The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

  Outbreaks had an ominous preamble, too. Newspapers would track the disease’s progress through the harbors and trading towns of Europe, as it marched relentlessly across the Continent. When cholera first appeared in New York City in the summer of 1832, it attacked the city from the north: arriving first in Montreal via ships originating in France, the disease spent a month snaking along the trade routes of upstate New York toward the city, then floating straight down the Hudson. Every few days the papers would announce that the cholera had taken another step; when it eventually arrived, in early July, almost half the city had escaped to the countryside, creating traffic jams that resembled the Long Island Expressway on a modern-day Fourth of July weekend. The New York Evening Post reported:

  The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stage coaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic struck, fleeing from the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii or Reggio fled from those devoted places, when the red lava showered down upon their houses, or when the walls were shaken asunder by an earthquake.

  The popular fear of cholera was amplified by the miasma theory of its transmission. The disease was both invisible and everywhere: seeping out of gulley holes, looming in the yellowed fog along the Thames. The courage of those who stayed to fight the disease—or investigate its origins—is all the more impressive in this light, since simply breathing in the vicinity of an outbreak was assumed by almost everyone to be risking death. John Snow had at least the courage of his convictions to rely on: if the cholera was in the water, then venturing into the Golden Square neighborhood at the height of the epidemic posed no grave threat, as long as he refrained from drinking the pump water during his visits. The Reverend Whitehead had no such theory to allay his fears as he spent hour after hour sitting in the presence of the sick, and yet not once in his writing about the Broad Street outbreak is there mention of his own private dread.

  It is hard to peer behind that absence, to extract the real truth of Whitehead’s mental state: Was he terrified but still compelled into action by his faith and his sense of duty to the parish? And compelled, by pride, to avoid mention of his terror in his subsequent writing? Or did his religious convictions help him ward off his fear, as Snow’s scientific convictions helped him? Or had he simply acclimated to the constant presence of death?

  Certainly some process of acclimation must have been at work. Otherwise, it is hard to imagine how Londoners survived such dangerous times without being paralyzed by terror. (Not all escaped the anxiety, however; witness the prevalence of hysterics in so much Victorian fiction. The corset may not have been the only culprit behind all those fainting spells.) The spike in cases of posttraumatic stress disorder experienced by big-city dwellers after 9/11 is conventionally attributed to a sudden rise in danger thanks to terrorist threat, particularly in iconic urban centers like New York, London, and Washington, D.C. But the long view suggests that this account has it exactly backward. We feel fear more strongly because our safety expectations have risen so dramatically over the past hundred years. Even with its higher crime rate, New York City in its debauched nadir of the 1970s was a vastly safer place to live than Victorian London. During the epidemics of the late 1840s and the 1850s, a thousand Londoners would typically die of cholera in a matter of weeks—in a city a quarter the size of present-day New York—and the deaths would barely warrant a headline. And so, as shocking as those numbers seem to us now, they may not have provoked the same mortal panic that they trigger today. The literature—both public and private—of the nineteenth century is filled with many dark emotions: misery, humiliation, drudgery, rage. But terror does not quite play the role that one might expect, given the body count.

  Far more prevalent was another feeling: that things could not continue at this pace for long. The city was headed toward some kind of climactic breaking point that would likely undo the tremendous growth of the preceding century. This was a profoundly dialectical feeling, a thesis giving rise to an antithesis, the city’s success eventually breeding the very conditions of its destruction, like the “avenging ghost” in Dickens’ eulogy for the opium-addicted scrivener in Bleak House.

  London, of course, had a long history of offending social critics, as in this cheery description from Scottish physician George Cheyne, written at the end of the eighteenth century:

  The infinite number of Fires, Sulphurous and Bituminous, the vast expense of Tallow and foetid Oil in Candles and Lamps, under and above the Ground, the clouds of Stinking Breathes and Perspirations, not to mention the ordure of so many diseas’d, both intelligent and unintelligent animals, the crouded Churches, Church Yards and Bury Places, with the putrifying Bodies, the Sinks, Butchers Houses, Stables, Dunghills, etc. and the necessary Stagnation, Fermentation, and mixture of Variety of all Kinds of Atoms, and more than sufficient to putrefy, poison and infect the Air for Twenty Miles around it, and which in Time must alter, weaken, and destroy the healthiest of Constitutions.

  Part of this disgust can be attributed to the fact that the classical distinction between the metropolis and the industrial towns to the north—one the center of commerce and services, the others of industry and manufacturing—was not nearly as clearly defined as it eventually became in the late 1800s. At the end of the eighteenth century, London had more steam engines than all of Lancashire, and it remained the manufacturing center of England until 1850. Factories like the Eley brothers’ would be dramatically out of place next to the shops and residences of today’s London, but they were an ordinary sight (not to mention smell) in 1854.

  Accounts of London’s repulsive conditions inevitably imagined the city as a unified organism, a sprawling, cancerous body laid out along the Thames. In prose that sounds more like a medical diagnosis than an economic forecast, Sir Richard Phillips predicted in 1813 that

  the houses will become too numerous for the inhabitants, and certain districts will be occupied by beggary and vice, or become depopulated. This disease will spread like an atrophy in the human body, and ruin will follow ruin, till the entire city is disgusting to the remnant of the inhabitants; at length the whole becomes a heap of ruins: Such have been the causes of decay of all overgrown cities. Nineveh, Babylon, Antioch, and Thebes are become heaps of ruins. Rome, Delphi, and Alexandria are partaking the same inevitable fate; and London must some time from similar causes succumb under the destiny of every thing human.

  It is here that the modern urban mind confronts what may be the largest gap separating it from the Victorian worldview. In a very practical sense, no one had ever tried to pack nearly three million people inside a thirty-mile circumference before. The metropolitan city, as a concept, was still unproven. It seemed entirely likely to many reasonable citizens of Victorian England—as well as to countless visitors from overseas—that a hundred years from now the whole project of maintaining cities of this scale would have proved a passing fancy. The monster would eat itself.

  Most of us don’t harbor doubts of this scale today, at least where cities are concerned. We worry about other matters: the epic shantytowns of Third World megacities; the terror threats; the environmental impact of a planet industrializing at such a dramatic rate. But most of us accept without debate the long-term viability of human settlements with populations in the millions, or tens of millions. We know it can be done. We just haven’t figured out how to ensure that it is done well.

  And so, in projecting back to the mind-set of a Londoner in 1854, we have to remember this crucial reality: that a sort of existential doubt lingered over the city, a suspicion not that London was flawed, but that the very idea of building cities on the scale of London was a mistake, one that was soon to be corrected.

  IF LONDON WAS SUCH A RANK, OVERCROWDED SEWER IN THE first half of the nineteenth century, then why did so many people decide to move there? No doubt there were those who savored the energy and stimulus of the city, its architecture and parks, its coffee-house sociability, its intellectual circles. (Wordsworth’s
Prelude even included a paean to shopping: “the string of dazzling wares, / Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names, / And all the tradesman’s honours overhead.”) But for every intellectual or aristocrat moving to the city for its cosmopolitan flavor, there were a hundred mud-larks and costermongers and night-soil men who must have had a very different aesthetic response to the city.

  The tremendous growth of London—like the parallel explosions of Manchester and Leeds—was a riddle that could not be explained by simply adding up decisions made by large numbers of individual humans. This was, ultimately, what perplexed and horrified so many onlookers at the time: the sense that the city had taken on a life of its own. It was the product of human choice, to be sure, but some new form of collective human choice where the collective decisions were at odds with the needs and desires of its individual members. If you had somehow polled the population of Victorian England and asked them if stacking two million people inside a thirty-mile circumference was a good idea, the answer would have been a resounding no. But somehow, the two million showed up anyway.

  That perplexity gave rise to an intuitive sense that the city itself was best understood as a creature with its own distinct form of volition, greater than the sum of its parts: a monster, a diseased body—or, most presciently, Wordsworth’s “anthill on the plain.” (The unplanned but complex engineering of ant colonies display a number of striking similarities to human cities.) The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that “mass” behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass. Even if you had the time to write it all down, you couldn’t tell the story of a city as an endless series of individual biographies. You had to think of collective behavior as something distinct from individual choice. To capture the city in its entirety, you had to move one level up the chain, to the bird’s-eye view. Henry Mayhew famously took to a hot-air balloon in any attempt to take in the entirety of the city from a single vantage point, but found, to his dismay, that the “monster city…stretched not only to the horizon on either side, but far away into the distance.”

  The sense, then, of London as a monstrous, cancerous presence focused not merely on the smell or the overcrowding; it also included the uncanny feeling that, somehow, humans themselves were not in control of the urbanization process. In this the Victorians were grasping at an underlying reality that they were only partially able to understand. Cities tend to be imagined in terms of their streets, or markets, or buildings (or, to the twentieth-century mind, their skylines). But they are ultimately shaped by flows of energy. The hunter-gatherers or the early agriculturists couldn’t have formed a city of the size and density of 1850s London (much less today’s São Paulo) even if they had wanted to. To sustain a population of a million people—to keep them fed alone, much less power their SUVs or subways or refrigerators—you need a massive supply of stored energy to keep all those bodies alive. Small bands of hunter-gatherers collected enough energy, if they were lucky, to sustain small bands of hunter-gatherers. But when the Fertile Crescent’s proto-farmers began planting fields of cereal grains, they dramatically increased the energy available to their settlements, allowing populations to swell into the thousands, and, in the process, creating density levels that had never been seen before among the primates, much less the humans. Soon, positive feedback loops emerged: more people working the fields increased the food supply, which allowed more people to work the fields, and so on. Eventually, these first agricultural societies achieved what may still be the sine qua non of civilization: a large class of people liberated from the day-to-day problem of finding a new source of food. Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip.

  That same process drove the explosion of metropolitan London after 1750. Three related developments had triggered an unprecedented intensification of the energy flowing through the capital. First, the “improvements” of agrarian capitalism, where the dotted, irregular system of the feudal English countryside gave way to rationalistic agriculture; second, the energy unleashed by the coal and steam power of the Industrial Revolution; third, the dramatic increase in the portability of that energy thanks to the railway system. For millennia, most cities had been bound inexorably to the natural ecosystem that lay outside their walls: the energy flowing through the fields and forests around them established a population ceiling they couldn’t grow beyond. London in 1854 had shot through those ceilings, because the land itself was being farmed more efficiently, because new forms of energy had been discovered, and because shipping and railway networks had greatly expanded the distance that energy could travel. The Londoner enjoying a cup of tea with sugar in 1854 was drawing upon a vast global energy network with each sip: the human labor of the sugarcane plantations in the West Indies and the newly formed tea plantations in India; the solar energy in those tropical realms that allowed those plants to flourish; the oceanic energy of the trade currents, and the steam power of the railway engine; the fossil fuels powering the looms in Lancashire, making fabrics that helped fund the entire trade system.

  The great city, then, could not be understood as an artifact of human choice. It was much closer to a natural, organic process—less like a building that has been deliberately constructed and more like a garden erupting into full bloom with the arrival of spring—a mix of human planning and the natural developmental patterns that emerge with increasing energy supplies. Several decades ago, the physicist Arthur Iberall proposed that patterns of human organization could be understood as the social equivalent of the patterns formed by molecules in response to changing energy states. A collection of water molecules follows a reliable pattern of transformations depending on how much energy is injected into the system: in low-energy situations, it takes on the crystal form of ice, while high-energy infusions transform liquid water into a gas. The dramatic shifts from one state to another are called phase transitions, or bifurcations. Iberall observed that human societies appeared to cycle through comparable phase transitions, as the energy harnessed by the society increased: moving from the gaseous state of roaming hunter-gathers, to the more settled configuration of agrarian farming, to the crystalline density of the walled city. When the supply of surplus energy spiked, thanks to the slave labor and transportation networks of the Roman Empire, the city of Rome itself surged to more than a million people, and dozens of towns connected to that network reached populations in the hundreds of thousands. But when the imperial system crumbled, the energy supply dried up, and the cities of Europe vaporized in a matter of centuries. By the year 1000—right around the time the next great energy revolution was stirring—Rome had been whittled down to a mere 35,000 people, one-thirtieth of its former glory.

  Growing a city of three million from less than a million a century before required more than just increased energy inputs, however. It also required an immense population base that was willing to move from the country to the city. As it happened, the enclosure movement that dominated so much of British rural life during the 1700s and early 1800s created a huge surge in mobility by disrupting the open-field farming system that had been in place since medieval times. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tenant farmers who had resided in rural hamlets, living off common land, suddenly found their ancient lifestyle upended by a long wave of privatization. Those newly free-floating laborers became another, equally essential, energy source for the Industrial Revolution, filling its cities and coketowns with a nearly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. In a sense, the Industrial Revolution would have never happened if two distinct forms of energy had not been separated from the earth: coal and commoners.

  The dramatic increase of people available to populate the new urban spaces of the Industrial Age may have had one other cause: tea. The population growth during the first half of the eighteenth century neatly coincided with t
he mass adoption of tea as the de facto national beverage. (Imports grew from six tons at the beginning of the century to eleven thousand at the end.) A luxury good at the start of the century, tea had become a staple even of working-class diets by the 1850s. One mechanic who provided an account of his weekly budget to the Penny Newsman spent almost fifteen percent of his earnings on tea and sugar. He may have been indulging in it for the taste and the salutary cognitive effects of caffeine, but it was also a healthy lifestyle choice, given the alternatives. Brewed tea possesses several crucial antibacterial properties that help ward off waterborne diseases: the tannic acid released in the steeping process kills off those bacteria that haven’t already perished during the boiling of the water. The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was, from the bacteria’s point of view, a microbial holocaust. Physicians observed a dramatic drop in dysentery and child mortality during the period. (The antiseptic agents in tea could be passed on to infants through breast milk.) Largely freed from waterborne disease agents, the tea-drinking population began to swell in number, ultimately supplying a larger labor pool to the emerging factory towns, and to the great sprawling monster of London itself.

  Do not mistake these multiple trends—the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior—for mere historical background. The clash of microbe and man that played out on Broad Street for ten days in 1854 was itself partly a consequence of each of these trends, though the chains of cause and effect played out on different scales of experience, both temporal and spatial. You can tell the story of the Broad Street outbreak on the scale of a few hundred human lives, people drinking water from a pump, getting sick and dying over a few weeks, but in telling the story that way, you limit its perspective, limit its ability to convey a fair account of what really happened, and, more important—why it happened. Once you get to why, the story has to widen and tighten at the same time: to the long durée of urban development, or the microscopic tight focus of bacterial life cycles. These are causes, too.