Despite the censor’s attentions, enough carnivalesque satire of the authorities seems to have remained in the actual production of Harlequin Father Thames for the Era critic to single it out for praise as a hard-hitting ‘sanitary epic’ and one of the best pantomimes in recent years. It went down well with its ‘crowded’ audiences at the Royal Surrey too, with its ‘strictures on city and corporate abuse; the Board of Works and its half measures; Commissioners of Sewers; and other popular themes of the day; and all given with a freedom and harmless energy that, while rendering each subject extremely amusing, elicits unbounded laughter and enjoyment from the audience, who relish, with unmistakable delight, every blow aimed at public and familiar abuse’.19
One hot summer’s consequences
While the humour of the pantomimes may be lost on the page, the spectacle they presented to audiences was clearly extraordinary, with their scores of characters – both human and allegorical – taking to the stage, their frequent changes of scene and costume, talking bridges and sewers, and elaborate effects such as muddy rivers turning into crystal caverns and forests and fountains sprouting up suddenly before the eyes of astonished audiences. In terms of the themes chosen to characterise the year just passed, these were naturally the ones which had most preoccupied the press and public during the year. There were the trivial or ephemerally popular attractions – the Christy Minstrels, the Great American Horse Tamer, and the new widths achieved by the ongoing fashion for the crinoline. Then there were the innovative and exciting events which held promise of future progress: the semi-successful laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable, the sight of Donati’s Comet (and the fact that photography had progressed enough to capture it), the magnitude and tribulations of the Great Eastern.
Beyond the scope of topical theatrical entertainments lay more far-reaching events which had their origin in the hot summer of 1858. These included the matters consuming criminal and civil courts, especially those relating to the very first examples coming to court under the life-changing new law of divorce. Not unrelated to marriage and divorce settlements was the flush of cases involving asylums and the remit of the Lunacy Commission. Some results lay further in the future, the chief example being the progress in medicine following the passing of the Medical Act, which began the process of putting medicine on a proper professional footing and paved the way for better medical education and greater equality of opportunity for doctors. Though the tortuous procedure by which Baron de Rothschild was at last enabled to take his seat in the House of Commons affected only him, his brother, and David Salomons in the first few years, it marked, alongside the little-noticed act to abolish the property qualification hitherto required of prospective MPs, further progress in the history of political reform from the great Reform Act of 1832 to the arrival of universal suffrage in the early twentieth century.
As the pantomimes record, the most significant public event was the Great Stink, which finally, in the hottest of June days, brought about the hugely important sanitary measures for the world’s largest city. Not only was the Thames cleansed over the next decade, but the whole city was structurally, infrastructurally, and visibly improved by the Thames embankments which carried Bazalgette’s sewers and their burden of sewage while at the same time easing road traffic from the congested Strand, embracing the new underground railway system, and enhancing the look of London above ground. The whole modernisation of the city which was now undertaken took longer than the five-and-a-half years Disraeli envisaged for the Thames when pushing through the act in July 1858, and cost more than the £3 million he estimated for the job. On the other hand, the work which was eventually completed was well worth the time and money spent. By 1865 the Victoria and Chelsea Embankments on the north side of the river and the Albert Embankment on the south were under construction – 52 acres having been reclaimed from the river to create them – and 82 miles of sewers had been laid. The total cost in the end was just over £4 million for the main drainage and £2.5 million for the embankments, with more spent on enhancing parks, gardens, streets, and bridges.20
After Bazalgette’s death in 1891 the Illustrated London News reminded Londoners what the city had been like ‘before those vast undertakings of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the system of Main Drainage and the magnificent Thames Embankment, which had contributed so much to sanitary improvement and to the convenience and stateliness of this immense city’.21
Bazalgette himself recalled not long before his death that he got ‘the most credit for the Thames Embankment, but it wasn’t anything like such a job as the drainage’:
The fall in the river isn’t above three inches a mile; for sewage we want a fall of a couple of feet and that kept taking us down below the river and when we got to a certain depth we had to pump up again. It was certainly a very troublesome job. We would sometimes spend weeks in drawing out plans and then suddenly come across some railway or canal that upset everything, and we had to begin all over again. It was tremendously hard work.22
The vital part of the construction, the intercepting sewers which improved public health by safely removing the ever-enlarging city’s ever-increasing sewage, was invisible and therefore received less consideration than the above-ground grandeur of the embankments.
If Disraeli’s expert steering of the Thames Bill through parliament was the greatest political and public achievement of summer 1858, with long-lasting consequences for the inhabitants of London and for engineering and construction generally, the greatest individual and private success belonged to Darwin. His work had been taking shape as it were subterraneously for twenty years, and might have gone on like that for many more years, if it had not been for his receiving out of the blue a letter and some notes from a colleague on the other side of the world which caused him to set about making his theory public by finally completing and publishing On the Origin of Species. His upheaval in June 1858 remained hidden from public sight, with only a handful of firm friends aware of the likely storm to come when his work appeared above ground the following year.
For Disraeli summer 1858 was the time of his triumphant arrival as a politician to be reckoned with, a man wielding political power at last; for Darwin it was a critical moment when he faced up to his desires and difficulties, as well as his responsibility to give to the public the findings of his researches.
By nature Darwin was as private a man as Disraeli was a flamboyantly public one. Between these two extremes was Dickens, indisputably a public man by virtue of his remarkable literary success. He was also by nature a showman, a man who enjoyed being in the spotlight, whether acting in plays, performing magic tricks at children’s parties, or giving dramatic readings from his novels. In 1858, however, he was desperate to deflect attention away from his relationship with Ellen Ternan and his shabby treatment of his wife. For such a clever man, he acted foolishly, losing his head in those hot summer months, and unnecessarily drawing attention to his miserable private life by printing his personal statement about the separation from Catherine and demanding that his adoring readers accept his nobility and truthfulness just when he was most equivocating. Of these three great Victorians, Dickens experienced the least successful or promising time in 1858. He wrote no novel and enjoyed no steady happiness. But his reputation did not suffer much, he drank in the overwhelming success of his new venture of countrywide public readings, and two years after the dreadful summer of 1858 he began Great Expectations, his greatest novel and one which presents, with the astuteness of bitter personal experience, the inner life of an unhappy man who, recognising and regretting his mistakes, bears his burden of guilt as best he can.
For all three men the hot summer of 1858 presented new challenges, as it did also for others in the public eye, among them Thackeray, Sir Edward and Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Isabella and Henry Robinson and Dr Edward Lane, Lord Derby and his son Lord Stanley, Brunel and Bazalgette, Queen Victoria as India came under direct British rule, Alfred Russel Wallace on his distant travels, London journali
sts like Yates and Sala and the Punch set, the lawyer Edwin James, artists of contemporary life like Frith and Egg, and the rising star in English fiction, George Eliot. The interactions and connections between these people were sometimes unexpected, as, for example, the friendship between the retiring Darwin and the inadvertently scandalous Edward Lane, or the hearing of Frederick Dickens’s divorce proceedings in the same court and on the same day as the final judgment in the case of Isabella Robinson. There is also the coincidence in May and June of Bulwer Lytton and his friend Dickens making allegations of madness about their respective wives, the provocative and hysterical Rosina and the unfortunate and stoical Catherine. These people, along with many Londoners who had no particular claim to fame, were touched in different ways and to different degrees by the public events of the summer, while the events themselves, from the decision about rectifying the catastrophic state of the Thames to parliamentary legislation on political representation, foreign affairs, divorce, and medicine, were in turn affected by the increasing power of the press to influence outcomes. Nowhere was this more clearly shown than in the matter of the fetid Thames, about which the newspapers kept up a constant howl of protest. The backdrop to London living, especially along the banks of the capital’s river, was the unprecedented, lasting, and oppressive summer heat.
Endnotes
Chapter One: 1858 in history
1.John Lothrop Motley to his wife, 20 June 1858, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, ed. George William Curtis, 2 vols (London, 1889), vol. 1, p. 271.
2.G.M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (London, 1922), p. 292.
3.Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, ed. John Burrow (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 53–63. This edition reproduces the first edition, with ‘An Historical Sketch’ added. For the immediate success of Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, the intelligent work of a scientific amateur, of which Darwin is respectfully critical, see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (London, 2000).
4.The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (London, 1958), pp. 76–7.
5.Ibid., p. 72.
6.See Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in the Nineteenth Century (Bristol, 1986), Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital (Stroud, 1999) and The Great Filth: The War against Disease in Victorian England (Stroud, 2007), Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens, Ohio, 2008), and Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight against Filth (New Haven, Connecticut, 2014).
7.See Adrian Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight-Errant (London, 1991), and R. Angus Buchanan, The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (London, 2002).
8.See A.R. Bennett, London and Londoners in the Eighteen-Fifties and Sixties (London, 1924), and Gillian Cookson, The Cable: Wire to the New World (Stroud, 2012).
9.See Jay M. Pasachoff, Roberta J.M. Olson and Martha L. Hazen, ‘The Earliest Comet Photographs: Usherwood, Bond, and Donati 1858’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol. 27 (1996), pp. 129–45.
10.G.A. Sala, Twice Round the Clock, or Hours of the Day and Night in London (London, 1859), reprint edited by Philip Collins (Leicester, 1971), p. 164. The work was first published serially in the journal Welcome Guest from May to November 1858. For the history of photography in London, see Gavin Stamp, The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839–1879 (Harmondsworth, 1984).
11.The Birthplace of Podgers, in Lacy’s Acting Edition, vol. 35 (1858), and Your Likeness – One Shilling!, in ibid., vol. 36 (1858).
12.Edward A. Copland, Photography for the Many, number 11 (1858), pp. 25, 29.
13.Richard Owen, President’s Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1858, Internet Archive, p. 62.
14.Ibid., pp. 97, 98, 102. See also Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (London, 1976).
15.For assessments of Chadwick’s career, see S.E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952), and Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain 1800–1854 (Cambridge, 1998).
16.The work of the ‘nightsoil men’, of ‘mudlarks’ (collectors of debris from the Thames foreshore at low tide), and of ‘toshers’ (scavengers in the sewers) was brought to the public’s attention by Henry Mayhew in his articles during 1849 and 1850 for the Morning Chronicle, reprinted in 1851 as London Labour and the London Poor; see the selected edition by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford, 2010).
17.See Martin Daunton, ‘London’s “Great Stink” and Victorian Urban Planning’, BBC History (2004).
18.For Snow’s career and the late appreciation of his discovery, see Peter Vinten-Johansen et al., Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford, 2003). See also Halliday, The Great Stink, pp. 129–37, and David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore, Maryland, 2006), pp. 9–10, 243–4.
19.Owen, President’s Address, pp. 102, 104, 105.
20.Ibid., p. 105.
21.Snow, ‘Cholera and the Water Supply’, The Times, 26 June 1856.
22.See ‘Health of London’, Era, 27 June 1858.
23.See Halliday, The Great Stink, pp. 61–9.
24.Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Robert Brough, 7 July 1858, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman, 10 vols (Woodbridge, 2002–10), vol. 2, p. 219.
25.The Times, 3 July 1858 (quoting the Globe). The temperature in Hyde Park on 30 June was given in The Times on 2 July 1858.
26.Edwin Lankester, ‘The Silver Thames’, Athenaeum, 17 July 1858. For Lankester’s career, see Mary P. English, Victorian Values: The Life and Times of Dr Edwin Lankester, MD, FRS (London, 1990).
27.Punch, vol. 35 (24 July 1858), p. 33. For cartoons featuring Father Thames, see Punch, vol. 35 (3 and 10 July 1858), pp. 5, 15.
28.Editorial, The Times, 21 July 1858.
29.Karl Marx, ‘Lord Palmerston’, People’s Paper, 22 October 1853, Marx–Engels Collected Works, 50 vols (London, New York, Moscow, 1975–2005), vol. 12, p. 345.
30.Ibid., vol. 12, p. 346.
31.Dickens, speech to the Administrative Reform Association, 27 June 1855, The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K.J. Fielding (Hemel Hempstead, 1988), pp. 198n, 199, 200.
32.See ODNB entry for Clanricarde.
33.Punch, vol. 34 (23 January 1858), p. 35.
34.Illustrated London News, vol. 32 (27 February 1858), p. 201.
35.Prince Albert, memorandum, 4 September 1858, The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861, ed. A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, 3 vols (London, 1907), vol. 3, pp. 381–2.
36.Marx, ‘The Attempt upon the Life of Bonaparte’, New York Daily Tribune, 22 February 1858, Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 12, p. 458.
37.Sir George Grey to Lord John Russell, 2 February 1858, The Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell 1840–1878, ed. G.P. Gooch, 2 vols (London, 1925), vol. 2, p. 225.
38.Sir James Graham to Lord John Russell, 4 February 1858, ibid., vol. 2, p. 226.
39.‘The Derby Ministry’, Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 43 (April 1858), p. 331.
40.Lord Stanley, journal, 21 February 1858, Benjamin Disraeli Letters, ed. J.A.W. Gunn, M.G. Wiebe, Michel W. Pharand et al., 10 vols so far (Toronto, 1982–), vol. 7 (2004), p. 124n.
41.See the summary of his career in Robert Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966), pp. 757–66.
42.Disraeli, the ‘Mutilated Diary’ for 1833, see Thea Van Dam, My Dearest Ben: An Intimate Glimpse into the World of Benjamin Disraeli, his Family and the Women in his Life – through their Letters, Buckinghamshire Papers, numb
er 16 (Aylesbury, 2008), p. 47.
43.Disraeli to Lord Derby, 22 February 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 124.
44.See William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, new and revised edition, 2 vols (London, 1929), vol. 1, pp. 1520ff.
45.Joseph Irving, The Annals of Our Time: A Diurnal of Events, Social and Political, Home and Foreign, from the Accession of Queen Victoria, June 20, 1837, to the Peace of Versailles, February 28, 1871, new revised edition (London, 1880), p. 510.
46.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 12 March and 24 June 1858, Letters, vol. 7, pp. 142, 215.
47.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 24 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 215–16.
48.‘The Closing Session’, Era, 1 August 1858.
49.See W.D. Jones, Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism (Oxford, 1956), pp. 238–40.
50.‘Prorogation of Parliament’, The Times, 3 August 1858.
51.See Stephanie J. Snow, Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World (Oxford, 2008).
52.For Wakley see John Hostettler, Thomas Wakley: An Improbable Radical (Chichester, 1993). For medical reform in the nineteenth century see Ivan Waddington, The Medical Profession in the Industrial Revolution (Dublin, 1984); Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter (eds), Doctors, Politics and Society: Historical Essays (Amsterdam, 1993); W.F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994); Vivian Nutton and Roy Porter (eds), The History of Medical Education in Britain (Amsterdam, 1995); Michael J.D. Roberts, ‘The Politics of Professionalization: MPs, Medical Men, and the 1858 Medical Act’, Medical History, vol. 53 (January 2009), pp. 37–56.
53.See Waddington, The Medical Profession, pp. 53–4, 96–107.
54.‘The Doctors and their Bills’, Punch, vol. 34 (12 June 1858), p. 235.
55.See Waddington, The Medical Profession, pp. 107–11.
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