‘Dirty Old London,’ by Lee Jackson
ByJO BAKER DEC. 12, 2014 The Ne w York Times
Dirty Father Thames, a Punch cartoon, 1848.CreditCollection of Lee Jackson
In 1827, in a pamphlet called “The Dolphin,” a British journalist named John Wright described the source from which the Grand Junction Water Works Company was drawing its supply for the city of London. His revelation caused a scandal.
The company, which provided the fashionable West End with water for its mains, was pumping it directly from the lower reaches of the Thames, in the 19th century a famously unwholesome stretch. This alone might seem bad enough, but it wasn’t the real cause of outrage. Neither was the disclosure that the water wasn’t treated in any way. It wasn’t allowed to rest in a reservoir so impurities might settle out, nor was there any filtration. Anything lurking in the river — churned-up silt, minnows, worms — could come slipping out of the scullery tap in any of the 7,000 households the company supplied.
None of this was considered particularly scandal-worthy either. Londoners were used to happenstance arrangements when it came to their water supply. In the slums, or “rookeries,” there might be one standpipe for a whole tenement building. Or there might be none, which meant residents had to buy their water by the bucket from a nearby shop or pub. Even in the wealthier parts of town, an ad hoc supply was accepted as quite normal, a problem for the individual (or the individual’s servants) rather than the government.
What actually caused the scandal was the realization that the “dolphin” of the pamphlet’s title (a marker buoy, indicating the presence of the water company’s intake pipe, intended to warn off river traffic) was bobbing within yards of the outfall of a major sewer. The water with which London’s elite were having their floors mopped, their clothes laundered, their dishes washed; the water they were shaving with, washing their faces in, heating up for endless cups of tea, contained their own diluted effluent.
The public’s outrage was due to distaste as much as fear of disease. Doctors considered tainted water to be inimical to health, but there was no proof that it transmitted infection. Rather, disease was, according to the prevailing wisdom, transmitted by “miasmas” or “bad air.” There’s a telling instance of this misconception in H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel, “She,” which portrays the central characters as terrified of catching malarial fever from the miasmas of an African swamp. The fact that they’re already covered with mosquito bites is hardly a concern.
It was in response to this supposed problem of “bad air” that flush toilets had been introduced in the first place: what had previously piled up for weeks in privies and cesspools, filling households with supposedly dangerous vapors, was now flushed away in seconds. Out of sight, out of mind. But since it was flushed into the sewers, and the sewers spewed directly into the Thames, and the Thames was a major source of drinking water, it could hardly remain out of sight for long. The Dolphin scandal was just one unintended consequence of a well-meaning but ill-founded effort to clean up the capital.
And it did need cleaning up. We get glimpses of London dirt in the literature of the day — Jo in “Bleak House” is a “crossing sweeper”; in “The Water Babies,” Tom is a grimy chimney sweep; the drinking water in “The Happy Prince” is murky and unpalatable — and yet, perhaps because it was common knowledge, the realities of filth were rarely dwelt upon. But where literature gives only glimpses, in “Dirty Old London” Lee Jackson stops to have a good poke around — and consider in fascinating, sometimes gruesome detail, the filth and nuisances of the time. Here, in plain sight (and smell), are the foul water, the unwashed bodies, the heaped-up night soil and decaying corpses that are usually just hinted at in the fiction of the period.
Given the sheer quantity and variety of nastiness Jackson describes, it’s striking that there was never a united effort to cleanse the city. People were used to “dirty old London,” and a laissez-faire attitude prevailed. It took a visionary or a radical or someone who had spotted a way to make a name or a fortune to bother to intervene. Or a timely cholera epidemic.
So what cleaned London up — though, as Jackson points out, the work remains unfinished — was a series of ad hoc interventions, some grand, some small-scale, some enduring and some stopgap. Jackson is deft in his portrayal of the torturous progress of these schemes as they’re deflected and delayed, diminished by vested interest, lack of funds and snobbery, and even, on occasion, by prudishness. The British incapacity to talk rationally about “this kind of thing” may have given rise to an impressive range of euphemisms, but it also caused real difficulties. London’s local government was painfully slow to provide public toilets for women because certain vestrymen, when trying to discuss the matter, ended up dissolving into schoolboy snickering.
Utterly engrossing in its own right, “Dirty Old London” also serves as an illuminating companion to Victorian literature. With Jackson’s book in hand, we know the injuries a sweep like Tom could expect to sustain, exactly what was in the water in “The Happy Prince” and the reality of what Jo was sweeping in “Bleak House” — not just mud or manure, it turns out, but a black adhesive paste compounded of grit, abraded iron and wet dung, sticky enough to “suck off your boots.” The book is replete with such detail. This makes for queasy reading, but it’s hard to look away.