Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society How Filthy Were the Victorians? About this episode They say people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. The Victorians might have done well to live by that rule.
For all of the dirt that the Victorians threw at other eras, suggesting that all those who came before them were filthy, they weren't that clean themselves.
Lee Jackson joins Kate for this final episode of our filthy series to talk toilets and more. Lee is the author of ‘Dirty Old London’, ‘Palaces of Pleasure’ and ‘Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens's London’
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:37 Speaker 01 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.
1:12 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Leister. You're listening to Betwixt the Sheets, the podcast that likes to roll its sleeves up and root around in the pounce of history. But before we can do that, I do have to give you the fair do's warning. What is a fair do's warning? Well, it's like, fair do's. We did tell you, we did warn you, fair dinkum, fair do's. And here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering arranged adult subjects and you should be an adult too. Let's crack on.
1:45 Kate Lister? 1851 in Hyde Park, London. Every day for five months, over 40,000 visitors rolled in to attend the great exhibition, taking in the massive glass and iron crystal palace before its relocation to South London. The visitors, for just one shilling in many cases, were spoilt for choice. They could see the world's largest diamond, they could witness steam engines, hydraulic presses, and early fax machines, they could lay their eyes from prodigies from all around the world, like sugarcane from the Caribbean, and fun inventions like the gun umbrella and an ice cream freezer. But one of the most exciting things that people were cramming in to see was the new public toilets. Well, I guess it's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?
2:28 Kate Lister? But these were the first public flushing toilets. Ooh, fancy, and that seems like a huge step forward for cleanliness, right? But just what the fuck were they doing before that? Well, I am ready to find out if you are.
3:04 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. In many ways, the Victorians shaped the world that we live in today. This month, we've been digging through the filth of history and we've found that a lot of people who we were told, mainly by the Victorians, were dirty, were simply not as filthy as they have been made out to be. But what about the Victorians? Oh, they loved to tell you that the medieval people were dirty, they loved to slag off the Egyptians, they even had a pop at ancient Rome. But just how clean were they? Huh? Today, I'm joined by Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London, and he is going to tell us just how dirty the Victorians really were. Let's do it.
3:54 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Lee Jackson. How are you doing?
4:01 Speaker 02 Oh, I'm feeling okay, thank you. A bit anxious about where this is gonna go, this conversation.
4:06 Kate Lister? No, no, we're here to talk about the dirty Victorians.
4:10 Speaker 02 Exactly.
4:11 Kate Lister? And this is so in your wheelhouse. You've written lots of books, but you are the author of Dirty Old London.
4:16 Speaker 02 That is true, yes.
4:18 Kate Lister? Yes. So if we're talking dirty, grimy, mucky Victorians, I think you are the man to come to.
4:26 Speaker 02 I'll take that as a compliment.
4:27 Kate Lister? Yeah. The Victorians, I'm fascinated by them. They're such a strange, weird bunch of people because they existed at this really bizarre time in history, the Industrial Revolution. Like at the start of the Industrial Revolution, like they didn't have cars, they didn't have phones. And then by the end of it, phones, cars, cinema, all of this stuff. It's, the world changed so much and presumably hygiene changed as well.
4:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, certainly the Victorians were very keen on sort of, you know, highlighting their sanitary achievements. You know, we always think of Joseph Basiljet, the great engineer who built this sort of vast sewer network in mid-Victorian London, which, you know, we still kind of rely on today. The idea of things being sanitary, that's something that comes in in the Victorian era. They don't call it hygiene, but they call it sanitary and sanitation. And the sanitary question, as it became known in the 1840s. And it's kind of, the way to think of it, I always think, is you know how we think about sort of green issues today, you know, over the last 30, 40 years? The question is something green or not, you know, is it environmentally friendly or not?
5:35 Speaker 02 It's something that we also, we might disagree on the details and some people are, you know, green, but we all understand the concept. It's kind of embedded itself in daily life. And you get in the Victorian period, the question is something sanitary or not? It's exactly the same sort of overall concept, I think. And you get that from about the 1840s onwards.
5:53 Kate Lister? The Victorians, they exist in two states in the public imagination today. One way, they are super clean. They have got new sewage systems. It's the birth of like the modern world and soap and beauty products and all this stuff. And then, and then on the other side to this, they are filthy, living in slums and squalid and awful and everyone is in hovels. It was very much. Two worlds.
6:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I think we also have to be a bit careful, obviously, about sort of just seeing everything in black and white. There's a whole grade of Victorian people, right? So from people absolutely desperate, living on the streets to poor workers who perhaps rent a single room, to people who might manage a couple of rooms, people who could perhaps rent a small terraced house in Walthamstow or the East End or somewhere. And you know, you can build up the scale, right up the scale to people who can afford a mansion in Mayfair. So there isn't one unique Victorian experience. One thing that is very different from us is that they were lacking, certainly most of Victorian period, and arguably all, they were lacking the scientific knowledge we have of bacteria. And they were lacking some of the basic understanding we have of germs.
7:02 Speaker 02 Germ theory, yes, it's a Victorian discovery in a way, but it's not one that's widely accepted or understood throughout much of the 19th century, even towards the end of the century. So the famous example I always think of is that when the Victorians introduced public toilets, which are a bit my particular obsession, to have a wash basin was seen as additional luxury if you're willing to pay an extra penny. So you had toilets for the poor without the wash basins and toilets. And because they weren't thinking in bacterial terms, it was just literally, well, it's quite nice to wash your hands afterwards, but so what sort of thing? You know, the poor are dirty anyway. So.
7:38 Kate Lister? What terms were they speaking of there? Because this is fascinating. So germ theory, like, so tell us a bit about what that came in. But obviously, they didn't discover germs, then everyone got that memo. How did they understand dirt contagion disease?
7:53 Speaker 02 I mean, there isn't, there isn't, and again, this is sometimes a misrepresentation. There isn't an absolute shared understanding that's there, I think, at the start of the 19th century. But the thing that happens, I mean, the key event, certainly Victorian London is my key area, but arguably nationally as well. Cholera comes to Britain in 1831. It's this awful disease that's been travelling across Europe. You've still got to map its spread, the newspapers report it, now it's got to Moscow, now it's got to the Baltic States and so on. And it was obvious it was going to then travel further west and England, Britain had lots of trade connections with the Baltic. So it's fairly clear cholera was going to go here. And it's not dissimilar to our recent experience with Covid in a way in that
8:38 Speaker 02 people are scared of what it, you know, it's potentially fatal within a day or two.
8:42 Kate Lister? Really, that quick?
8:43 Speaker 02 Can be, yeah. What kills you with cholera is dehydration. And in an intense case, then if you don't, if you don't have the dehydration assaults that we know to give it, to give someone now, they can die within sort of twenty four, forty eight hours after the first
8:55 Kate Lister? Wow.
8:56 Speaker 02 First visible symptoms. Obviously, they, you know, maybe bring for a little before that. So cholera comes to the UK. It's a bit like Covid. No one knows what it is. No one knows how to treat it. There's all sorts of weird experiments and, you know, all sorts of weird potions and pills are suggested and a lot of sort of quack medicine, but literally no one knows how to treat it. And that's what gets the Victorians thinking about this big Spanish reissue because, you know, thousands of people die essentially. But the way it gets framed in the eighteen thirties, what's cholera comes, is this notion of miasma, which you may have heard of. It's like the idea that disease is in the air in terms of a bad smell. If you could smell something rotting, decaying, the sort of smell you might get with rotten vegetables, rotten meat, or the smell you might get from sewers,
9:41 Speaker 02 then they think that actually it's the smell that is the cause of disease. And that sort of miasmatic theory comes to predominate in the mid century. And I think that holds true for much of the nineteenth century then. And germ theory, yes, you know, you get the sort of discoveries in the eighteen eighties and hints of it earlier on. But it doesn't really filter through to the general public until maybe the eighteen nineties.
10:01 Kate Lister? The miasma theory, the bad smell theory, to defend them a little bit, it's not a million miles wider than Mark. You can see the joined up
10:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:11 Kate Lister? Thinking there.
10:12 Speaker 02 I mean, basically, you know, so London is a big example, you know, we, we built this massive sewer network. The idea behind that was to get rid of the bad smells that were coming out of cesspools mainly to start with. And then when they emptied the cesspools and they all ended up flowing into the Thames. So to get rid of the stuff that was in the Thames. And it was the right answer for the wrong reasons. Um. That that's the really intriguing thing. It was such a major development in, you know, how our cities are built and structured. And if for entirely the wrong reasons, you know, because it's actually waterborne bacteria that we should be watching for. But yeah, they kind of go together. So it wasn't it wasn't ridiculous. And in fact, he was more to the point, it was even less than being ridiculous. It was very plausible to people, you know, people are grown up.
10:51 Speaker 02 For the most part, in the eighties, they would have grown up with a cesspool in the back garden or under the house if they lived in like a crowded part of central London. And that would have been filled that would fill up with domestic waste, shall we call it, over a period of months. And then be emptied every six months, maybe every year even, depending on the size of it.
11:11 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
11:12 Speaker 02 And so people were kind of used to that, but they also began to think, well, you know, that even even in that age when there was more smell and the more aroma about and more horrible smells about. They they recognized what the smell of a cesspool was a horrible smell, right? And nobody actually wanted to smell it. So is to link that to the idea of health. Public health sanitation was a really clever idea. One of the most unfortunate things about the cesspools were that they were actually built to be porous. So that the liquid would leak away into the soil. And the reason being, once you do that, the smell decreases. And you get a more compact sort of sludge that's easily scooped out by some poor man with a shovel, the night soil man, yeah.
11:52 Speaker 02 And of course, leaking out that liquid into the soil is exactly where waterborne bacteria can also stem from. And of course, that's famously what John Snow found in in Soho in the eighteen fifties by mapping cholera cases. So yeah, cesspools, not the best idea in a sense, but you know, there's other issues with water closets as well, though, because, you know, we now we flush all our waste, you know, into very sewage treatment systems.
12:16 Kate Lister? Yeah, we don't even think about it, do we?
12:18 Speaker 02 I mean, the Victorias were basically just flushing it down the Thames and then later out to sea. And in the eighteen nineties, then it was sort of. Treated waste, I missle, but it was all basically dumped. It's pretty much opposite Southend, if you if you know that area, so.
12:31 Kate Lister? Oh, dear.
12:32 Speaker 02 So, you know, what do you do with it? It's a really interesting thing. How do you do?
12:34 Kate Lister? What do you do with it?
12:35 Speaker 02 How do you deal with waste is one of those big questions. For a city. And if you look at the Victorians, and I think it carries right through to us today, the historic answer is you put it out of the way somewhere else. You you send it somewhere that isn't here. And we get.
12:49 Kate Lister? Don't we don't want to smell it.
12:50 Speaker 02 Don't want to smell it.
12:50 Kate Lister? As far away from us as possible.
12:52 Speaker 02 Possible. And so, you know, today, the thing is like electronic waste, right? We've dumping tons of electrical waste and such that ends up in massive heaps in Africa, being scavenged by people living in what we would now see as kind of Victorian conditions, you know?
13:03 Kate Lister? Yeah, or into we we're currently dumping raw sewage into public waterways.
13:09 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the other thing. The the dumping of of sewage was one of the things that actually was cleaned up in quite well in in the UK. After, you know, from the Victorians almost, and mainly down to the European Union. And once that, once those protections were wiped out, then, yeah, it's just getting worse and worse.
13:26 Kate Lister? We're back to just chucking shit wherever.
13:29 Speaker 02 Wherever we can.
13:29 Kate Lister? Just just we're just back to chucking shit. But actually, like, I know that, like, the issue of toilets is like, it's innately comical, because we can't stop laughing at things like that. But it's so important to any kind of civilization, because that is key. And in this series about dirt and filth, how a large group of people are going to manage waste is absolutely central to it. What I get the feeling of Victorian London is it expanded so rapidly, so significantly, that there was a sort of sense of, like, the infrastructure couldn't cope with it. So there's a sort of like, how are we dealing with this? And that's just the cesspit system, which is that what they would call privies? There'd just be like an out.
14:08 Speaker 02 A privy just means, I think, essentially a a an outhouse of some kind, typically in your backyard, right? So, yeah, but if you lived in somewhere like Soho, it would often be in like your basement, because you didn't have a backyard and in some of the old townhouses or not much, whatever. The original cesspit would just be a hole in the ground. And there you go, essentially, hole in ground. And you have a nice mahogany seat with a little hole in it, you know?
14:28 Kate Lister? But it's a hole in the ground.
14:29 Speaker 02 You have to squat over the hole. You can have a seat, you know? Um, I looked at, um, I've been looking recently at the history of Covent Garden. I found a sort of the auction details for a building on, I think, I think Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. So building up would have been built sort of early Georgian period, maybe maybe a little before. And unusually, the auction needs to actually list the toilet as one of the effects that is going to be sold at the auction. And it's a magnificent affair. It's like mahogany panel that has some kind of tin tin lined dome over the roof. It looked like, I imagine, like a little sort of Georgian temple or something. Now, not many places were like that, I think. Unless you're in a super rich, you know, after for most people, it was just a little, it was a little, you know, little shed in the garden with a hole in it.
15:11 Speaker 02 And the cesspool, yeah, it would be porous, so the liquid seeped away, which meant less smell. No one knew about the consequences. And the night soil man would come around, often just once a year. Literally, these are some guys with a cart and some shovels and some baskets, and they would get down to the business of emptying it. And they were called night soil men because nighttime was the time to do it when no one else was around. Because no one else wanted to be near it when it was happening, essentially.
15:39 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Lee after this short break.
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17:23 Kate Lister? They were shared toilets. Sometimes I think about like that, of like what that would be like to, like if you wake up in the middle of the night and you need to go, like hopefully you can just like get out of bed, stumble across the hall and then you've got a space all to yourself. But in the 19th century and for all of history before that, until we got private space, you'd be running outside or downstairs to a shared space in the cold.
17:45 Speaker 02 Certainly if you lived in like any kind of tenements or flats or whatever of a working class kind in Central London, you'd be sharing, you know, you'd be sharing toilets. Absolutely. I mean, again, I know when we go about coming on, because I've been looking at it recently, but like one of the courts, I sort of, you know, back streets sort of enclosed areas off, I think Bedfordbury, 70 residents, two toilets between them. So, you know, you can imagine how that gets, right?
18:09 Kate Lister? Oh, no. And of course, it makes people sick, doesn't it? Because that is that, I'm not an expert on cholera, but is that how cholera is transmitted?
18:17 Speaker 02 It's a waterborne infection, right? So as soon as you have contaminated water in any sense.
18:22 Kate Lister? Contaminated with shit?
18:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, with shit essentially, yeah. Or, you know, I'm sure you could vomit into it too, you know, if you're.
18:29 Kate Lister? Yes, okay.
18:30 Speaker 02 But basically.
18:31 Kate Lister? Which of those would you pick?
18:34 Speaker 02 But yeah, no, it's waterborne, can I say, contaminated with largely human excrement, yeah. And it's, it's a chaotic, it's a chaotic system. And, you know, the Thames is, is this, is this sort of great barometer of what's happening. Even, even in the 1820s, before the coming of cholera, as the decade before, it was getting filthy because the mortal people were connecting their cesspits, the sewers. Now, those sewers weren't the sewers that Basilisk built. They were ancient sewers that could be for anything, but were largely designed for rainwater. So actually what precedes cholera is that dodgy builders are connecting houses cesspools to the rainwater sewers.
19:19 Speaker 02 So that they will lit, so that instead the liquid going to the ground, it will flow away nicely into the sewers. But no one designed those sewers for that purpose and all those sewers end up flowing into the Thames. So it's just, it's just a mess, right? No one's planned it. It's all this kind of weird ad hoc erasure that you would literally have a house. If you're like a middle class person and you're renting a nice house, but they say, well, I don't like the smell of this. The builder will literally say, if you're near any kind of sort of rainwater drain, I can do your pipe from that. And it was literally, there's literally one, these individual choices being made by people. And then, and this it comes in with the, with the beginning of the flush toilets. People get flush toilets. Water's going into their cesspools, they're filling up, they're getting too full of water, more smelly. Builders say, oh, we can deal with that. Let's put under the pipe.
20:01 Speaker 02 It's just chaos. It's just basically this weird insanity chaos happening across the city of like. Million and a half people.
20:08 Kate Lister? Absolutely stunk.
20:09 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, you know, I think obviously it's a lot of smell in Victorian London that we would, we would not accept by, I mean, horses. You know, the.
20:16 Kate Lister? Just horses.
20:17 Speaker 02 Horses, right. Horses. I mean, the, the, the great one I always remember is that, um. The shopkeepers on Piccadilly, I think like eighteen sixties or eighteen seventies. Um, all their brass, you know, sort of brass finishes you get on Victorian shop from sort of little, sort of like a brass plaque underneath the window type thing and brass, brass fittings. They were all quickly decaying because of the sheer amount of horse piss.
20:38 Kate Lister? No.
20:40 Speaker 02 You know, we just take for granted, you know, they, they took for granted that there'd be quite a lot of horse stung and horse piss in, in the city. And that was like urban life. Strangely enough, like the, the title of the book I wrote about on this some years ago is, is Dirty Old London. And it's actually a short thing of what the Victorians said, because they often refer to London as dear, dirty old London. As if it was like part of the joy and charm of being a city, that you have dirt. You know, dirt was kind of the quintessential thing that you see in an urban environment. They got most romantic about fog. I mean, fog, Victorians could get very romantic about fog and they love the idea of, you know, the sort of romantic atmosphere of fog, everything blurred, everything smoky. Some people said it even purified your lungs. I know Kate turned all the buildings black and the trees, but, you know, but.
21:24 Speaker 02 Dear dirty old London, you see it referred to as that, that little phrase comes up quite a few times in various. It's Victorian literature and it's because I think we have that as well, though, you know, the sort of gritty.
21:32 Kate Lister? Oh, yeah.
21:33 Speaker 02 The idea that the city has to be kind of gritty and dirty and, you know, it's like there's something much more interesting about, say, nineteen seventy is New York, but it was all like, you know.
21:43 Kate Lister? Yes, we do. You're absolutely right.
21:44 Speaker 02 Rather than say like, you know, something that's been sanitised. And so we have this sort of dual feelings about sanitation and improvement actually as well, because I think we do see sort of dirt and filter sort of a a part of urban life, as long as we don't, you know, catch a fatal disease from it. You know, that's the other question.
22:00 Kate Lister? But sometimes it did get too stinky even for them because there was this issue that they referred to as the great stink coming out of the Thames at one point, wasn't it?
22:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, so this is what I've sort of incoherently rambled about, but basically you get people getting flush toilets. That goes into the cesspools, the cesspools get too full, they connect the cesspools to existing sewers, which aren't really meant for human waste at that point. And that starts going into the Thames and then you get this sanitary question in the eighties, but what are we going to do about all this? And one of the answers is, look, we need to shut down cesspools and build, build sewers. But the sewers, again, were all at that point, just connecting to the Thames. So in solving the problem by getting rid of the old cesspools, they just started redirecting everything into the sewers, which ended up in the Thames. So it's just this cube, it's in fact, it's part, it's partly introduction to water closets, it's partly people thinking, oh, cesspools might not be a good idea.
22:50 Speaker 02 But then turning to sewers instead, and no one had really planned where all the sewers would go properly. So it all ends up in the Thames. And it's this so-called great stink, there's been like twenty years of discussion before this. If you can imagine like HS two, you know, you know how long that has taken to sort of think and plan about and it's still gone wrong. Well, that's kind of where the Victorians were with sewers in the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, eighteen fifties. And it is this final, finals, it's a hot summer eighteen fifty eight, you can imagine, you know.
23:19 Kate Lister? How bad did the smell get?
23:20 Speaker 02 It just got overwhelming for members of parliament because it was in the Thames, you know, this is, this is always the great joke. It was in the Thames, parliament was next to the Thames. They were literally soaking their curtains with like disinfectants in a hope of getting rid of it.
23:33 Kate Lister? Oh, that is bad.
23:34 Speaker 02 They were dumping like, you know, tonne blocks of chloride of lime into the river. In the hope they could kind of disinfect the river. So, you know, it was, it was bad.
23:44 Kate Lister? That's not gonna work.
23:45 Speaker 02 But I think what, I think what sort of accounts of Victorian tourism are often sort of gloss overs. There had literally been twenty, thirty years of discussion about this. And what the great steam was, it wasn't, it didn't alert people to the problem. They were well aware of the problem. But it just pushed them into paying for it. Cause that's, of course, is always the other thing with sanitation. With any of these things, it's like, who pays for it and how much they want to stump up. And it wasn't, yeah. What would be now, you know, tens of millions and millions of pounds to build a new sewer network.
24:11 Kate Lister? And you've mentioned the name Basil, Basil Jet a couple of times. So we should give him a bit of a shout out. Who was, who was Joseph Basil?
24:18 Speaker 02 Joseph Basiljet was basically an engineer. I think, I hesitantly think he started out in railways. I'm, I'm fairly sure. He had a sort of nervous breakdown after the railway boom of the eighteen forties where lots of stocks and shares sort of collapsed. But I maybe, I hope I'm not thinking of someone else. Some all right into correct you. But he was an engineer. He was working for sort of sewers commissions that had been set up in the eighteen forties to like, try and solve this question. And he was just a very good, consistent, thorough engineer. He checked all these measurements. He, he was very good at making sure he got value for money. That all the goods that we were supposed to be paying for came in. He tested the quality of all the concrete. He was just a very, very thorough.
24:58 Speaker 02 Man who kept track of this vast project on the, which, you know, was on a scale kind of no one has ever attempted before. Cause so you built, you know, he built this vast network of intercepting sewers going to east, west across London to. Stop all the filth hitting the Thames base. If you can imagine London, everything goes towards the Valley of the Thames. So what he built was these vast intercepting sewers running parallel with the Thames as it were, which was sweep all the rubbish eastwards. But of course, he also, they also built at the same time, the Thames Embankment, you know. So it's like, it was all massive construction project.
25:27 Kate Lister? Clever sausage.
25:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, he knew what he was doing. He knew what he was doing.
25:30 Kate Lister? He didn't, no.
25:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:31 Kate Lister? The other issue, if you're building or just dealing with a mass expanding city, is you've got sewage to have to deal with, which. Very much an ad hoc basis until Mr. Basiljet got involved. The other thing you have to deal with is dead bodies. Like what do you do with the dead when people, cause they have to go. Somewhere they have to like, what, what are we doing with them? Are we burying them? Are we cremating them? What happens to them?
25:55 Speaker 02 It's a real challenge. I mean, it's always been a challenge in a big city. But the thing to remember about Victoria London and lots of stages of London beforehand is that it's growing, so it's growing at a rapid rate, right? So it starts at one million people at the start of the century, pushing six million by the end, or obviously the boundaries expand massively as well. But it's growing at a rapid rate due to incomers, because actually people who did there for a long time tend to die quite, quite more quickly than people born in the countryside. It's got a high mortality rate. I mean, if you look at, even if you look at Soho, so, so central London Soho in the 1890s, infant mortality, so children dying under one year old was something like one in six in central London in 1890. People are dying in droves because the city isn't healthy and part of that is contagious
26:40 Speaker 02 disease. A lot of it is poor living conditions. Some of it is poor nutrition. Yeah, there's all the reasons you might expect. So yeah, what do you do with that? Well, traditionally, you'd be buried in the parish church. So if you were a well-to-do person, space was made in the churchyard and so on. But what happens is that a lot of the places that do it exist are getting kind of getting over full. All sorts of tricks are done to try and deal with it. In particular, you get sort of graveyards being topped up with earth just to hide the fact that, you know, we can just get a couple more in. So you think about, say, St Anne's Soho, I don't know if you know, if you know that street?
27:11 Kate Lister? I do, yeah.
27:11 Speaker 02 And the graveyard is substantially higher than the rest of the, the rest of the ground. And part of that is because it's built on a slight eminence, but also it's partly so they've got space. And, and you see that, so it's St Giles' Church as well. And they're above the road deliberately, but it's also because, yes, that gives you some more burial space, right? And because burial space was at a premium. And so it depends, as with so many things in, in life, and certainly 19th century London, the answer depends on how wealthy you are. So the solution that comes in the 1830s is the creation of what we would call the modern cemetery. So Kensal Green is the first one, and not then in central London, but on the, in the, in the countryside essentially, in when it's built in the early 1830s. And there's that famous run of sort of commercial cemeteries, which
27:54 Speaker 02 people call the magnificent seven, which is always very grand. And I won't be able to name, I'll, I'll struggle to name all of them now, but it's like Kensal Green, Highgate, Norwood, Nunhead, Avon Park, Brompton, that's still only six.
28:08 Kate Lister? Don't worry, I don't think anyone's going to pull you up on that. I'm very impressed.
28:11 Speaker 02 So, commercial cemeteries are built and they are commercial, they're commercial ventures, right? They're not run by for the public good. They're literally property speculations with a company running it and a manager and they have to make money. But they create these park-like cemeteries on the modelers who pay all the shares in Paris. And you know, you'll pay your sum and you'll get a lovely plot and it'll be all in rustic and rural and there'll be trees and it'll be beautiful. So if you're reasonably well-to-do from the 1830s, you have the answer finally. You can just go out of town. You've got these magnificent parks. If you're poor, it's much, much harder. And what you actually get is a whole run of sort of burial speculators in central London, but not of the sort of grand park variety.
28:50 Speaker 02 So the most famous one, I think, is Enon Chapel, which was built just off the Strand, near Clare Market, that sort of area. And they built it as a chapel in theory for people to worship in, but it seems to be built largely as a speculation to bury people in the vaults. Because they had a big vaults underneath, you can bury people there, you know, get the coffin stuffed coffin in the vaults. But after a few years, it's starting to smell quite badly. There was sort of odd insects buzzing around the chapel and all these things.
29:17 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
29:17 Speaker 02 And also after a few years, they realised that they seemed to have buried like at least like two or 3,000 people here. And if you imagine a single building, how do you achieve that? Well, I guess it was you don't. So what they were doing is, it turned out, they were carting off the deceased at regular intervals and dumping them somewhere in the countryside. And you get all sorts of these weirdly mismanaged things. Another one just off Rosebury Avenue, who's, I shouldn't do my, whose name escapes me. But again, it was, it was said that they were disinterioring recently buried bodies and burning them. It was said, all sorts of quite gruesome stuff, right? And these were the sort of people who were just selling cheap funerals to the poor. But you couldn't guarantee that, you know, the body would be there for very long, if you can imagine.
29:59 Speaker 02 So that was that option. And then what happens in the 1840s is there is this public outcry led by a doctor called Dr Walker or Graveyard Walker, as it became known. Who gets obsessed with this notion that graveyards are part of the sanitary question. It's not unreasonable, actually.
30:15 Kate Lister? Well, that's fair.
30:16 Speaker 02 You know, again, he thought. It was due to me asthma. He thought it was from the stench that was coming from these horribly managed graveyards and what have you. Uh, but yeah, he campaigned, you know, he did, he did letters, he did, he did pamphlets, he did public meetings. He paid to close down uh Enon Chapel and then held tour and then held tours of the basements so people could see how bad it was. And it was, it was just like, it was a full publicity campaign and Dickens's Bleak House is sort of the tail end of that. If you know the, the Grey Garden Bleak House, which is, which was based on a very real one in Russell Court, uh, just on Wow. And so there's this big campaign and yeah, it's actually one of the great successes in a way. The government finally, after much debate, they thought first of all about nationalizing undertaking.
30:58 Speaker 02 So that the government were literally the person who bears you no matter what, but they couldn't get that through. But they, in the end, again, it's about finding the money. They find money for local authorities to build cemeteries in the style of the grand commercial ones, which have been built thirty years ago for the rich. And so, you know, you, I think Islington St Pancras Cemetery is, is the first one that's allowed out in northwest London. And yeah, so that's actually a real success. People say, look, look at this horror. Can't we do something about it? The rich have been sorted, we can't still green, what can we do for the poor? And the government cops up and say, okay, we're going to lend money for local authorities to build proper cemeteries. And those, the local authorities cemetery have been out today, essentially.
31:41 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Lee after this short break.
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32:25 Kate Lister? Hello, betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I'm I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
33:07 Kate Lister? So if you're just an average Victorian, just trying to get by day to day, and you've got the great stink and cesspits and maybe somebody's thrown a body on your lawn because they ran out of space in the local cemetery. I'm just trying to think, how do you stay clean? Because being clean has always been important to people. There's this myth that throughout history, people were just disgusting and they were happy to be so. But people were trying to keep clean. Do you think that would have been an easy task in those circumstances?
33:37 Speaker 02 I mean, again, what is the average Victorian? But no, he wasn't. And I think it was also, I think it's fair to say, yes, people want to be clean, but what they meant by clean varied, right?
33:48 Kate Lister? It was very different.
33:49 Speaker 02 By what we might mean. So it genuinely was a novel idea in the mid 19th century. Even to have a bath once a week was seen as kind of a weird indulgence. So I mean, you might have a bath once a week maybe, but you didn't have to. You know, you just have a quick splash and you wash or whatever, you're fine. But of course, the big problem, if we can sort of assume that, again, let's assume that the middle class on the ridge could always find water. They could always get the servants to heat them up hot water. A lot of the soaps and things that people would use in the early half of the century were not mass produced. They would be very chemical type things you'd get from your local farms. Your servants would mix them together in the house according to your liking.
34:32 Speaker 02 And then during the 19th century, you get mass produced pear soap and all this sort of thing. But if you're rich or middle class. At the end of the day, you you'll find a way through because you have hot water and you have water. That that's the other thing as well, right? It will always give or take be there. I'm gonna do a horrible thing, just adding a caveat to that, though. Water supplies in London in the nineteenth century were not constant. So if you were wealthy, you had a big system in your house to store it. So even if you're well to do, you wouldn't have constant running water. You would have to fill up your system when the water supply was turned on by the water company. So nevertheless, if you if you're in a decent sized house, you have a decent sized system, you'd have your giant tank somewhere and you would store that water. If you were poor, well, first of all, there's no way you'd have any space for your own water system. How's that gonna happen?
35:15 Speaker 02 Um. You don't have money to heat up water anyway. That's just, you know, it's just very unlikely, not much anyway, yeah. Uh. So not for bathing purposes, last thing you want to use it for. You don't have access necessarily to that clean water because it depends what your source is. If it's a well, there's still quite a lot of wells in London in the nineteenth century, then maybe they have been polluted by, you know, local sanitary or in sanitary arrangements rather. If you're lucky, you have access to a standpipe run by one of the water companies, then most sort of like, I'll talk about that, that sort of that sort of courtyard before, you might have like seventy people and two toilets. Well, they probably also had a standpipe, but that'd be one standpipe for those seventy people and it wouldn't be turned and it wouldn't be turned on all the time.
35:57 Speaker 02 Again, we say stamp, it's the same thing. It was not turned on all the time because the water companies couldn't keep that up. So it was only a certain number of hours, set hours per week. A man would literally come along with a key, open it. And there will be queues with people, there'd be pale and bucket they could lay their hands on. And sometimes there were fights, there were literal fights because people were getting to, you know, because they would imagine them to, you know, wait queue for water. And someone says, and someone says, well, you're actually, I've got two babies at home and I need, you know.
36:22 Kate Lister? Screw you bitch, no, I'm.
36:25 Speaker 02 I go, you you're there, you're there already.
36:27 Kate Lister? I won't be.
36:29 Speaker 02 So, yeah, I mean, I think it's so hard to sort of, I mean, it's so hard for us here now, not hard for many people living in different parts of the world at the moment to imagine this, right? This is the conditions that exist in many cities, um, all over the world, right? But for us now, it's quite a hard decision. That's what London was like hundred fifty, two hundred years ago, you know.
36:47 Kate Lister? What about like public hijinks? I'm just because I'm up in Yorkshire and we've got the Harrogate Turkish Baths. I'm pretty sure they were built in the nineteenth century. And I know we've got Armley Baths just near where I am, and that was built in the nineteenth century. So there must have been this sort of like initiative to create. Health spaces for people. Was there anything like that?
37:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, no.
37:08 Kate Lister? In London?
37:08 Speaker 02 Absolutely. No, I mean, public baths are, again, one of the sort of responses to the sanitary question in the 1840s. They first begin to appear basically in sort of late 1840s in London, certainly. I think I have that very right. And again, it was this idea that the government would lend some money to local authority and that would give them a chance to build a bath. And what's interesting about them is that they were, you know, a lot of them needed to clean and they always went with a laundry. So basically, typically, it would often be the men who went in to bathe because they were working sort of hard manual labour and getting particularly filthy. The women, on the other hand, lucky then, mainly just goes to the laundry and do the washing.
37:45 Kate Lister? Thank you for that.
37:47 Speaker 02 But the interesting thing about public baths is that, you know, and we all think, we can all think like swimming baths and maybe we know a Victorian public bath still, you know, some of them still sort of just about survive. Originally, they were seen exclusively as places for people to sort of wash themselves communally, basically. So, you know, they would generally be divided on a sort of like class ground so that you could pay a slightly more expensive version if you were some middle class and if you're lower middle class. And if you were, you know, poor, you'd go into the slightly cheaper bathroom. But interestingly, what happens to them over the century is, although this still, although this does slightly astir to us, so they're gender segregated for starters, right? You don't have men and women in the same pool.
38:25 Speaker 02 They've become more fun, actually. And by the end of the 19th century, you could see pictures of Victorian baths with lights of slides and sort of almost like log flume type things where people would launch themselves into the swimming pool.
38:35 Kate Lister? Nice.
38:35 Speaker 02 Now, I think it was, you know, it was meant to promote like, you know, learning how to dive or, but you just can see people just having fun with this stuff. And they become more like the modern swimming baths. So the original Victorian baths are literally more like a sort of plunge pool. Like you would just, you know, you wash about and this would, you know, be fun. But by the end of the 19th century, no, they've become more like swimming baths for actual swimming in and having fun as well. They get deeper. So, yeah, again, public baths are one of those great things, but women didn't use them that much, actually. I think the stats show certainly to start off. And I think there was, were issues with sort of modesty in quotes and shame, but also just they didn't have the time, you know.
39:12 Kate Lister? They didn't have the time to be lounging around. Around on a high diving board. Thank you very much. I wonder how clean that water was though, like, because we were talking to Alexander Meddings about ancient Rome. And he was saying that despite the fact that they had bathhouses everywhere, they didn't have a system for changing water.
39:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, no.
39:31 Kate Lister? So it was the same water.
39:32 Speaker 02 I think they did. They did change the water, but it, I think probably not with the consistency or the, the chemical sort of thoroughness that we would do today. And certainly there were, there were massive outbreaks, to say eye infections in.
39:44 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
39:45 Speaker 02 Late 19th century London, especially when sort of children, when, when children have to start going to school. So sort of, um, schools act or sense of school, certainly by the 1890s, you're getting, you know, under, under tens of all having to go to school. And yeah, and this like massive outbreaks of eye infections whenever they go to a public bath, because no one's, no one's watching that.
40:04 Kate Lister? And you do get, I mean, maybe this has existed all throughout history, maybe it has, but a moralization around dirt. That being dirty is somehow immoral, that only, and that being cleanliness is next to godliness. And that seems to be a very Victorian thing as well.
40:20 Speaker 02 I mean, it's certainly a sort of high, if I say high Victorian, I mean, where I've seen that some instances of that have were more in the 1850s, 1860s. When public baths were coming in, I haven't seen it so much in the sort of late Victorian municipal sort of public baths of the sort we know today. Which not say wasn't there, but yeah, there's always been that sort of, it's a sort of, I think, I think Wesley or, or someone who's a Methodist sort of really sort of pushed that early on. And at the sort of turn of the 19th century and there were, but again, I think we've got to be a bit careful. I always feel a bit careful about the Victorians of framing them as like this archetypally religious Bible bashing, you know, sort of. Because there was that, there was that section of Victorian society, but there was also another section, you just laughed at that.
41:04 Speaker 02 I thought it was just absolutely ridiculous. So I think we have to be a little cautious about sort of taring them with that brush. Having said that, I do think the sort of, the whole sanitary sort of question and this idea that you could remake London by building these new sewers wholesale. And that, you know, the, that the idea that's sort of the march of science and statistics and. Engineering and investigation could sort of clean up the city in a sanitary fashion. I think that does carry over into some of those who are moral campaigners who see that, well, here's a model in a way that something can be done. That, you know, if you look at the way we get dealing with cholera, why can't we apply that to sex workers or venereal disease, whatever?
41:47 Speaker 02 And it creates this sort of parallel there. I think that's there for a lot of the century.
41:51 Kate Lister? And it's funny that, like, looking back at some of the history, like, obviously, they didn't know what we know, but it, and, but it is very easy to sort of laugh at them. Like, there seems to have been, like, resistance in some places for some of these measures, like Florence Nightingale is a great example. Like, when she turned up and she went, look, I think, I think maybe we should wash our hands. There was like a reaction from the doctors of like, I very much do not think we should be doing that. And now to us, that just sounds completely bonkers.
42:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, but again, it was, again, it's like, as you say, it's lack of knowledge and, you know, we're, we're grounded things on this, this sort of notion of germ theory. And things you could see in a microscope and scientific explanations. Now, Victorians had microscopes, but they, you know, they don't get to germ theory till, really to the very end of the century. So you, I don't think you can really blame them for that. I think Florence Nightingale, though, was also a miasmatist. I think she wasn't.
42:44 Kate Lister? Oh, was she?
42:44 Speaker 02 I may be wrong here, but I think she was, like most Victorians in the mid, mid 19th century. So if you pressed her on the cause of disease, I think she would have said, it's the smell.
42:56 Kate Lister? Yes, she probably would have done, wouldn't she? Oh, Lee, you've been so much fun to talk to. Thank you so much for dropping by. If people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
43:06 Speaker 02 Best place to have a quick look is my ancient website, victorianlondon.org. And that's got links to my books, but it also has a sort of vast encyclopedia of Victorian primary sources you can look around in for free. So there's a lot there.
43:20 Kate Lister? Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much. You've been marvelous.
43:23 Speaker 02 Thank you very much.
43:27 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Lee for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got a special Valentine's Day treat for you because what could be more romantic than a deep dive into the worst breakups of all time? And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
44:08 Speaker 03 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.
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