From earliest times, 100's of millions have died from epidemics of Bubonic Plague "Black Death," Typhoid, Typhus, Smallpox, Yellow Fever, Spanish Flu, Malaria, Measles, and AIDS. The disease of the 19th century was cholera.
When the British East India Company built railroads and sent steamboats up rivers, individuals infected with cholera could quickly travel back to Europe, carrying cholera with them. Cholera spread by drinking unsanitary water. It was the first truly global disease, killing tens of millions in crowded cities. In 1849 the contagion was particularly acute.
In 1849, cholera killed 5,000 in New York, with a mass grave on Randall's Island in the East River. Its multitude of deaths included an estimated 12,000 on their way to the California Gold Rush and former 11th U.S. President James K. Polk.
On July 3, 1849, President Zachary Taylor proclaimed a National Day of Fasting: "At a season when the providence of God has manifested itself in the visitation of a fearful pestilence which is spreading itself throughout the land, it is fitting that a people whose reliance has ever been in His protection should humble themselves before His throne, and, while acknowledging past transgressions, ask a continuance of the Divine mercy.
It is therefore earnestly recommended that the first Friday in August be observed throughout the United States as a Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer...
The rest of the world was not far behind. In London, ‘The Standard’ for Monday, September 10, 1849 reports that “the pestilence continues its debilitating progress ... fearfully exceeding anything that London has suffered within the last 184 years”. More than 5,000 had died in that week alone in London. It complains that the Government had not taken notice either of its support for a public day of fast on Thanksgiving Day.
It includes a notice of a ‘Day of Public Humiliation’ with a special ‘penitence and prayer’ service “under a solemn sense of the judgement of God” undertaken by the clergy of the Parish of Shoreditch on 14th. One of the “good men whose names are inscribed” according to the Standard is Rev. Jerome Vlieland, the curate of St Mark’s Old Street.
Thomas Robert Dunn, father of Thomas Dunn of this blog will be dead within a fortnight. The information on the death certificate is "bilious fever and diarrhoea 6 weeks certified". His symptoms are consistent with a form of dysentery.
Once in the human gut, the micro-organisms multiply rapidly causing an inflammation of the intestinal wall and possible ulceration. The almost continuous diarrhoea is accompanied by the passage of blood and mucus. With his abdominal pains, there may be fever, nausea, and vomiting. The most extreme ‘choleraic’ state of dysentery causes severe dehydration, and a shrunken appearance. Extreme dehydration increases the complications.
With poor hygiene and sanitary arrangements plus crowded conditions, bacilli from faeces can enter a new host on contaminated food. If they recover, bacilli can be passed in the motions for some time afterwards. The recovered individual therefore becomes a potential carrier of the disease during that period. In a position where the water supply is (to put it mildly) ‘poor’, water can therefore also spread the disease. This was (so far) unknown to the Victorians.
The average age of death in London was only 22 for working classes; an average not helped by almost half the burials being of children under ten. Not the worst, in Liverpool it was 15! Nowhere in urban Britain did average life expectancy exceed thirty. Thomas Robert was 27 with a wife and three young children. His death would separate them.
Compulsory registration of births and deaths had begun in 1937 in order to ascertain the causes of mortality; as inspectors were issuing report after report on overcrowded cemeteries houses without water and sanitation.
Three and a half thousand a year were dying in London alone from smallpox. Tuberculosis, (both glandular and pulmonary), was common and there were also regular outbreaks of typhoid fever, epidemic diarrhoea, dysentery scarlet fever, influenza and a variety of ills classified only as “fevers”.
By 1849 London was ‘heaving’. Its population had doubled since 1800 (and would double again by the end of the century). In the 1840s some quarter of a million extra people arrived. They came to London looking for work from Ireland and all over England. Most were so poor that they had no option but to swell already overcrowded slums.
It is now believed that the first large cholera outbreak in England in the 1830’s was brought from Eastern Europe. There is a suggestion that this recent one originated with the influx of souls from Ireland after the potato crop failures and subsequent famine. In 1848-9 London had been in the grip of a major cholera outbreak; even worse than that in 1832
Between November and December of 1847 the amazingly high figure of 500,000 people were infected with typhus fever out of a total population of 2,100,100. Typhus was also common in prisons (and other crowded conditions where lice spread easily - such as London slums). Imprisonment until the next term of court was often a death sentence.
The Irish typhus epidemic of 1846-9 spread to England, where it was sometimes called "Irish fever" and was noted for its virulence. It killed people of all social classes, since lice were endemic and inescapable. In the slums there was certainly no possibility of ‘isolating’ an infected person; whatever their symptoms but the Queen, herself, had caught typhus and there is a possibility that the Prince Regent died of it, (although he may also have has cancer)
A letter to the Times in 1849 read: “We live in muck and filthe. We ain’t got no privez, no dustbins, no drains, no water splies… We all of us suffer and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us…” The cholera did come. It had no known cause and there was no cure.
As well as sharing a standpipe for water in most cases a block would share an outside ‘privy’ (usually an earth closet – and quite often overflowing). Most dwellings had no real sewers at all: they relied on cesspits which, as we know, could be in their basements. As they filled up, they saturated the brickwork, rotted the wood of the foundations and sometimes seeped into the living area. The stench filled even well-to-do homes and there were cases of entire families being asphyxiated in their sleep because of noxious gases in the air.
In earlier decades nearly all were within a few hundred yards of open fields and clearing the ‘night soil’ into the countryside was possible. Now domestic cesspits were often sluiced out into the street or emptied by hand – a job frequently done by the youngest, smallest children. All this left whole communities surrounded by human excrement.
Flush toilets did not become widespread until after the Great Exhibition (1851) but even if your property had its own modern privy the waste would simply sit in brick sewers ‘ripening’ until, in wet weather, the water discharged it into the local water course – from which the water company would extract its ‘drinking’ water. Such water, of course, did not just contain the outflowing sewage from properties but the waste from butchers, tanners and many other noxious remains.
Even when new houses were built, the builders might dig out and sell the gravel which should have been used for the base and replace it with decaying refuse. The (stinking) cess pit for the house may well be the ‘basement’ below the wooden floor and the gutters outside still ran with human waste.
Only the few more expensive properties had water piped to the property or a ‘new-fangled’ water-closet and, even then, most were simply using stinking brown recycled Thames water. Even if they had, the water companies did not provide water ’24 x 7’. Sometimes water was only pumped for an hour a day – and not late evenings or Sundays when working men would be home.
London’s sewage system was worse than useless. Many sewers were already broken and the others, simply discharged into yet another until, like the ‘River’ Fleet (now a ditch) running beside Holborn Hill, they finally discharged into the Thames. The river itself became an open sewer, described by Punch magazine as a ‘foul sludge and foetid stream’, yet this was the main source of drinking water for London’s poor.
Should you avoid ‘death by water’ or a local epidemic, the rise in sales of untreated cow’s milk (even if not adulterated) caused heavy tolls from dysentery which also still killed more soldiers than war and, with typhus, decimated Napoleon's army in Russia. Boracic acid, to remove the sour taste and smell from milk that had gone off, also caused diarrhoea.
One well known fatal disease of the time was dubbed ‘sausage poisoning’ – food poisoning from eating sausages made from bad meat. If anything, with the growth in town populations and the failure of real wages of the poor to sustain them, the position was now even worse.
It was unusual for milk not to have been watered down by the time it reached the final customer – and the water was, itself, part of the problem. A 2010 TV programme on ‘the Victorian High Street’ showed bread (made from poor quality flour) being routinely adulterated with items such as chalk and (to whiten the bread) arsenic.
Even the burial grounds were packed to overflowing and bodies buried packed so close together and sometimes breaking through the ground. One graveyard worker reported that “I have been up to my knees in human flesh by jumping on the bodies so as to cram them into the least possible space at the bottom of the graves in which fresh bodies were afterwards placed”. Graves were ‘desecrated’ and re-used with alarming regularity, with disinterred bones left scattered across the churchyard grass.
Poet William Blake was buried in Bunhill fields in 1821 on top of three previous incumbents. At intervals, later, four others were buried on top of him. The reason many older churches look as though they have ‘settled’ some feet lower in the ground is primarily down to the piled up bodies constantly causing the surrounding soil to get higher.
It was not unknown for the noxious fumes to kill those living closest to the graveyards. Occasionally bones were moved years later to a charnel house in order that the ‘plot’ be reutilised but usually they were just ‘compacted’ in the digging to allow another body ‘on top’.
The year after this terrible cholera outbreak (and Thomas Robert’s death) ‘The London Necropolis Company’ was set up. A massive (2,000-acre) cemetery was planned at Brookwood Surrey; “big enough to hold all of London's dead forever” (and, at 25 miles from the city, far enough away to avoid the spread of disease from the bodies). There were special funeral trains from London Necropolis railway station, adjacent to Waterloo station.
The coffins (and mourners) were taken directly to platforms within the cemetery itself and the coffin also travelled either first second or third class (with each hearse car split into three sections of four coffin cells each) dependent upon the funeral ‘package’ booked by the mourners.
So there were six distinct classes of travel (since non-conformists also had to be ‘accommodated’, addressing Bishop of London Charles James Blomfield’s worries that “for instance, the body of some profligate spendthrift might be placed in a conveyance with the body of some respectable member of the church, which would shock the feelings of his friends.”
It was still used until 1941 but, a month after the last train had departed a massive bombing campaign not only levelled most of the Necropolis complex but destroyed the special funeral train and signalled its demise. Brookwood, still the biggest cemetery in W Europe, is now a Grade I Historic Park & Garden.
Thanks Ray !
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