This Event Can Be Seen To Encapsulate Much Of The Perception About The Decade

This event can be seen to encapsulate much of the perception about the decade as a whole; one of struggle and conflict between workers and their managers.
Urbanisation was a major factor during the period. Much of this was concentrated in London and Middlesex (as well as Lancashire, Durham, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, west-central and parts of south Wales). Increasing ground rents in the period were beginning to drive many of the middle and upper classes to the city limits. The term 'Greater London' was used for the first time in the 1881 Census; an area that was growing the most rapidly. During the 1870s, rural population experienced an absolute decline for the first time since records began while urban population increased by 75% in some cases. In response to this there was a building boom in London during the 1880s. By the middle of the next decade, in London and Middlesex, nearly half of the population had been born elsewhere. While this massive urban growth was positive for the city in many ways, it also meant more crowding, insufficient housing, increasing rents and costs and the dangers of disease that accompany such conditions.
Harris discusses the fall in fertility during the 1880s. Commentators at the time put it down to the strain of urban living and the modern education system eroding human procreative powers. This fall in the birth rate concerned many contemporaries at the time, and it has been debated at length by historians ever since. It is interesting that it coincided with the Great Depression, and another, later drop coincided with a fall in real wages in 1900. This general atmosphere of depression, economic an social, was perhaps at its most acute during the 1880s, and although it actually spanned over twenty years, it is this decade in particular that is remembered as a decade of crisis.
During the 1880s, Charles Booth began his great survey of the London poor entitled London Life and Labour. this would become an important work in drawing attention to the want of the working class in the capital. It marked a realisation, or appreciation, of what was becoming a serious problem of poverty and low living. In one passage, he describes the typical working woman (who was often only partly-employed) as generally elderly, infirm, penniless and a widow she is nervous and timid, and takes work at whatever price it may be offered to her. A major reason why the decade is seen as one of crisis, then, is that it was one of the earliest times that the poverty and dire situation of the working classes in London was forced to the attention of the wider public. Poverty was the biggest single fact of contemporary existence. Poverty, poor sanitation and over-crowding were nothing new to the 1880s, but with Booth's work, and the later work of Rowntree, the situation was increasingly recognised.