By 1851, the subdistrict of Berwick Street on the west side of Soho was the most densely populated of all 135 subdistricts that made up Greater London, with 432 people to the acre. (Even with its skyscrapers, Manhattan today only houses around 100 per acre.) The parish of St. Luke’s in Soho had thirty houses per acre. In Kensington, by contrast, the number per acre was two.
But despite—or perhaps because of—the increasingly crowded and unsanitary conditions, the neighborhood was a hotbed of creativity. The list of poets and musicians and sculptors and philosophers who lived in Soho during this period reads like an index to a textbook on Enlightenment-era British culture. Edmund Burke, Fanny Burney, Percy Shelley, William Hogarth—all were Soho residents at various points in their lives. Leopold Mozart leased a flat on Frith Street while visiting with his son, the eight-year-old prodigy Wolfgang, in 1764. Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also stayed in the neighborhood when visiting London in 1839–1840.
“New ideas need old buildings,” Jane Jacobs once wrote, and the maxim applies perfectly to Soho around the dawn of the Industrial Age: a class of visionaries and eccentrics and radicals living in the disintegrating shells that had been abandoned a century ago by the well-to-do. The trope is familiar to us by now—artists and renegades appropriate a decaying neighborhood, even relish the decay—but it was a new pattern of urban settlement when Blake and Hogarth and Shelley first made their homes along the crowded streets of Soho. They seem to have been energized by the squalor, not appalled by it. Here is a description of one typical residence on Dean Street, penned in the early 1850s:
[The flat] has two rooms, the one with the view of the street being the drawing-room, behind it the bedroom. There is not one piece of good, solid furniture in the entire flat. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, finger-thick dust everywhere, and everything in the greatest disorder.… When you enter the… flat, your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything covered with dust; it is dangerous to sit down.
Living in this two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. (Apparently a maid with an aversion to dusting.) Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband’s productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx.
By the time Marx got to Soho, the neighborhood had turned itself into the kind of classic mixed-use, economically diverse neighborhood that today’s “new urbanists” celebrate as the bedrock of successful cities: two-to-four-story residential buildings with storefronts at nearly every address, interlaced with the occasional larger commercial space. (Unlike the typical new urbanist environment, however, Soho also had its share of industry: slaughterhouses, manufacturing plants, tripe boilers.) The neighborhood’s residents were poor, almost destitute, by the standards of today’s industrialized nations, though by Victorian standards they were a mix of the working poor and the entrepreneurial middle class. (By mud-lark standards, of course, they were loaded.) But Soho was something of an anomaly in the otherwise prosperous West End of the city: an island of working poverty and foul-smelling industry surrounded by the opulent townhouses of Mayfair and Kensington.
This economic discontinuity is still encoded in the physical layout of the streets around Soho. The western border of the neighborhood is defined by the wide avenue of Regent Street, with its gleaming white commercial façades. West of Regent Street you enter the tony enclave of Mayfair, posh to this day. But somehow the nonstop traffic and bustle of Regent Street is almost imperceptible from the smaller lanes and alleys of western Soho, largely because there are very few conduits that open directly onto Regent Street. Walking around the neighborhood, it feels almost as if a barricade has been erected, keeping you from reaching the prominent avenue that you know is only a few feet away. And indeed, the street layout was explicitly designed to serve as a barricade. When John Nash designed Regent Street to connect Marylebone Park with the Prince Regent’s new home at Carlton House, he planned the thoroughfare as a kind of cordon sanitaire separating the well-to-do of Mayfair from the growing working-class community of Soho. Nash’s explicit intention was to create “a complete separation between the streets occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrower Streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community.… My purpose was that the new street should cross the eastern entrance to all the streets occupied by the higher classes and to leave out to the east all the bad streets.”
This social topography would play a pivotal role in the events that unfolded in the late summer of 1854, when a terrible scourge struck Soho but left the surrounding neighborhoods utterly unharmed. That selective attack appeared to confirm every elitist cliché in the book: the plague attacking the debauched and the destitute, while passing over the better sort that lived only blocks away. Of course the plague had devastated the “meaner houses” and “bad streets”; anyone who had visited those squalid blocks would have seen it coming. Poverty and depravity and low breeding created an environment where disease prospered, as anyone of good social standing would tell you. That’s why they’d built barricades in the first place.
But on the wrong side of Regent Street, behind the barricade, the tradesmen and the mechanics managed to get by in the mean houses of Soho. The neighborhood was a veritable engine of local commerce, with almost every residence housing some kind of small business. The assortment of storefronts generally sounds quaint to the modern ear. There were the grocers and bakeries that wouldn’t be out of place in an urban center today; but there were also the machinists and mineral teeth manufacturers doing business beside them. In August of 1854, walking down Broad Street, a block north of Golden Square, one would have encountered, in progression: a grocer, a bonnet maker, a baker, a grocer, a saddle-tree manufacturer, an engraver, and ironmonger, a trimming seller, a percussion-cap manufacturer, a wardrobe dealer, a boot-tree manufacturer, and a pub, The Newcastle-on-Tyne. In terms of professions, tailors outnumbered any other trade by a relatively wide margin. After the tailors, at roughly the same number, were the shoemakers, domestic servants, masons, shopkeepers, and dressmakers.
Sometime in the late 1840s, a London policeman named Thomas Lewis and his wife moved into 40 Broad Street, one door up from the pub. It was an eleven-room house that had originally been designed to hold a single family and a handful of servants. Now it contained twenty inhabitants. These were spacious accommodations for a part of the city where most houses averaged five occupants per room. Thomas and Sarah Lewis lived in the parlor at 40 Broad, first with their little boy, a sickly child who died at ten months. In March of 1854, Sarah Lewis gave birth to a girl, who possessed, from the beginning, a more promising constitution than her late brother. Sarah Lewis had been unable to breast-feed the infant on account of health problems of her own, but she had fed her daughter ground rice and milk from a bottle. The little girl had suffered a few bouts of illness in her second month, but was relatively healthy for most of the summer.
A few mysteries remain about this second Lewis infant, details scattered by the chance winds of history. We do not know her name, for instance. We do not know what series of events led to her contracting cholera in late August of 1854, at not even six months old. For almost twenty months, the disease had been flaring up in certain quarters of London, having last appeared during the revolutionary years of 1848–1849. (Plagues and political unrest have a long history of following the same cycles.) But most of the cholera outbreaks in 1854 were located south of the Thames. The Golden Square area had been largely spared.
On the twenty-eighth of August, all that changed. At around six a.m., while the rest of the city struggled for a few final minutes of sleep at the end of an oppressively h
ot summer night, the Lewis infant began vomiting and emitting watery, green stools that carried a pungent smell. Sarah Lewis sent for a local doctor, William Rogers, who maintained a practice a few blocks away, on Berners Street. As she waited for the doctor’s arrival, Sarah soaked the soiled cloth diapers in a bucket of tepid water. In the rare moments when her little girl caught a few minutes of sleep, Sarah Lewis crept down to the cellar at 40 Broad and tossed the fouled water in the cesspool that lay at the front of the house.
That is how it began.
HENRY WHITEHEAD
Saturday, September 2
EYES SUNK, LIPS DARK BLUE
FOR TWO DAYS AFTER THE LEWIS BABY FELL ILL, LIFE IN Golden Square carried on with its normal clamor. In nearby Soho Square, an affable clergyman named Henry Whitehead took leave of the boarding room he shared with his brother and embarked on his morning stroll to St. Luke’s Church on Berwick Street, where he had been appointed assistant curate. Only twenty-eight years old, Whitehead had been born in the seaside town of Ramsgate and grew up in a prestigious public school called Chatham House, where his father was headmaster. Whitehead had been a stellar student at Chatham, finishing top of the school in English composition, and he went on to attend Lincoln College at Oxford, where he developed a reputation for sociability and kindness that would last the rest of his days. He became a great devotee of the intellectual tavern life: sitting with a handful of friends over dinner, savoring a pipe, telling stories or debating politics or discussing moral philosophy in the late hours of the night. When asked about his college years, Whitehead liked to say that he got more good out of men than he got out of books.
By the time he left Oxford, Whitehead had decided to enter the Anglican Church, and was ordained in London several years later. His religious calling did nothing to abate his fondness for London’s taverns, and he frequented the old establishments around Fleet Street—The Cock, The Cheshire Cheese, The Rainbow. Whitehead was liberal in his political views but, as friends often remarked, conservative in his morals. In addition to his religious training, he had a sharp, empirical mind and a good memory for detail. He was also unusually tolerant of maverick ideas, and immune to the bromides of popular opinion. He was often heard saying to friends, “Mind you, the man who is in the minority of one is almost sure to be in the right.”
In 1851, the vicar of St. Luke’s offered him a position, telling Whitehead that the parish was a place for those who “care more for the approval than the applause of men.” At St. Luke’s he worked as a kind of missionary to the slum dwellers of Berwick Street, and was a well-regarded and familiar figure in the tumultuous neighborhood. One of Whitehead’s contemporaries captured the chaotic sights and sounds of the streets around St. Luke’s in that period:
One does not realize as one passes down Regent Street, how small a distance of street and alley separates “the unknown little from the unknowing great.” But to the person who will dive down such entrance to the unknown land of slums of Soho as Beak Street or Berwick Street provides, there is much that will astonish and interest him, if he is a student of the ways of the poor in London. Your cab is suddenly brought up sharp by a coster’s barrow, and you are asked if you are going down to St. Luke’s. Berwick Street: if you intimate that this is your destination, you are told politely, but with proper Soho emphasis, that you will get through by the end of next week, and you are soon obliged to believe there is truth in the prophecy. Closely ranged side by side in the narrow street are the vendors’ stalls and barrows. The cats’-meat man, the fish salesman, the butcher, the fruiterer, the toy-seller, the old rang-and-bone men, jostle and cry their wares. “Prime meat! meat! meat! buy! buy! buy! Here! here! here! veal! veal! fresh-veal today! what’s your fancy! Sold, sold again! fish for nothing! cherries ripe!” Your aim is St. Luke’s, Berwick Street: you soon see its dim row of dingy semi-domestic, semi-gothic windows. A man is standing just opposite the barred gate skinning eels; you hear a scream, and you know that a poor creature who objects to its fate has slipped from his hand, and is making its way among the crowd.
In the heat and humidity of late August, the smells of Soho would have been unavoidable, wafting up from the cesspools and sewers, from the factories and furnaces. Part of the stench derived from the omnipresence of livestock in the city center. A modern-day visitor time-traveling back to Victorian London wouldn’t be surprised to see horses (and, consequently, their manure) in great numbers in the city streets, but he would probably be startled to discover how many farm animals lived in densely packed neighborhoods like Golden Square. Veritable herds would stream through the city; the main livestock market at Smithfield would regularly sell 30,000 sheep in two days’ time. A slaughterhouse at the edge of Soho, on Marshall Street, killed an average of five oxen and seven sheep per day, the blood and filth from the animals draining into gulley holes on the street. Without proper barns, residents converted traditional dwellings into “cow houses”—herding twenty-five or thirty cows into a single room. In some cases, cows were lifted into attics via windlass, and shuttered there in the dark until their milk gave out.
Even the pets could be overwhelming. One man who lived on the upper floor at 38 Silver Street kept twenty-seven dogs in a single room. He would leave what must have been a prodigious output of canine excrement to bake in the brutal summer sun on the roof of the house. A charwoman down the street kept seventeen dogs, cats, and rabbits in her single-room flat.
The human crowding was almost as oppressive. Whitehead liked to tell the story of visiting one densely packed household, and asking an impoverished woman there how she managed to get along in such close quarters. “Well, sir,” she replied, “we was comfortable enough till the gentleman come in the middle.” She then pointed to a chalk circle in the center of the room, defining the region that the “gentleman” was allowed to occupy.
Henry Whitehead’s journey that morning would have been a meandering, sociable one: stopping by a coffeehouse largely patronized by machinists, visiting with parishioners in their homes, spending a few minutes down the street from his church with the inmates at the St. James Workhouse, where five hundred of London’s impoverished citizens were housed and forced to perform arduous labor through the day. He might have paid a call on the Eley Brothers factory, home to 150 employees churning out one of the most important military inventions of the century: the “percussion cap,” which had enabled firearms to be operated in any weather. (Older, flint-based systems were easily disabled by a mild rainshower.) With the outbreak of the Crimean War several months earlier, the Eley brothers were doing a brisk business.
At the Lion Brewery on Broad Street, the seventy workers employed there went about their daily labor, sipping on the malt liquor supplied as part of their wages. A tailor living above the Lewis family at 40 Broad—we know him only as Mr. G—worked his trade, assisted occasionally by his wife. On the sidewalks, the upper echelons of London’s street laborers swarmed: the menders and makers, the costermongers and street sellers, hawking everything from crumpets to almanacs to snuff boxes to live squirrels. Henry Whitehead would have known many of these people by name, and his day would have been a steady, comforting stream of sidewalk and parlor conversation. No doubt the heat would have been a primary topic of conversation: the temperature had peaked in the nineties for several straight days, and the city had seen scarcely a drop of rain since the middle of August. There was news from the Crimean War to discuss, as well as the appointment of a new head of the Board of Health, a man by the name of Benjamin Hall, who had vowed to continue the bold sanitation campaign of his predecessor, Edwin Chadwick, but without alienating quite as many people. The city was just finishing Dickens’ screed against the industrial coketowns of the north country, Hard Times, the final installment of which had run in Household Words a few weeks before. And then there were the personal details of daily life—an upcoming marriage, a lost job, a grandchild on the way—which Whitehead would have readily discussed, knowing his parishioners as well as he did.
But of all the conversations he had over the first three days of that fateful week, Whitehead would later recall one ironic omission: not one of those conversations broached the topic of cholera.
Imagine an aerial view of Broad Street that week, accelerated in the fashion of a time-lapse movie. Most of the activity would be a blur of urban tumult: “the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain… [making] their usual uproar,” as Dickens put it at the end of Little Dorrit. But in all that turbulence, certain patterns appear, like eddies in an otherwise chaotic flow. The streets flex with the Victorian equivalent of rush hour, rising at daybreak and then subsiding with nightfall; streams of people pour into each daily service at St. Luke’s; small queues form around the busiest street vendors. In front of 40 Broad Street, as baby Lewis suffers only a few yards away, a single point on the sidewalk attracts a constant—and constantly changing—cluster of visitors throughout the day, like a vortex of molecules winding down a drain.
They are there for the water.
THE BROAD STREET PUMP HAD LONG ENJOYED A REPUTATION as a reliable source of clean well water. It extended twenty-five feet below the surface of the street, reaching down past the ten feet of accumulated rubbish and debris that artificially elevated most of London, through a bed of gravel that stretched all the way to Hyde Park, down to the veins of sand and clay saturated with groundwater. Many Soho residents who lived closer to other pumps—one on Rupert Street and another on Little Marlborough—opted to walk an extra few blocks for the refreshing taste of Broad Street’s water. It was colder than the water found at the rival pumps; it had a pleasant hint of carbonation. For these reasons, the Broad Street water insinuated itself into a complex web of local drinking habits. The coffeehouse down the street brewed its coffee with pump water; many little shops in the neighborhood sold a confection they called “sherbet,” a mixture of effervescent powder with Broad Street water. The pubs of Golden Square diluted their spirits with pump water.
The Ghost Map Page 3
