Victorian london presentation background

Victorian London

Transcript: Victorian London Industrial Revolution Witness Sara R. Hine: “She was tending her ‘sides’ like a veteran, but after I took the photo, the overseer came up and said in an apologetic tone that was pathetic, ‘She just happened in.’ Then a moment later he repeated the information. The mills appear to be full of youngsters that ‘just happened in,’ or ‘are helping sister.” London's 'Great Stink' and Victorian Urban Planning By Professor Martin Daunton Cholera epidemics, the 'Great Stink' and miasmas combined to create a death rate in Britain's cities higher than at any time since the Black Death. The Government was forced to face up to the need for an urban planning policy. Death in the city The census of 1851 recorded half of the population of Britain as living in towns - the first society in human history to do so. Over the previous 70 years, the population of Britain had risen at an unprecedented rate, passing the levels reached in an earlier period of growth, in the early 14th century, when the population had been decimated by epidemics such as the Black Death. The towns offered a better chance of work and higher wages than the countryside, where many families were trapped in dire poverty and seasonal employment. On the other hand, the countryside was healthier. A baby born in a large town with a population of more than 100,000 in the 1820s might expect to live to 35 - in the 1830s, life expectancy was down to a miserable 29. New epidemics were stalking the cities - cholera and typhoid were carried by polluted water, typhus was spread by lice, and 'summer diarrhoea' was caused by swarms of flies feeding on horse manure and human waste. The problem was easy to identify and difficult to solve. Too little was invested in the urban environment, in sewers, street paving and cleansing, and in pure water and decent housing. At some point, conditions long accepted with fatalistic resignation become intolerable, a problem in need of urgent action. The process of persuasion was crucial to investment in Victorian cities, to the realisation that conditions should not be accepted and money should be spent. The sanitary reformers used the literary techniques of Victorian novelists to create a sense of crisis. Edwin Chadwick, the author of the report on the sanitary conditions of British towns, consulted Charles Dickens over how to describe the situation - and Dickens himself obtained graphic accounts of the vile conditions of reeking graveyards from his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, a leading sanitary reformer. The imaginative force of their writings made people aware of the need for action. The 'Great Stink' The appearance of cholera from Asia in 1831 provided another powerful incentive. The wealthy were not immune to it - indeed, it's possible they were the group who were most vulnerable to the illness. Water closets were adopted by the more affluent households of London in the early 19th century. As a result, sewers originally intended to take rain water into the Thames now carried raw sewage - which was then extracted by the water companies to be drunk by their customers. The Metropolitan Commission of Sewers had responsibility for the situation, but didn't have the power to impose sufficient taxes to solve the problem. The crisis came to a peak in the 'Great Stink' of London in 1858. Such was the overpowering smell from the Thames, that the curtains of the Commons were soaked in chloride of lime [cloruro di calce] in a vain attempt to protect the sensitivities of MPs. It is no surprise that a bill was rushed through Parliament and became law in 18 days, to provide more money to construct a massive new sewer scheme for London, and to build the Embankment along the Thames in order to improve the flow of water and of traffic. Packing in the people One of the greatest problems created by the rise of great cities, was that of housing the population. The early Victorians spent little and their children died young, while later Victorians spent more and enjoyed a longer life. This was not a triumph of medicine, but of political action and public investment in engineering and preventive medicine. In the first half of the 19th century, the answer was all too often by subdividing existing property and cramming more accommodation into backyards. Cities became more densely packed, creating dead-ends and foul alleys, and damp cellars offered miserable accommodation. The borough engineer painted a lurid picture of the conditions in the early 1860s, explaining how courts had no through ventilation, and normally contained 'the privy or ashpit common to all the wretched dwellings, with its liquid filth oozing through their walls, and its pestiferous gases flowing into the windows'. Conditions within the houses were no better. In 1854, the commissioners appointed to enquire into the cholera outbreak in Newcastle-upon-Tyne found that about 50 per cent of families had only a single room. Most houses did not have an independent water

Victorian London Presentation Background

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