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In 1888, London experiences an autumn of terror: between 31 August and 9 November, five women have their throats slit in Whitechapel in the East End, an area seen by respectable citizens as a 'frightful hell-hole'. The victims all work as prostitutes – and the last one, Mary Kelly, is gruesomely mutilated. While these murders terrify the population, and hog newspaper headlines, the killer – nicknamed Jack the Ripper – sends mocking letters to the police, claiming to have eaten the liver of one of his victims. Not only are local people horrified, but Queen Victoria demands that the police service be improved. At the same time, a brilliant fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, makes his debut in Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. In the end, although the Whitechapel murders stop, Jack the Ripper is never found. And, horrific as he is, most Londoners are more at risk from cholera than from serial killers. Cholera The most life-threatening hazard facing city-dwelling Victorians is cholera, closely followed by typhoid fever and typhus. Four epidemics of cholera – in 1831/32, 1848/49, 1853/54 and 1866 – kill about 140,000 people, with more than 60,000 perishing in the second epidemic alone. The main problem is ignorance. The medical establishment believes that diseases are spread by 'miasma' (bad air) rather than by infected water. Crusading doctors such as Dr John Snow (1813-58) and reformers such as Edwin Chadwick (1800-90) demonstrate by 1854 that the best way to combat cholera is to separate drinking water from sewage. In that year in London's Soho, Snow removes the handle of a drinking pump infected by leakage from a sewer – and stops an outbreak of cholera that, in two weeks, had killed almost 700 people in just this small area. He also recommends boiling water before use. In London, there are still open cesspools, and the sewers run straight into the Thames. The metropolis stinks. In 1858, when Victoria and Albert try to take a pleasure cruise on the Thames, they have to turn back after a few minutes because of the river's stench. Parliament has to stop sitting because the smell from the river is unendurable. In general, the only way to cut disease is by promoting cleanliness: building new drains, protecting the water supply, setting up public washhouses and baths. In Belgravia, where the upper classes wash their hands, deaths from cholera are fewer than 30 per 1,000; in the slums, they are almost seven times that. But gradually the greater availability of soap and clean running water also makes working-class houses cleaner. Hospitals and doctors If you are sick, you might have a chance of getting a place in one of the new hospitals. By mid-century, the number of people treated in these has doubled to 8,000. By 1860, more than 70 special hospitals have been set up, including the London Fever Hospital, the Kensington Children's Hospital and the Free Cancer Hospital, Fulham. In the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale pioneers nursing practice. However, as late as 1900, patients under a doctor's care have only a 50% chance of being better off than if they and their diseases had been left alone. Hospitals not only provide more room for patients, but also give opportunities for doctors to train: you may find yourself being treated as a human guinea pig. In 1832, the Anatomy Act is passed, which allows all unclaimed bodies to be sent to hospitals to be dissected. As a result, these places have become important centres for the study of anatomy. Sometimes, the system is abused – guards are often employed to watch over new graves to deter grave robbers. And doctors don't yet realise that touching a dead body and then a live one can spread infection – this lack of hygiene makes giving birth in hospitals much more dangerous than at home. Disposal of bodies is moved away from inner-city graveyards to cemeteries (run by private companies) located on the outer edges of urban areas. This shift is, in part, due to the conditions of urban graveyards where body snatching, communal or mass graves and unsanitary conditions are all too common. Work For most of the working classes, work itself is a hazard. Urban workers are stunted in growth and afflicted by debilitating diseases such as rickets, tuberculosis and bronchitis. Long hours of toil and poor diet weakens their resistance. In countless factories, both children and adults are mutilated by industrial accidents due to unsafe working conditions. Small boys, used as chimney sweeps, are undernourished and often suffer burns. (The 18th-century doctor Percival Potts had already discovered that sweeps, who work naked, are susceptible to scrotal cancer – the first occupational disease.) In Manchester and Birmingham, workers in match factories suffer from 'phossy jaw' from phosphorus contamination. Workers in wallpaper factories are poisoned by the arsenic used in dyes. Some trades are more deadly than others: London bakers, who toil through the night in temperatures of 90°F (32.2°C) and more, seldom live beyond the age of 40. Workhouses In the large Victorian institutions, such as workhouses, conditions
are hazardous to health. After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, workhouses
proliferate. 'Outdoor relief' for the able-bodied – that is, payments
made to the destitute living independently – is now rare. Parishes
are grouped into unions under Boards of Poor Law Guardians, who set up
workhouses in each union. The homeless poor are lodged in them and, to
discourage applicants, the law requires that conditions there are 'less
eligible' (that is, much worse) than those outside them. (For more about
the origins of the Poor Law, see By 1839, there are about 350 workhouses in southern England alone. To stay in one, you have to work to help pay your way. Jobs are menial and repetitive and some are simply punishments, such as oakum picking (separating strands of old rope). Until the 1840s, 'disorderly and profligate women' – a category that includes impoverished single mothers – are forced to wear distinctive yellow clothes, which leads to them being bullied. In the 1860s and 1870s, conditions in the special wards for the insane or for those with venereal (sexually transmitted) disease are especially grim. Although some areas, such as south Lancashire, are slow to build these fearsome institutions, the image of the workhouse succeeds in stigmatising poverty and spreading fear among the poor. Many proud and independent spirits prefer starvation or prostitution to going into the 'Bastille'. By 1850, out of one million paupers, only 110,000 are workhouse inmates. Not all workhouses are equally bad, but it is not until the 20th century – with the introduction of old age pensions and National Insurance (1911-12) – that a more compassionate treatment of the poor becomes common. Prisons Prisons are cleaner than workhouses but equally grim. The Victorians are firm believers in punishment for criminals, but realise that the old punishments – transportation to the colonies or execution for trivial offences – are not very liberal (or effective). So, by the 1840s, lots of new prisons are built and the decaying old ones are repaired. Being morally upright and strict, the prison authorities make their institutions as unpleasant as they can, to deter people from committing crimes. Once inside, prisoners are made to face up to their own faults by being kept in silence. To suffer, they are made to do hard, boring work. The most common forms of hard labour are walking a treadwheel or picking oakum (see above). Scarcely less pleasant are the debtor's prisons, such as the Marshalsea in London. The message is simple: Don't get into debt. Schools Equally hazardous are Britain's public schools (private boarding establishments meant to educate the children of the rich). The élite boarding schools – Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby, among others – are defined as 'public' schools in 1861-4 by the educational Clarendon Commission. They are maintained by fees and private endowment. In 1897, fewer than 7% of academic secondary school pupils come from the working classes. By the time Thomas Arnold becomes head of Rugby, public schools are characterised by awful teaching, bullying, sexual abuse and dreadful living conditions. Floggings are common. Between 1873 and 1876, 40 public floggings are ordered at Eton alone. The more minor schools, as shown by Dotheboys Hall in Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1839), are equally violent and food is often reduced to starvation rations. Arnold emphasises house systems, school spirit, 'muscular Christianity' and games such as football and cricket as means of improving character. As a result, Rugby – graphically depicted in Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) – becomes a model for reformed Victorian public schools. Knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, takes second place to the rigid division between classes. Nevertheless, even at their best, these schools concern themselves more with producing gentlemen than with preparing their pupils for the challenges of an industrial world. (For more about the history of education, see Criticising Education: A history.) Crime Despite the horrors of the Jack the Ripper murders, Victorian Britain is a remarkably ordered society. Crime, whether theft or violent assault, is uncommon – despite the hysterical reporting of shocking events by the newspapers. In fact, crime declines, contradicting the fear that greater urbanisation inevitably leads to more criminality. Gun crime, for example, is a rare occurrence even in London. In 1901, the Criminal Registrar notes that Britain has witnessed a marked 'decline in the spirit of lawlessness'. This is largely due to the good work of voluntary organisations – from churches to charities – that reform the unruly manners and lax morals of the new mass society. Temperance societies combat the 'curse of drunkenness', philanthropists act as social workers and the godly see it as their Christian duty to help prostitutes change their lifestyles and to aid the 'deserving' poor. Urban hazards Towns and cities remain hazardous places in which to live. The stone tenements of Glasgow, the back-to-back houses of Yorkshire or the 'two-up, two-down' cottages of the mining towns are often built of poor-quality brick and little or no plumbing. Damp, draughty and cramped living conditions contribute to the spread of tuberculosis. As Sir John Simon, a pioneer of public health, says in 1854: 'It is no uncommon thing, in a room of 12 feet [3.7 metres] square or less, to find three or five families styed together.' This kind of accommodation is usually rented by the working classes and thus precarious. In the 1880s, the word 'unemployment' gets its modern meaning – and the loss of work can easily result in eviction and even confinement in the workhouse (see above). Other new words include 'overcrowding' and 'slum'. Growing towns are dominated by railways, and filth and noise characterises the Victorian city, especially in the poor neighbourhoods. Factory chimneys pour dense smoke into the sky, steam trains are noisy and dirty and soot from thousands of coal fires fills the air. Carts, carriages and horses clatter across cobblestones, adding to the cacophony. Food During the 19th century, much of the food consumed by the working classes is adulterated by foreign substances, contaminated by chemicals or fouled by animal and human excrement. By the 1840s, the practice of home-baking bread has died out among the rural poor; in the small tenements of the urban masses, which have no ovens, it has never existed. In 1872, Dr Arthur Hill Hassall (1817-94), the pioneer investigator into food adulteration, demonstrates that half of the commercially made bread he examines is full of alum, which inhibits digestion. The list of poisonous additives includes: • strychnine in rum and beer • sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine and preserves • lead chromate in mustard and snuff • sulphate of iron in tea and beer • ferric ferrocyanide and lime sulphate in Chinese tea • copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate • lead in wine and cider. The Privy Council estimates in 1862 that one-fifth of butcher's meat in Britain comes from animals that are 'considerably diseased' or have died of pleuro-pneumonia or other diseases. As late as 1877, the Local Government Board finds that about a quarter of the milk it examines contains excessive water, or chalk, and 10% of butter, 8% of bread and 50% of gin contains copper to heighten the colour. Red lead gives Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue. In the long run, these additives result in chronic gastritis and, often, fatal food poisoning. Even the rich are not safe. For example, the London county medical officer discovers the following in ice cream: cotton fibre, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hairs and cat and dog hairs. Such contamination can (and does) cause diphtheria, scarlet fever, diarrhoea and enteric fever. Still, over the 19th century, diet improves among the masses. Working people's regular meals of bread, potatoes and beer are increasingly supplemented by meat, milk and vegetables. Disasters The massive industrial expansion of Victorian Britain results in bigger disasters than in previous centuries. Public interest in disasters at mines and other industrial sites is fed by the Illustrated London News and other popular magazines, who immediately dispatch artists to capture the scene of every major catastrophe. The most serious danger in mines is caused by the need for light. At first, miners carry candles underground, but this proves dangerous, as pockets of gas can ignite without warning. In 1816, the scientist Humphrey Davy had invented the safety lamp, which should make such explosions impossible. However, in October 1849, the Morning Chronicle reports: It will astonish many persons to learn that, during the 18 years previous to 1816 when the safety-lamp was introduced, the loss of life [in mines] in the counties of Northumberland and Durham by explosion was 447, whereas during the 18 years subsequent to 1816, the amount of loss of life in this way was 538 – the difference being accounted for by the working of the many 'fiery collieries', previously inaccessible; by the neglect and carelessness of the workmen themselves in the management of their lamps; and by the too frequent relaxation of ventilation measures that were previously rigidly carried into effect. On 28 December 1879, the Tay Bridge collapses in a gale while the Edinburgh–Dundee train is crossing it. In what would remain Britain's worst railway accident, all 75 passengers and crew are killed. The Scottish doggerel poet, William McGonagall, who specialises in memorialising shipwrecks and railway disasters, mourns the 'Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay'. The structure, designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, had been opened the previous year. In other disasters, some people have lucky escapes. Lord Colville of Culross is a passenger in one of three trains wrecked in a collision during a blizzard at Abbot's Ripton, Cambridgeshire in 1876; he walks away unharmed, but two men who had been sitting opposite him are killed. At Abergele in north Wales, the three front carriages of the passenger train burst into flame and all inside them die; the remaining 10 vehicles are pulled clear with all their passengers unharmed. However, during the construction of the Woodhead railway tunnel near Sheffield in 1839-45, at least 32 men are killed or injured. As accidents multiply on Britain's railways between 1840 and 1870, the notion arises that they are becoming more likely, deadly and destructive. In reality, Victorian railways are generally safe and reliable. In 1861, for example, 46 passengers die in eight accidents, but for each fatality, more than 3.5 million journeys are safely undertaken. |
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