The Workers A survey in revealed that the average lifespan of workers was lower than that of any other social group in cities: it was years in Birmingham, in Manchester, in Derby. More people died, and died at a younger age, in the new industrial cities, than in the villages they had come from. Half the children failed to survive beyond the age of five. The increase in the population of cities was because of immigrants, rather than by an increase in the number of children born to families who already lived there.
Deaths were primarily caused by epidemics of disease that sprang from the pollution of water, like cholera and typhoid, or of the air, T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY like tuberculosis. More than , people died from an outbreak of cholera in . Until late in the nineteenth century, municipal authorities were negligent in attending to these dangerous conditions of life and the medical knowledge to understand and cure these diseases was unknown.