The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Most cemeteries in London had been over capacity for years, if not decades, but they continued to function for the same reason Smithfield market did: they made money for their owners. Furthermore, there were no regulations, no supervision and no fear of repercussions. And, like the markets and the prisons, the graveyards were right in the centre of the city, beside virtually every London church. Dr George Walker, whose practice was in the capital’s heartland of Drury Lane, determined to change things, gathering evidence from gravediggers as well as from those who lived next to the graveyards. In 1842, an ex-gravedigger for St Ann’s burial ground, in Soho, testified to a Parliamentary Select Committee, telling them that when new bodies arrived for burial, the old ones were dug up, the coffins chopped up for firewood and the bodies, if they were too recent to have decomposed, were broken up with spades. The coffin nails and plates were sold to second-hand shops; the old bones piled in corners or burnt, or sometimes sold off, presumably to those who bought animal bones for fertilizer.

  Inside many churches, the situation was no better. On the Strand, in St Clement Danes’ vault, the air was so putrid that there was not enough oxygen for candles to stay alight. The crypt needed to be aired for days before each burial, to make it safe for the mourners. (Perhaps not coincidentally, at the same period the well on the eastern side of the church had to be blocked off owing to the quality of its water.) Dickens was mild in his comment: the City, he wrote, smelt of ‘rot and mildew and dead citizens’.

  As Walker saw it, it was a straightforward mathematical equation. New Bunhill Fields burial grounds, in the City, covered two-thirds of an acre and on average just over 1,500 bodies a year were interred there; in the epidemic year of 1842, that figure had risen to 21,000.74 Similarly the burying ground at St Martin-in-the-Fields had operated from at least the sixteenth century, and over 300 funerals a year were conducted there. Having heard the stories, the family of a Mr Foster, of Chapel-court, Long Acre, went to supervise his interment personally. When they arrived, the proposed grave was only two and a half feet deep, which they said was not acceptable. The gravediggers, not remotely perturbed, took their pickaxes to the coffin underneath, lifting out the corpse, breaking it up and shovelling it away, before assuring Mr Foster’s friends that if the grave were still too shallow, the two coffins remaining could be removed in the same fashion. These corpses had sometimes been interred just a few years earlier, sometimes a matter of months or even weeks.

  The gravedigger for the Portugal Street burial ground, by Clare market (now underneath the London School of Economics), testified that frequently the corpses were fresh enough that the gender of the dead could still be determined; but they were nonetheless ‘chopped and cut up’, and placed under the boards on which the mourners of that day’s funeral service stood, to ‘be thrown into the recent grave’ again after they left. When Scrooge is shown his own grave in a City churchyard in Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol, the area is typically ‘choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite’, which sounds very much like the Portugal Street churchyard walls, which seeped a ‘reeking’ fluid.

  Undertakers and church officials all agreed that nothing of the sort could possibly have occurred under their supervision. One undertaker protested that he visited the cemeteries once, sometimes even twice, a week and would have noticed such improper practices. One of these graveyards, as Walker dryly annotated, had records stating that, while that same undertaker had been in business, 9,500 burials had taken place in a space that could comfortably accommodate 900. But nothing anyone said could cover up the Enon Chapel scandal. Enon Chapel was not far from the Portugal Street burying grounds, halfway along the west side of Clement’s Lane, a turning off the Strand (now under the Royal Courts of Justice). It opened as a chapel in 1823, with a burial vault underneath measuring fifty-nine by twenty-nine feet. Over the next sixteen years, up to 12,000 bodies were buried there, with nothing but a wooden floor between them and the worshippers in the chapel above. The children in its Sunday school became accustomed to seeing what they called ‘body bugs’, the flies that hatched in the decomposing corpses. When the scandal finally broke, in 1844, a dustman testified that he had removed sixty loads of ‘waste’. After the chapel’s forced closure, the speculators who bought the building advertised: ‘Dancing on the Dead – Admission Threepence. No lady or gentleman admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings.’ In 1847, the owner opened up the vault to the public, charging them for the privilege.

  Enon Chapel was at least closed down; few of the civic authorities had legal powers to close graveyards. In 1845, when a pawnbroker complained that his Exmouth Street premises were virtually uninhabitable because of the ‘continual stench’ from the 1,500 people buried annually in the neighbouring workhouse burial ground, he was told that he would have to petition the Poor Law Guardians, who had control of the two-acre site. If they refused to act, then he could go to the Poor Law Commissioners; after that, there was nothing for it but to petition the Secretary of State: no one else could oblige them to cease using the grounds.

  To deal with this impasse, in 1850 the Metropolitan Interments Act was passed, enabling the Board of Health to supervise new cemeteries, to close churchyards that were full and to purchase private cemeteries if necessary. In June 1850, a parody in Household Words, ‘Address from an Undertaker to the Trade’, satirized the undertakers’ hostile response to this bill. It was science that was to blame, they protested, for showing people ‘that they are drinking their dead neighbours’. In case the message was lost, six months later the journal published a poem on the churchyards’ ‘half-unburied dead’:

  I saw from out the earth peep forth

  The white and glistening bones,

  With jagged ends of coffin-planks,

  That e’en the worm disowns;

  And once a smooth round skull rolled on,

  Like a football, on the stones...

  In 1853, Dickens preserved for ever St Mary-le-Strand’s churchyard in Drury Lane, by burying Nemo there in Bleak House, in ‘a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene...a beastly scrap of ground’. As in reality, in the novel Jo watches as ‘They was obliged to stamp upon [Nemo’s coffin] to git it in.’ In the year Bleak House was published, this churchyard was formally closed, but readers would have been aware that Dickens was describing an ongoing problem, and he returned to it a decade later, in Our Mutual Friend, when Lizzie and her brother Charlie meet in a City churchyard, with its ‘raised bank of earth about breast high...Here, conveniently and healthfully elevated above the level of the living, were the dead.’

  In an attempt to take the pressure off the city centre, new suburban cemeteries were authorized from the 1830s. Kensal Green cemetery became the first ‘garden’ cemetery, opening during the first cholera epidemic. It was here in 1837 that Charles and Catherine Dickens arranged for the burial of Mary Hogarth, Catherine’s seventeen-year-old sister, whose sudden death so traumatized the author that an instalment of Oliver Twist had to be delayed.75 The previous year, an Act had been passed ‘for establishing cemeteries for the Interment of the Dead, Northward, Southward, and Eastward of the Metropolis by a Company to be called The London Cemetery Company’. In 1837, the South Metropolitan Cemetery in Norwood opened, with Highgate Cemetery following in 1839, and Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington and Brompton Cemetery in 1840. (The land for Brompton Cemetery included part of the Kensington Canal, and the original plan was for water-borne coffins.)

  The return of cholera in 1853–4, this time in the West End, led to the Metropolis Land Management Act, which in turn created the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was given statutory powers to remove any civic ‘nuisances’, be they street pumps or graveyards. Yet even then Parliament failed to endow the Board with the one thing it needed – the authority to create a London-wide system of sewers, to drain the city that was almost a single cesspool of waste. That took the Great Stink of 1858.

  In an essay in Household Words in 1850, a narrator i
magines he tours the river with Father Thames: ‘may I inquire,’ he says, ‘what that black, sluggish stream may be which I see pouring into you from a wide, bricked archway’? Replies a proud Father Thames, ‘that’s one of my sewers...and a fine, generous, open fellow, he is...[there is] one generally near every bridge.’ He indicates the different-coloured currents swirling about: ‘That one belongs to a soap-boiler...next to it, is from a slaughter-house...[others] are from gas-factories, brewhouses, shot-factories, coal-wharfs, cow-houses, tan-pits, gut-spinners, fish-markets, and other[s].’ He benevolently advises his interviewer not to be confused by the ‘scum derived from barges, and limeworks, and colliers, and the shipping...and bone-grinders, and tar-works, and dredging-machines, and steamers...and floating remains of creatures from knackers’ yards’. Or, as Dickens put it more succinctly in Little Dorrit, ‘Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine, fresh river.’

  In 1857, the same year that novel was finished, the stench from the Thames had become so overwhelming that the government authorized quantities of chloride of lime to be dumped in the river in an attempt to mitigate the smell. An unusually dry, hot summer the following year rendered even that measure useless. The water was its usual black mass, and now the shrunken river revealed a bed of rotting, putrescent waste, which soon began to ferment in the sun. By 19 June conditions were, said Dickens, ‘head-and-stomach distracting’. Despite the ninety-degree heat, every window of every building overlooking the Thames remained closed, ‘and, as the smell rushes up the streets that lead from the river to the Strand, passers-by utter maledictions on the Government, the City authorities, the Central Board, and all who can or are supposed to be able to interfere’. By the end of the month, all were pointing a single finger of blame: ‘The causes of the nuisance are perfectly clear, so are the means of cure; but...no Minister has the courage to demand [what it will cost]. If it were a question of arming ships, or embarking soldiers, there would not be a day’s hesitation in asking for ten times the sum – it is so much better to spend money in killing our neighbours than in keeping ourselves alive and well.’ ‘Nobody knows what is to be done,’ wrote Dickens; ‘at least everybody knows a plan, and everybody else knows it won’t do.’

  But he was wrong: nothing makes funds available more quickly than the discomfort of the ruling class, and the Houses of Parliament sit directly on the river. One hot day there was a ‘sudden rush’ of MPs, all dashing from a committee room: Disraeli, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had ‘papers in one hand and...his pocket handkerchief clutched in the other’, holding it ‘closely to his nose, with body half bent’ as he fled, followed by Gladstone and his colleagues, all choking, their eyes streaming. Twelve days later Disraeli sponsored a bill to give the Metropolitan Board of Works the funds and, for the first time, the legal authority to undertake a city-wide, sewage-building project. The Metropolis Local Management Act for the Purification of the Thames and the Main Drainage of the Metropolis was passed one day short of a month after parliamentarians were forced to flee their own offices. ‘Parliament,’ said The Times, ‘was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench.’

  The Metropolitan Board of Works and its engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, had long been attempting to get approval for their plans to build intercepting sewers to run along the bank of the Thames, collecting waste from the street sewers and shipping it off to four pumping stations, then to great outfall sewers at Beckton and Crossness, near Abbey Wood, where at high tides it would be released to be swept out to sea. And this was what happened: only five years after the Great Stink, intercepting sewers were taking much of London’s waste as far as Barking Creek; in 1865, the Crossness pumping station was opened by the Prince of Wales. And in 1866, with eighty miles of sewering laid, the benefits were visible to all: a fourth epidemic of cholera arrived in London, but this time only the East End, not yet connected to the great new sewage system, was affected. Once the Abbey Mills station was opened in 1868, there were no further cholera outbreaks in London.

  Sewers and sewerage became a subject of fascination to the reading public. In 1861, All the Year Round took readers along the sewers from Finchley Road in north London to Vauxhall Bridge, showing the different types of waste: blood sewers under the meat markets, where ‘you could wade in the vital fluid of sheep and oxen’; ‘boiling-sewers’ near sugar bakers, where the effluent was always hot; ‘open rural sewers that were fruitful in watercresses, and closed town sewers whose roofs are thickly clustered with edible fungi’; and ‘sewers of different degrees of repulsiveness’ near chemical works and factories. (Informed that he was underneath Buckingham Palace, the reporter’s ‘loyalty was at once excited, and, taking off my fan-tailed cap, I led the way with the National Anthem, insisting that my guides should join in the chorus’. The sewer workers’ response is not recorded.) By 1866, the sewers were so much part of daily London life that they had almost ceased to seem dirty. In The Wild Boys of London, an 1866 adventure story for boys, a gang of orphans and outcasts live in a sewer that somehow has no smell and no waste: ‘It’s nothing when you get used to it. We gets wet, and we gets dry again; the mud makes us dirty, and the water makes us clean.’

  There was one single delay. Parliament had deliberately closed its eyes to the fact that the Thames would have to be embanked for Bazalgette’s plan to function in full, and not until 1862 did the government accept that the money would have to be found for this too. Another couple of years elapsed before the various plots of land along the river were purchased. The Duke of Buccleuch, for example, had a newly built house on land leading down to the river, and his case for compensation took eight years to grind its way through the courts. There was more delay as elaborate plans were developed to utilize the opportunity to create a new road, as well as a mass of underground support systems, including what became the District and Circle lines of the tube, water and gas pipes, and service access tunnels. This slowed things down, but everyone understood that it was worth doing properly.

  The idea of embanking the river, building out into the Thames to create additional shore, was not new: the Adelphi Terrace to the west of Waterloo Bridge, and Somerset House to the east, had both built on embankments in the eighteenth century. Waterloo Bridge in the early nineteenth century had banked in the area underneath the new span to link up these two pieces of land. There were also embankments where the Temple gardens stood;76 by Blackfriars Bridge, created in 1769, when the bridge was built; and at Chelsea Hospital, the remains of an older, failed embankment. The new Houses of Parliament, which were built between 1837 and 1852, had created an 850-foot embankment, its buildings jutting out into what had previously been the river. So the new Embankment was new only in scale; the entire length of the river, running for five miles, on the north side of the river from Chelsea to Blackfriars, was embanked. On the south side the land by Lambeth was embanked to prevent the regular floods that the low-lying south bank had always been subject to, creating the reclaimed land on which St Thomas’s Hospital was built.

  For many Londoners, the building of the Embankment was an ordeal to be survived. The city had become the site of what was in effect a military campaign, in which ‘a series of fortifications, mostly surmounted by huge scaffolds...arose in our chief thoroughfares’. Arthur Munby felt the full force of this campaign. He lived in Fig Tree Court, Inner Temple, and the buildings on the south side of his courtyard were all demolished for the work, as he noted dismally in his diary:

  APRIL 1864: ‘On my way home, went to look at the great mound of earth, now an acre in extent, which carts are outpouring...at the foot of Norfolk Street, for the Embankment.’

  MAY 1864: The embankment seen from Middle Temple garden is now ‘outlined by the scaffold beams and dredging engines ranged far out in the river opposite’.

  SEPTEMBER 1864: ‘The embankment grown a more horrible chaos than ever.’

  And so it went on for him, year by dreary
year:

  APRIL 1866: ‘The walls of the Embankment begin to appear: piles for new bridges block up the Thames everywhere.’

  Before the Thames was embanked, low-lying areas of London flooded regularly. Here, with the new Chelsea Embankment nearing completion in 1874, and plans under way for the Embankment Gardens, residents could look forward to drier and more pleasant living conditions after years of building work.

  Unlike Munby, Dickens did not live by the river, and so he saw less the devastation of the present than hope for the future. In 1861, he wrote, ‘I thought I would walk on by Mill Bank, to see the river. I walked straight on for three miles on a splendid broad esplanade overhanging the Thames...When I was a rower on that river it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public-house or two, an old mill, and a tall chimney. I had never seen it in any stage of transition.’