Dickens' London: ...Victorian London was the largest, most spectacular city in the world.
While Britain was experiencing the Industrial Revolution, its capital was both
reaping the benefits and suffering the consequences. In 1800 the population of
London was around a million souls. That number would swell to 4.5 million by
1880. While fashionable areas like Regent and Oxford streets were growing in the
west, new docks supporting the city's place as the world's trade center were
being built in the east. Perhaps the biggest impact on the growth of London was
the coming of the railroad in the 1830s which displaced thousands and
accelerated the expansion of the city.
The price of this explosive growth and domination of world trade was untold
squalor and filth. In his excellent biography, Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes that
"If a late twentieth-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or
house of the period, he would be literally sick - sick with the smells, sick
with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him".
Imagine yourself in the London of the early 19th century. The homes of the
upper and middle class exist in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty
and filth. Rich and poor alike are thrown together in the crowded city streets.
Street sweepers attempt to keep the streets clean of manure, the result of
thousands of horse-drawn vehicles. The city's thousands of chimney pots are
belching coal smoke, resulting in soot which seems to settle everywhere. In many
parts of the city raw sewage flows in gutters that empty into the Thames. Street
vendors hawking their wares add to the cacophony of street noises. Pick-pockets,
prostitutes, drunks, beggars, and vagabonds of every description add to the
colorful multitude.
Personal cleanliness is not a big priority, nor is clean laundry. In close,
crowded rooms the smell of unwashed bodies is stifling. It is unbearably hot by
the fire, numbingly cold away from it.
At night the major streets are lit with feeble gas lamps. Side and secondary
streets may not be lit at all and link bearers are hired to guide the traveler
to his destination. Inside, a candle or oil lamp struggles against the darkness
and blacken the ceilings.
Until the second half of the 19th century London residents were still
drinking water from the very same portions of the Thames that the open sewers
were discharging into. Several outbreaks of Cholera in the mid 19th century,
along with The Great Stink of 1858, when the stench of the Thames caused
Parliament to recess, brought a cry for action. The link between drinking water
tainted with sewage and the incidence of disease slowly dawned on the
Victorians. Dr John Snow proved that all victims in a Soho area cholera outbreak
drew water from the same Broad Street pump.
Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the new Metropolitan Board of Works
(1855), put into effect a plan, completed in 1875, which finally provided
adequate sewers to serve the city. In addition, laws were put in effect which
prevented companies supplying drinking water from drawing water from the most
heavily tainted parts of the Thames and required them to provide some type of
filtration.
After the Stage Carriages Act of 1832 the hackney cab was gradually replaced
by the omnibus as a means of moving about the city. By 1900 3000 horse-drawn
buses were carrying 500 million passengers a year. A traffic count in Cheapside
and London Bridge in 1850 showed a thousand vehicles an hour passing through
these areas during the day. All of this added up to an incredible amount of
manure which had to be removed from the streets. In wet weather straw was
scattered in walkways, storefronts, and in carriages to try to soak up the mud
and wet.
Cattle were driven through the streets until the mid 19th century. In an
article for Household Words in March 1851 Dickens, with characteristic sarcasm,
describes the environmental impact of having live cattle markets and
slaughterhouses in the city:
"In half a quarter of a mile`s length of Whitechapel, at one time, there shall
be six hundred newly slaughtered oxen hanging up, and seven hundred sheep but,
the more the merrier proof of prosperity. Hard by Snow Hill and Warwick Lane,
you shall see the little children, inured to sights of brutality from their
birth, trotting along the alleys, mingled with troops of horribly busy pigs, up
to their ankles in blood but it makes the young rascals hardy. Into the
imperfect sewers of this overgrown city, you shall have the immense mass of
corruption, engendered by these practices, lazily thrown out of sight, to rise,
in poisonous gases, into your house at night, when your sleeping children will
most readily absorb them, and to find its languid way, at last, into the river
that you drink".
In Oliver Twist, Dickens describes the scene as Oliver and Bill Sikes travel
through the Smithfield live-cattle market on their way to burglarize the Maylie
home:
It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and
mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle,
and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung
heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many
temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with
sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long Smithfield Market lines of
beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers,
boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together
in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and
plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs,
the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the
ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the
crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and
discordant dim that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed,
unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting
in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which
quite confounded the senses.
The Smithfield live-cattle market was finally moved out of the city to
slaughterhouses in Islington in 1855. ...
The Victorian answer to dealing with the poor and indigent was the New Poor
Law, enacted in 1834. Previously it had been the burden of the parishes to take
care of the poor. The new law required parishes to band together and create
regional workhouses where aid could be applied for. The workhouse was little
more than a prison for the poor. Civil liberties were denied, families were
separated, and human dignity was destroyed. The true poor often went to great
lengths to avoid this relief.
With the turn of the century and Queen Victoria's death in 1901 the Victorian
period came to a close. Many of the ills of the 19th century were remedied
through education, technology and social reform...
