Contemporary reviews started appearing in other publications shortly after the “Labour and the Poor” investigation commenced, of which a number were reprinted in The Morning Chronicle.
We have transcribed a selection of these to give an idea of how the letters were being received at the time, which you can find below. Each article has links to the other articles at the top and bottom of the page.
The Morning Chronicle, Monday, December 31, 1849.
If, as has been often said, to know an evil is to be half-way to a remedy, The Morning Chronicle has done good service to humanity in dispatching its special correspondents to inquire into and state the actual condition of our humbler fellow-citizens throughout the kingdom. The inquiry has now proceeded so far, and such a variety of interesting facts have been elicited, that we purpose, in our succeeding numbers, to offer a few remarks, although we should be sorry were our doing so the occasion of preventing any single one of our readers from studying the originals for himself. … A practical effect, too, has been already produced by the disclosures that have been made. Mr. S. Herbert has issued his appeal in behalf of one particularly suffering class, and a society has been formed to carry his benevolent suggestion into operation, and no doubt other efforts of the same kind will follow. … With the exception of those who believe that division of labour and industrial competition is a panacea for all our social evils, or at least that all evils which cannot be so cured are unworthy the notice of a sensible man, the rest of the world will feel much obliged to the journal in question for the trouble and expense it has gone to to get at the truth. We venture to predict that this series of papers will be found by the future historian to be one of the most valuable statistical muniments ever put together, and we hope that when the history of the present time shall hereafter be composed, the writer will be able to draw as flattering a comparison between the condition of the labourer then and now as a certain popular historian has instituted between the present and past.—Guardian.
The Morning Chronicle, Monday, December 31, 1849.