for those who did not have a toilet or cesspool.

What happened to the slums when the decent workers left here? ‘After 1900 the slums started to ‘segregate’. Many take the step towards decent poverty in other neighbourhoods, so neighborhoods such as the Jordaan increasingly became the domain of the underprivileged laggards. In that sense, the contrast between the slums and the rest of the city became even greater in the 20th century. The misery and the housing shortage actually continued there until the 1960s.'

In your foreword you quote the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who stated that 'a society that starts to have too many members can only survive through enslavement'. Did that also happen in the 19th-century Netherlands? “That bondage was definitely there. And that continues even now, although it is of course much more subtle. On the other hand:I am also interested in the belief in the makeable man, as you see it in modernism during the interwar period. You should compare the Netherlands in 1900 with an Eastern European country today. Like Bulgaria, where crime is almost the only thing that is effectively organized. You can already see how difficult it is to create institutions there that serve the general interest, that provide security and peace of mind. But when you have laid the material foundation, the next step is emancipation:to progress spiritually. That is what modernism wanted. I think that's a great subject.'

Are you done with the 19th century now? "No, I'm not done with that yet. In 1898 the journalist P.H. Ritter in his book Half a century I look back with satisfaction on the progress since 1848. But it is mainly material. The intellectual avant-garde, such as Frederik van Eeden, is critical of this. They lack the spiritual element. It was actually like today:everyone is busy, busy, busy, while at the same time you think:why are you doing it anyway? Around 1900 people have the feeling that things must be different in the 20th century. You also see this with artists, such as the painter G.H. Breitner and the playwright Herman Heijermans. That's how I end my book. In 1898 he wrote the autobiographical novel Kamertjeszonde, about a man's relationship with a married woman. Something that was considered very indecent at the time. But the book became a bestseller. It marks the revolt against the oppressive morality of the existing order. The book is the expression of a desire for emancipation, for liberation from oppression. Heijermans thus bids farewell to the 19th century. The modernity of the 20th century can already be felt at the end of the 19th century, and that fascinates me.'

1990 Professor of Architectural History (VU)2002 Professor of History of Architecture and Urbanism (RuG) 2006 A new world. The emergence of the modern Netherlands 2010 Kingdom full of slums. Slums and Dirt in the Nineteenth Century