One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Professor Owen, Britain’s leading comparative anatomist and palaeonto-logist and the superintendent of the British Museum’s natural history departments, closed his wide-ranging presidential address to the Leeds meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September 1858 with an account of the progress of two emergent branches of science, statistical and sanitary science. The two were linked by their importance to ‘the prosperity of nations and the well-being of mankind’. Hitherto the official response to plague, fever, and – as recently as 1854 – a countrywide epidemic of cholera had been chiefly reactive. Isolation and quarantine were employed, whereas what were needed were proactive preventive measures in the interests of public health. The recently developed science of statistics, which promoted the study of the comparative rates of mortality in different districts, the investigation of conditions, and the search for causes of disease, showed the way forward. Owen praised the dedicated sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick, whose Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain of 1842 had connected contagious diseases with the inadequate sanitary conditions of cities, including London, which had doubled in size and population in the first half of the nineteenth century.14

  By 1858 Chadwick’s star was waning; he had antagonised politicians, engineers, and civil servants alike with his arrogance and obstinacy, and was forcibly retired in 1854 on a generous pension of £1,000 per annum.15 Though he was removed from his official position, his sincerely held but mistaken views on how to solve the urgent problems of urban living were shared by most people. They did not foresee the catastrophic effects of his well-meaning efforts to alleviate filthy conditions in overcrowded areas of London and other cities. He advocated the extension of the use of water closets by individual households to replace the existing method of collecting effluent in cesspools which were regularly emptied by so-called ‘nightsoil men’, who sold the contents as fertiliser to farmers outside the metropolis.16 Chadwick’s intervention made things worse, as the sewers, originally built to carry rainwater into the Thames, now held raw sewage from water closets; the resulting mixture was then extracted by water companies to be drunk by their customers.17 The Thames, swelled further by effluent from its many tributaries, flowed to and from the sea without getting rid of its toxic load. The problem, clear for all to see (and smell) in the summer of 1858, had to be solved.

  The study of public health which Chadwick had pioneered was now in the hands of other reformers, medical men like John Snow and John Simon, and engineers like Bazalgette, rather than civil servants like Chadwick. Many of them, along with Owen and most public officials, shared Chadwick’s mistaken ‘miasma’ theory, the view that the transmission of cholera and other contagious diseases was airborne, when the true source of infection was waterborne bacteria. In Britain only Dr John Snow worked it out; during the 1854 cholera epidemic he famously traced the exceptionally high incidence of death in a particular area of Soho to the Broad Street pump from which inhabitants drew their (untreated) drinking water. In his lifetime Snow was celebrated as an early advocate of anaesthesia – he used chloroform for the births of two of Queen Victoria’s children – but his truly pioneering theory of waterborne disease was not accepted by his colleagues until long after his untimely death at the age of forty-five. By one of those quirks of history he died of a stroke on 16 June 1858, the hottest day hitherto recorded. Though some of Snow’s colleagues began to accept his theory in the 1860s, it was not until some years after Robert Koch had identified the bacterial cause of cholera in 1883 that Snow’s work became generally recognised.18

  Meanwhile Professor Owen in September 1858 spoke, like everyone else, of the ‘atmospheric impurity’ and ‘noxious and morbific power’ of the sewage-filled Thames which became critical ‘summer after summer’. While he believed in the miasmic theory of disease, Owen nonetheless recognised the need for efficient drainage and, at the end of this summer to end all summers, he hoped that the ‘skill of our engineers’ would ‘meet the call, and leave nothing but the rainfall of the metropolis to seek its natural receptacle – the Thames’.19 Though not an expert in sanitary matters, and disinclined to make political points in this scientific forum, Owen permitted himself some criticism of the authorities. The fact that we pollute by our household waste products ‘the noble river bisecting the metropolis and washing the very walls of our Houses of Parliament’ was a ‘flagrant sign of the desert and uncultivated state of a field where science and practice have still to cooperate for the public benefit’.20 This was true, despite the fact that four years earlier John Snow had produced statistically drawn evidence from the Broad Street pump and elsewhere and had stated in clear terms the connection between contaminated water and disease. Snow could not have made his point more clearly than he did in a letter to The Times in June 1856 entitled ‘Cholera and the Water Supply’, in which he described his own inquiries during the 1854 cholera outbreak into the water supplies of two of London’s water companies, the Southwark and Vauxhall Company and the Lambeth Company. The former supplied impure water, he wrote, the latter pure, and the ratio of deaths from cholera of recipients of water from the two companies was six to one. A brief report of his findings, he said, had been published in the Medical Times in September and October 1854. He finished his letter with the opinion that ‘many other diseases, besides cholera, can be shown to be aggravated by water containing sewage’.21

  Though Snow’s arguments were ignored, the sewage problem insisted on being tackled in 1858, when the summer reached a sustained level of heat which surpassed the previous hottest recorded summers, those of 1846 and of the immediately previous year, 1857.22 By the time Owen added his voice in September 1858 to those of newspapers from The Times to the specialist paper the Builder and a number of dogged parliamentarians who had been raising the question of the filthy Thames every summer for at least ten years, legislation was in place. Bazalgette, who himself had offered plans and detailed suggestions for improvements on several occasions in previous years, was at last given the go-ahead – and the required finance – to build his intercepting sewers.

  In January 1856 Bazalgette had been appointed chief engineer to the newly formed Metropolitan Board of Works, and he had begun immediately to suggest a drainage system to take sewage out of London to the north and south of the Thames, but was met with obstruction. Though everyone could see that something had to be done, there was little agreement, even among engineers, let alone politicians and civil servants, about how to set about solving the drainage problem. Worse than that was the intransigence and resistance to spending money among the many vested interests which were inevitably involved: vestries, local paving boards, private water companies, Commissioners of Sewers, MPs anxious not to burden their constituents with the cost of improvements.23 Even now, in summer 1858, when at last something was going to be done, debates went on in the unbearably hot chambers of Westminster about who should pay – just Londoners or all of Britain? – and which of several engineering plans under consideration should be adopted.

  While newspaper editors fumed about politicians’ time-wasting and hair-splitting and people who lived near the offensive Thames fled their homes, if they could – Dante Gabriel Rossetti left his rooms near Blackfriars Bridge to take refuge from ‘the river stink’ at the home of his friend William Morris in Red Lion Square24 – the issue was forced on 30 June 1858. On that day, after a whole month of unusually high temperatures, parliament itself could stand the heat and stench no longer. For weeks debates and committee meetings had taken place in horrendous conditions, but everyone had persevered, no doubt because the two Houses of Parliament were trying to complete the legislative programme for the session, which was due to end by the beginning of August at the latest. On Wednesday, 30 June, with the noon temperature recorded in Hyde Park as 75 °F (24 °C), by no means the hottest of the month, but following on from four weeks of even hotter days, one roomful of conscientious committee members admitted defeat. As
The Times recorded with undisguised glee on the following Saturday, the committee inquiring into the Bank Acts gave up:

  A sudden rush from the room took place, foremost among them being the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Disraeli], who, with a mass of papers in one hand and with his pocket handkerchief clutched in the other, and applied closely to his nose, with body half bent, hastened in dismay from the pestilential odour, followed closely by Sir James Graham, who seemed to be attacked by a sudden fit of expectoration; Mr Gladstone also paid particular attention to his nose … The other members of the committee also precipitately quitted the pestilential apartment, the disordered state of their papers, which they carried in their hands, showing how imperatively they had received notice to quit.25

  All the newspapers noted in the following days and weeks that it had taken impossible conditions on their own doorstep to galvanise politicians into action. The result was indeed speedily arrived at. Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons – the prime minister, Lord Derby, being a member of the House of Lords – brought in a bill for cleansing the Thames on 15 July; it rattled through committee and was passed into law on 2 August, the last day of the session. Disraeli became the hero of the hour, though it was noted that his and his government’s energies were called into action only when they were themselves inconvenienced beyond bearing. In an article ironically entitled ‘The Silver Thames’, Edwin Lankester, a medical reformer who had helped John Snow a few years earlier by examining his water samples under a microscope, wrote in the weekly journal the Athenaeum on 17 July, two days after Disraeli’s bill was introduced:

  London suffers the worst evils of a double government. With a municipality on the one hand, having no power or influence over nine-tenths of the inhabitants, and an imperial legislature on the other hand, composed, for the most part, of persons who know little, and care less, about London, it is no wonder that this great city lacks that supervision which its health demands. But the time has come when the state of the Thames threatens even the existence of the legislature on its banks; and we may have to thank the accident of the locality of the Houses of Parliament for the suppression of the foulest nuisance that ever disgraced the annals of a nation.

  Lankester goes on to remark that the only remedy is to divert the sewage away from London, no matter what it costs.26

  Disraeli announced that, after much debate, it had been decided that Londoners would bear the cost, estimated at £3 million, through the levy of a special tax over forty years at the rate of not more than three pence in the pound, the whole to be guaranteed by the government; the work was to take about five years. MPs immediately raised questions about the details; many were doubtful about the competence of the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was tasked with taking the project forward. In the end, however, after speedy readings in the two Houses of Parliament, Disraeli’s bill was passed and work could begin.

  A critical and still sceptical press followed every step taken. On Saturday, 24 July the satirical magazine Punch, which had already carried lurid caricatures of Old Father Thames as a skeleton, gloomily prophesied that the venture would more likely take ten years and cost £10 million.27 The Times, after constant agitation for action, praised the government for at last making a move, though its editorial on 21 July reminded readers that the newspaper had been complaining for ten years about the state of the Thames, parti-cularly in summer, and had been critical of the slow reaction of the authorities and the constant disagreements among engineers and other so-called experts. Thank goodness, wrote the editor of The Times, for the parti-cularly hot fortnight in June which ‘did for the administration of the metropolis what the Bengal mutinies did for the administration of India’.28 The reference was to another bill making progress – in this case rather slow progress – through parliament, namely the India Bill which, following the Sepoy rebellion against the British army of 1857–8, was to remove the administration of India from the East India Company and bring it under the direct rule of the British government. The first India Bill had been brought in by the Whig prime minister Lord Palmerston in February 1858. After the unexpected advent of Lord Derby’s Tory government at the end of February, Disraeli took on the task of getting it through parliament.

  The rise of Disraeli

  Disraeli had tasted power only once, and that briefly, when he was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer by the Tory leader Edward Stanley, 14th earl of Derby, in the ten-month administration of 1852. His budget was poorly received, and contributed to his and Derby’s swift fall from power. At the beginning of 1858 the popular elder statesman Lord Palmerston led a Liberal administration which had been in charge since 1855. Palmerston was an experienced politician, an easy-going aristocrat who had served in many administrations, most successfully as a patriotic foreign secretary. This was his first stint as premier; in 1858 he was a large, energetic man of seventy-two. He had his critics in the press. He was known for giving jobs to his relations, and also for his slack sexual mores. There was a carelessness about him which could charm but also irritate observers. One person who studied him closely was Karl Marx, living in political exile in north London. At the end of 1853 Marx wrote a series of articles on Palmerston, which were published in England in the People’s Paper, the Chartist newspaper owned and edited by Ernest Jones, and in America by Horace Greeley’s liberal paper the New York Daily Tribune.

  Marx, who subjected the politics of Britain and Europe to forensic scrutiny in his regular articles for these newspapers, opened his series on Palmerston with a striking allusion to Orlando Furioso, Ariosto’s sixteenth-century epic poem, in which the young man Ruggiero falls for the wiles of the sorceress Alcina. Palmerston, though in opposition at the time, had become a favourite of the people once more and looked likely to return to power:

  Ruggiero is again and again fascinated by the false charms of Alcina, which he knows to disguise an old witch … and the knight errant cannot withstand falling in love with her anew whom he knows to have transmuted all her former adorers into asses and other beasts. The English public is another Ruggiero, and Palmerston is another Alcina.29

  Though he was not far off seventy years of age and had been on the ‘public stage’, as Marx said, since 1807, Palmerston was irrepressible:

  He succeeds in the comic as in the heroic … in the tragedy as in the farce: although the latter may be more congenial to his feelings. He is no first class orator. But he is an accomplished debater. Possessed of a wonderful memory, of great experience, of a consummate tact, of a never-failing presence d’esprit, of a gentlemanlike versatility, of the most minute knowledge of parliamentary tricks, intrigues, parties, and men, he handles difficult cases in an admirable manner and with a pleasant volubility … secured from any surprise by his cynic impudence, from any self-confession by his selfish dexterity, from running into a passion by his profound frivolity, his perfect indifference, and his aristocratic contempt. Being an exceedingly happy joker, he ingratiates himself with everybody.30

  Dickens, too, though less forensic than Marx, noted critically in a speech of June 1855 that Palmerston, now prime minister for the first time at the age of seventy, had a habit of joking his way through opposition and objections. Dickens was speaking at Drury Lane Theatre in favour of the recently founded Administrative Reform Association, which agitated in the wake of the Crimean War for reform of the army, the navy, and the civil service. Palmerston had already replied flippantly in parliament to the association’s accusation that he regularly ‘sacrificed’ merit to ‘party and family influences’ when making political appointments. He laughed at the ‘Drury Lane private theatricals’, by which he meant the meetings of the association. Dickens addressed the third of its meetings on 27 June 1855, rebuking Palmerston for ‘officially and habitually’ joking ‘at a time when this country was plunged in deep disgrace and distress’. He also punished Palmerston for his slighting reference to the theatre. Dickens, famous for directing and acting in private theat
ricals, often before the queen, turned the insult against its author. He extended the theatrical metaphor to include an allusion to Palmerston’s well-known acts of nepotism:

  I have some slight acquaintance with theatricals, private and public … I will not say that if I wanted to form a company of Her Majesty’s servants, I think I should know where to put my hand on ‘the comic old gentleman’; nor, that if I wanted to get up a pantomime, I fancy I should know what establishment to go to for tricks and changes … The public theatricals which the noble lord is so condescending as to manage, are so intolerably bad, the machinery is so cumbrous, the parts so ill distributed, the company so full of ‘walking gentlemen’, the managers have such large families, and are so bent upon putting those families into what is theatrically called ‘first business’ – not because of their aptitude for it, but because they are their families, that we find ourselves obliged to organize an opposition. We have seen the Comedy of Errors played so dismally like a tragedy that we cannot bear it. We are, therefore, making bold to get up the School of Reform [a play of 1805 by Thomas Morton], and we hope, before the play is out, to improve that noble lord by our performance very considerably.31