All About History - Issue 111, 2021_

LEFT A classic

scene of a busy

London street

with St Paul’s

Cathedral

dominating

the  skyline

BELOW

The polluted

River Thames

depicted as

the highway

of  death

BELOW-LEFT

A photo of poor

young children

on the streets

of London

taken in the

late  1800s

BOTTOM

Dickens’ novels

frequently

blended his

stories with a

fierce social

conscience

©^ G

etty

Im

age

s

©^ A

lam

y

©^ A

lam

y

Dickens’ London

smog was not really addressed until the

mid-20th century.

In 1888 Henry James, the American

novelist who settled in the city in 1869,

praised the “magnificent mystifications”

of London’s fog: it “flatters and

superfuses, makes everything brown,

rich, dim, vague, magnifies distances and

minimizes details, confirms the inference

of vastness by suggesting that, as the

great city makes everything, it makes

its own optical laws.” The 1880s saw the

most acute smogs, but the growth in

population and fuel consumption had

led to air pollution becoming steadily

worse from early in the century; in 1853

the Smoke Nuisance Abatement Act

was aimed at a phenomenon vividly

described that year in Dickens’ novel

Bleak House. Inspection and enforcement

made regulation difficult, but in any

case legislation excluded the households

where inefficient coal-fed open fires

were a big cause of the smog. Londoners

much preferred the term fog and saw

it as part of the identity of the city.

Brilliantly captured by painters such

as the Frenchman Claude Monet, fog

also provided opportunities for crime,

caused accidents, and helped prostitutes

by providing cover from the police and

making it easier for cautious clients to

make an approach.

Respiratory deaths in the winter

reflected the impact of air pollution from

coal fires, and diarrheal infant mortality

in the summer was an aspect of the

continuing problems with clean water,

while poverty and overcrowding both

remained serious problems. Dickens

powerfully captures the terrible situation

in Dombey and Son, in which he urges:

“follow the good clergyman or doctor,

who, with his life imperilled at every

breath he draws, goes down into their

dens, lying within the echoes of our

carriage wheels and daily tread upon

the pavement-stones. Look round upon

the world of odious sights – millions

of  immortal creatures have no other

world on earth... Breathe the polluted

air, foul with every impurity that is

poisonous to health and life; and have

every sense, conferred upon our race

for its delight and happiness, offended,

sickened and disgusted, and made a

channel by which misery and death

alone can enter.”

The heatwave of 1858 triggered the

already noxious Thames, filled with

sewage and animal carcasses, into an

even more over-ripe state that came

to be called the Great Stink. This led

to the temporary abandonment of

Parliament and to a major programme

of sewerage works. In 2021, marine

archaeologists found a compacted layer

of Victorian waste in the Thames near

Tate Modern that came from this era.

The anaerobic environment of sewage

baked at the riverside in hot dry weather

had preserved the smell. A member of

the Institute for Digital Archaeology

referred to “a very distinctive odour of

putrefaction, human waste and sulphur...

it’s like a body blow when you smell it. It

just stops you in your tracks.” The mud

included the remains of leather shoes,

pottery and clay pipes.

A city of change

Downstream, the Victoria Embankment

was built in 1862-70 as part of the

transformation associated with

celebrated civil engineer Joseph

Bazalgette, one that removed the

broad tidal range as well as creating

new road links along the river shores.

On the opposite bank, the Battersea

Marshes had been drained with the

encouragement of Prince Albert, and

in accordance with legislation of 1846.

Battersea Park opened in 1858, the same

year as Chelsea Bridge, greatly improving

a once marginal area.

Poor relief served to link concerns

about wages and cost, and notably so in

periods of economic crisis. By the end of

the century, London provided places for

nearly a quarter of those on indoor relief

(workhouses) in England and Wales.

Dickens repeatedly captured the city’s

misery, the severe stresses and strains

that economic anxiety placed on working

families, a grim existence that drove

some to take their own lives. London in

the time of Dickens was a city that never

stood still and, as he often portrayed

in his books, if you didn’t have enough

wealth to duck out of the way you were

likely to be trampled by the unstoppable

march of progress.

“Respir atory deaths in

the winter reflected the

impact of air pollution

from coal fires”