Atrocious working conditions, unbelievably long hours of labour, poor diet, overcrowded slum housing and totally inadequate sanitary arrangements made poor health and early death inevitable facts of life for the lower classes.
Manchester was not exceptional for either its housing or its health problems. What made it unusual was the number of eminent people who studied the city and wrote about those problems, from literary men like Robert Southey to medical luminaries like Dr James Phillips Kay to social scientists like Friedrich Engels.
They have left us a graphic and horrifying picture of what life was like for the poor city dweller in the 1830s and 40s, showing just what can happen when a country's rulers - admittedly distracted by a long and costly war - take their eyes off the ball during a time of major social upheaval.
As early as 1808, Southey - later to become Poet Laureate - was warning of the dangers inherent in Manchester's disgraceful housing situation.
Writing of the cellar dwellings which were mushrooming all over the working class areas of the city, he said: "These places are so many hotbeds of infection; and the poor in large towns are rarely or never without an infectious fever among them, a plague of their own which leaves the habitations of the rich unvisited."
Housing conditions and the health of the public during the middle years of the Industrial Revolution cannot be separated. But it was only when a deadly cholera epidemic took a grip on Manchester's poor areas that Kay and his associates were able to do something to change the housing and sanitary conditions in the inner city.
Writing more than a decade later, German social historian Jakob Venedey describes how the killer disease wreaked havoc in Little Ireland, one of the most notorious areas of Manchester, now long since consigned to history. Little Ireland, on a site
Venedey explains: "Little Ireland was discovered during the period of the cholera epidemic. Until then, all the inhabitants of Manchester hurried past the place and turned their gaze away. Cholera chose these dwellings of misery and came as a compassionate visitor to put an end to them.
"The authorities ordered that these dwellings should be examined, emptied and cleaned. It was then that the world first discovered this hideous hole of misery.
"Hundreds were evicted from these cellars. Hundreds rotted alive next to the unburied dead. And the endless pestilence that was raging there had taken such a grip that all fumigation and cleaning were useless and the decision had to be made to brick up many of these pits.
When the epidemic was over, the cellars were broken open and the inhabitants allowed back. But some cellars were found to be already inhabited again. The poor wretches ... emptied every morning, through the windows, with their eating and cooking vessels, the water which had flooded in overnight from the river."
Kay and his associates did not know how cholera spread and and were only groping towards ways of combatting the disease. But they believed firmly that, only by alleviating the conditions that prevailed in the worst city slums would it be possible to cure the unrest that was threatening the nation.
But the opportunity to take decisive action was lost. Engels, exploring those same areas of Manchester by night 12 years later, found pitifully little change in the circumstances of the poor.
The panic that had gripped the medical world in the summer of 1932, when they believed that cholera would become endemic in Britain if it ever got a hold, had faded as the disease died out in the autumn of that year.
