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March 31 - April 3, 2023
The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.
The city was vast even by today’s standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference.
without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people.
“The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren’t just getting rid of that refuse—they were recycling it.
But by plowing their organic waste back into the earth, the early medieval towns increased the productivity of the soil, thus raising the population ceiling, thereby creating more waste—and increasingly fertile soil.
To this day, the Netherlands has the highest population density of any country in the world.
Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste.
without efficient forms of waste recycling, those dense concentrations of life can’t survive for long.
If some rogue virus wiped out every single mammal on the planet, life on earth would proceed, largely unaffected by the loss. But if the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years.
“I found whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of nightsoil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools….
As the little thing dangled her tin cup as gently as possible into the stream, a bucket of night-soil was poured down from the next gallery.
The elevated wage of the night-soil men wasn’t the only culprit behind this rising tide of excrement. The runaway popularity of the water closet heightened the crisis.
Water closets were a tremendous breakthrough as far as quality of life was concerned, but they had a disastrous effect on the city’s sewage problem.
But the single most important factor driving London’s waste-removal crisis was a matter of simple demography: the number of people generating waste had almost tripled in the space of fifty years.
Five hundred years after the fact, London was slowly re-creating the horrific demise of Richard the Raker: it was drowning in its own filth.
All of those human lives crowded together had an inevitable repercussion: a surge in corpses.
Every Wednesday the remains of dead paupers are thrown in to a hole which is 14 feet deep. A clergyman gabbles through the burial service and then the grave is filled with loose soil.
The whole neighborhood is infected from the dreadful stench.
The social theorist Walter Benjamin reworked Dickens’ original slogan in his enigmatic masterpiece “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written as the scourge of fascism was enveloping Europe: “There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”
However gruesome the sight of the burial ground was, the corpses themselves were not likely spreading “malignant diseases.”
No one died of stench in Victorian London. But tens of thousands died because the fear of stench blinded them to the true perils of the city, and drove them to implement a series of wrongheaded reforms that only made the crisis worse.
The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps.
How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.
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.
“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 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.
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.
(Plagues and political unrest have a long history of following the same cycles.)
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.
Without proper barns, residents converted traditional dwellings into “cow houses”—herding twenty-five or thirty cows into a single room.
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.
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.
The coffeehouse down the street brewed its coffee with pump water;
The pubs of Golden Square diluted their spirits with pump water.
The Eley brothers also maintained two large tubs of well water for their employees to enjoy during the workday.
A regular pump-water drinker—and noted ornithologist—named John Gould had declined a glass on that Saturday, complaining that it had a repulsive smell.
But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.
And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it’s often too late—because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.
But if we want to re-create the inner experience of the outbreak—the physical and emotional torment involved—the historical record comes up wanting.
The initial symptoms themselves would be entirely indistinguishable from a mild case of food poisoning.
Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you’d be dead in forty-eight hours.
Imagine living with that sword of Damocles hovering above your head—every stomach pain or watery stool a potential harbinger of imminent doom.
But for Londoners, the specific menace of cholera was a product of the Industrial Age and its global shipping networks: no known case of cholera on British soil exists before 1831.
Londoners first took notice of cholera when an outbreak among British soldiers stationed in Ganjam, India, sickened more than five hundred men in 1781.
Cases inland didn’t appear until October of that year, in the northeast town of Sunderland, beginning with a William Sproat, the first Englishman to perish of cholera on his home soil.
On February 8 of the following year, a Londoner named John James became the first to die in the city. By outbreak’s end, in 1833, the dead in England and Wales would number above 20,000.
The epidemic of 1848–1849 would consume 50,000 lives in England and Wales.
He may have begun vomiting during the night and most likely experienced muscle spasms and sharp abdominal pains. At a certain point, he would have been overtaken by a crushing thirst.
