Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth

325 Pages·2014·6.49 MB·English

by  Lee Jackson

DIRTY OLD LONDON
i
ii
DIRTY OLD
LONDON
THE VICTORIAN FIGHT
AGAINST FILTH
L J
EE ACKSON
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
iii
Copyright © 2014 Lee Jackson
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Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Lee, 1971–
Dirty old London: the Victorian fight against filth/Lee Jackson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-300-19205-6 (cl: alk. paper)
1. London (England)—History—19th century. 2. Sanitation—England—
London—History—19th century. 3. London (England)—Social conditions—
19th century. I. Title.
DA683.J17 2014
363.7009421´09034—dc23
2014014234
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
iv
C
ONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 The Golden Dustman 7
2 Inglorious Mud 27
3 Night Soil 46
4 Removable Causes 69
5 Vile Bodies 105
6 The Great Unwashed 134
7 The Public Convenience 155
8 Wretched Houses 181
9 The Veil of Soot 212
Epilogue 238
Notes 244
Bibliography 270
Illustration Acknowledgements 284
Acknowledgements 285
Index 287
v
1 Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91), who designed and built London’s great network of intercepting
sewers during the mid-nineteenth century, is memorialised on the Thames Embankment, with a
bronze bust and the legend ‘flumini vincula posuit’ (‘he placed chains on the river’). The inscription
refers to the building of the embankment itself – containing both intercepting sewer and under-
ground railway – which reclaimed more than 30 acres of land.
2 From an 1831 broadside
entitled ‘Salus Populi
Suprema Lex’ (‘The
welfare of the people
is the supreme law’),
this cartoon drawn by
George Cruikshank
shows the sewage of south
London flowing into the
Thames, whilst the chief
of Southwark Water Co.
(which drew drinking
water from the foul
river) poses mid-stream,
like a filthy complacent
Britannia.
3 Bazalgette submitted a plan for building
public toilets, as part of his application
for the post of Assistant Surveyor at the
Metropolitan Commission of Sewers
in 1849. Bazalgette’s appealing classical
conveniences (for men only) would have
contained water closets and urinals,
monitored by an attendant. Tanks beneath
would have collected the urine, which
would have been periodically pumped
out and utilised as fertiliser. The toilets
were never actually built. Nonetheless,
Bazalgette found employment with
the MCS which ultimately led to him
designing London’s new sewers.
4 Charles Cochrane (1807–55), founder of the
National Philanthropic Association, exhausted
his personal wealth promoting, amongst other
projects, the street orderly system of continual
road cleansing. He also established two soup
kitchens (which included the first public toilets
for the poor), publicised workhouse abuses and
the state of slum accommodation in his radical
illustrated magazine The Poor Man’s Guardian,
and supported George Walker’s campaign
to abolish interments in overcrowded urban
graveyards. Cochrane styled himself ‘The
Agitator of the Metropolis’ and was criticised for
his rabble-rousing, confrontational approach.
5 The ‘scavengers’ who cleared
mud off the streets were not terribly
fastidious about their work, or its
impact on the public. This 1820s
print, entitled A London Nuisance,
shows a well-dressed young man
being spattered by mud, shovelled
up by street-cleaners.
6 An 1860s photographic portrait of Edwin
Chadwick (1800–90), the civil servant and
public health reformer, ‘father of the sanitary
movement’, author of An Inquiry into the
Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population
of Great Britain (1842). Chadwick persuaded
the nation that improving sanitation was
imperative. He was, however, a divisive figure,
disliked by both commercial interests and
representatives of local government for his
‘tyrannical’ centralising agenda. Engineers
and surveyors, likewise, resented his dogmatic
certainties about sewers and sewerage. One of
his many critics remarked: ‘No one was to be
clean except by Chadwick’s patent soap.’
7 An 1850 model plan for public baths and washhouses, costing £2,000, by Price Pritchard Baly.
The plan was published (with alternatives costing £4,000 and £8,500) by the Committee for
Promoting the Establishment of Baths and Washhouses. Note the typical features: separate entrances
for men and women, and different classes of bathers; and a modestly sized ‘plunge bath’ (as opposed
to the grander swimming pool of the late-Victorian period).