The Great London Stink of 1858 and the World's First Environmental Movement
The river Thames cuts through all of central London. It is the main artery of transport for the entire city through which the commerce of almost the whole English speaking world flows. The Thames is the center of maritime world trade, and in many ways in conjunction with the greater Atlantic Ocean itself into which it flows, the Thames is the primary reason that the sun is said to never set on her majesty Queen Victoria’s British Empire. But during this stinking summer of 1858 London’s all important waterway of worldwide transport the river Thames, still remains the city’s primary sewer as well.
And this murky cloud which has the stench of dead and rotting flesh to it has been steadily rising up from the river for over a month now. It will continue to spread during the summer until it has the entire city of London and all nearby environs, upwards of two million souls, in its stinking clutches. Daily, people will wretch and often vomit right where they stand as they walk down London’s busy sidewalks. Many will die this summer. For not only is the Thames London’s main sewer, but it is also the main reservoir from which most of the city’s municipal drinking water is supplied.
Each morning London citizens, women and children for the most part, head the few blocks from their homes to the nearest public water pump where they fill wooden buckets of water to be consumed by themselves and their loved ones. Until the number of dead begin to mount, as parent’s begin to watch children die and husbands hold wives who perish in their arms, Londoner’s are little aware that it is the pestilential Thames water they bring home each day that is killing them.
That summer London is trapped in what will become ever after known as the Great Stink of 1858. The Great Stink of 1858 will throw the world’s then largest city into a panic the likes of which it will not see again until Jack the Ripper begins to terrorize east London’s Whitechapel neighborhood thirty years later.
The “Great Stink” lives in history with a funny name, but the crisis that it plunged London into during the nineteenth century was considered just as serious, at the time, as the Nazi Blitz on London was during the Second World War. Parliament will hold dozens of emergency sessions in the thick of the wretched haze in an attempt to try to figure out how to respond to the crisis. Many of these emergency sessions will have to be cut short since parliament is right on the banks of the river and many members will faint and become sick as a result of the noxious fumes.
Newspapers will be in an uproar and wild rumors about causes and conspiracies will spread unchecked from neighborhood to neighborhood. The public majority, destitute, filthy, overworked and near the brink of starvation will be brought to the edge of insurrection as a result of The Great London Stink of 1858…
To understand the causes, consequences and fear that was generated by the Great London Stink of 1858 one needs to understand both the nature and symptoms of a disease that has largely been eradicated from today’s modern industrial world. That disease is cholera.
Cholera is a disease that is spread by drinking water that has been contaminated with human feces. Drinking the contaminated water causes a bacterial infection of the small intestine and that infection in turn causes the victim to suffer from endless watery diarrhea. Within hours this diarrhea will lead to dehydration and cause the victim’s skin to take on a sickly blue pallor.
Although largely eliminated among the wealthier nations of the world today, cholera still affects an estimated 3 to 5 million people worldwide every year. Those who live in extreme poverty in the slums of the developing world are most at risk for contracting cholera due to the poor sanitary conditions in which they live, conditions not all that dissimilar from those lived in by London’s poor during the 1850’s. Fortunately, if a cholera epidemic is detected today it can be treated by administering an oral vaccine which remains effective at preventing the infection in individuals for up to six months.
However, in Victorian London nearly all forms of vaccination remained as yet unknown and cholera was an ever present reality. To Londoner’s of the time cholera was a deadly plague that seemed to flare up at random and descend with terror on the population not unlike the Black Death of 1348 and subsequent outbreaks of bubonic plague right on up until the 18th century, which still remain fresh in the popular memory at the time.
In London during the summer of 1858 it was a common sight, almost daily, to see men, women and small children, blue in color and dressed in rags, staggering to the muddy banks of the Thames, emptying their watery bowels into the river, and then curling up like dogs in the city’s back alleys to die in a pool of their own excrement…
The real problem was that in the year 1858 no one knew for sure exactly how cholera was spread. There were several competing theories, and as newspaper cartoons, and written reports of the time suggest, many people strongly suspected that the stinking cesspool of the river Thames was a likely culprit for the disease, but in the summer of 1858 as the Great Stink settled over the entire city many people also thought that this cloud and stench, and the cloud and smell alone, were solely to blame for the spread of the disease.
In retrospect, given nearly 200 years of hindsight, it makes perfect sense that many Londoner’s of the time would be all but certain that “The Great Stink” emanating from the Thames was the main cause of cholera. Prior to the scientific discovery of germs and the subsequent “Germ Theory” of disease which became accepted scientific fact by the end of the 19th century, most people had no real concrete idea of how illness was spread at all.
Before the discovery of germs there were two main theories on the nature of contagion. One attributed illness to an imbalance of fluids or “humors” in the body. By 1858 this theory, though still pertinent only a hundred years before, had been largely discredited by advancements in the study of medicine, namely through dissection, which had proven that the inner workings of human beings were comprised of much more than simple fluids or “humors”.
There was one other theory of contagion, however, that had much more staying power and was still considered very current at the time of “The Great Stink of 1858”. This theory, which was the one adopted and wholly endorsed by most London newspapers during The Great Stink, was called the miasma theory of contagion. The miasma theory of contagion asserts that sickness and disease, or more generally pestilence in the parlance of the times, is spread through contaminated air (miasmas) having been breathed in by the sufferer. The miasma theory of contagion is the reason that inhaling snuff, scented tobaccos or other potpourris designed to ward off foul odors, was quite a popular habit among the world’s wealthier citizens right up until the end of the 19th century.
In fact, the miasma theory of contagion was considered scientific truth by almost all members of western civilization for nearly two-thousand years! Doctors, scientists and theologians all attributed pandemics, such as the outbreak of plague called the Black Death which swept across Europe between 1346 and 1348 to contaminated air.
Fortunately, at the exact time of the Great Stink, some forward thinking scientists were beginning to consider the possibility that illness could spread in other ways. At this point in our story it is time for the famed British physicist Michael Faraday to enter the picture.
You may remember Michael Faraday from your high school physics class as the father, so to speak, of electromagnetism and many modern principles of electric induction. But what you may not remember, what you may not have even known, was that in addition to being one of the world’s foremost physicists, Faraday was also one of the world’s leading chemists and he was one of the first public figures to ever concern himself with the problem of environmental pollution.
In fact, only three years prior to “The Great Stink” in 1855, after having tested the water and sailed slowly down the length of the river Thames to gather water samples for testing and to gain first-hand knowledge of the truly putrid nature of the waterway, Faraday wrote, prophetically as it turned out, in an open letter to the editor of The London Times:
“If we neglect this subject then a hot season will give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.”
The “subject” of which Faraday was speaking about was pollution. Specifically, pollution of the Thames and the cross-contamination of the river and London’s municipal water supply, which caused the Great Stink of 1858 and the consequent cholera epidemic.
In his letter to The London Times, dated July 7, 1855, Faraday continued to say in reference to the Thames, “The smell was very bad, and common to the whole water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer.”
In today’s modern world having one of your nation’s most majestic rivers damned by one of the world’s most renowned scientists as a “real sewer” might bring about a swift and all-encompassing cleanup effort, or at the very least a quite outspoken reaction on the part of the nation’s environmental lobby, but in the world of 1855 the information was duly noted in that day’s edition of the London Times and then lost among countless numbers of the Victorian Era’s more tawdry news headlines which caused readers to flock to the penny press in droves.
The more cynical members of London’s working class and upper crust alike, would probably have glanced at Faraday’s open letter to the editor in their newspaper, admitted that the man was a brilliant scientist, but then probably would have noted that, “Of course the river stinks, everyone knows that, but what difference does that make?”
And really, for three years, it didn’t make much difference in the lives of London’s citizens until the summer of 1858 when a heat wave descended upon the entire city and people began to die by the thousands and the stink became so unbearable that most people could not even stay outside for more than a few minutes at a time.
As revolutionary, and true, as Michael Faraday’s views on environmental pollution might have been, it took those viewpoints in conjunction with one other recent scientific breakthrough of the 1850’s to enable London to begin to do something about “The Great Stink”. This second great scientific breakthrough came about through the work of Dr. John Snow.
In the year 1854, a massive cholera epidemic spread through a small neighborhood at the intersection of Broad and Cambridge Streets in a suburban part of north London. This epidemic killed over 600 people, and though these numbers paled in comparison to the deaths caused during the Great Stink, what made this epidemic so unique and puzzling at the time was that all 600+ deaths from this epidemic were confined within a four block wide radius.
Dr. John Snow, an obstetrician in the area at the time, noticed that a great many of his patients all contracted cholera within weeks, if not days of one another, and he began to do three thrings. He made a map, later called Dr. Snow’s Ghost Map (since it marked where now dead people HAD lived) on which he marked the residences of each member of his practice, or their family members, who had contracted the disease. Then he began to interview as many local residents as possible asking them all questions such as: Where did they work and travel to each day? Who did they come in contact with on a regular basis? Where did they obtain their drinking water and food from? Lastly, he took all 616 victims of the Broad and Cambridge Street cholera epidemic and chronologically organized their day and time of death starting from the first to the last as accurately as possible.
It was from this painstaking research that Dr. Snow was able to ascertain that the cholera epidemic of 1854 was centered around contaminated water from a specific water pump located on Broad Street and had afflicted all individuals who had drank water from that pump immediately after a mother had washed her baby’s diaper in a local well. Dr. Snow had proven that cholera was spread not by bad air, or by bad blood, but by contaminated drinking water. However, it would take the Great Stink of 1858 to convince London’s politicians and medical community that his theories were facts.
Flash forward four years, and now that cholera and a disgusting odor were afflicting hundreds of thousands in London’s city center, most politicians and medical officials alike, were finally willing to take a chance on Snow’s theories. As the death toll began to rise most members of parliament, the press and the public admitted that what Faraday had already said about the negative effects of pollution were true, and that, perhaps, what Snow had “proven” about the spread of cholera through the drinking of contaminated water might be true, but what could be done about it?
London needed to build a sewer system, one that ran underground, and that separated waste from drinking water; piped millions of gallons of fresh water into the city each day for upwards of two million inhabitants to consume, while at the same time piping their raw sewage far enough away from the city so that it was unable to seep its way back into the earth to affect that water and cause the spread of cholera not to mention an awful stench.
Was such a thing even possible? And if it was, many wondered, how long would it take and how much would it cost?
During the summer of 1858, as thousands died, London was ready to admit that polluted water had caused the stink and that consumption of that water, through cross-contamination with human waste, had caused the spread of cholera, but solving this problem would require a civic engineering miracle.
Enter Joseph Bazalgette, a then little known civil engineer, who would be named by Parliament to head London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, and would become a miracle worker.
Despite vociferous protests from some conservative members, and from some newspaper editors, who questioned the enormous cost of such a project, Parliament passed in August of 1858 something called an enabling act, which gave Bazalgette as head of the aforementioned Metropolitan Board of Works (a post which he would hold until 1889) access to raise all the public funds required to construct the world’s first citywide underground sewer system.
Bazalgette’s design was as ingenious as it was simplistic, and most importantly of all, it allowed for the anticipated growth of the city’s population by being designed to handle the outflow of much more raw sewage than was being produced in London at the time. Bazalgette designed and oversaw the construction of nearly 100 miles of brick underground sewers, that resembled giant archways, and flowed out from the city center to a number of pumping stations located in the suburbs that were able to ensure the waste was then released into the Thames and other tributaries miles away from where it could contaminate drinking water or cause another “Great Stink”.
All told, Bazalgette’s sewer system would not be fully completed until 1865, and additional pumping stations would continue to be built on into the 1870’s, but as an example of Bazalgette’s far-sighted design and planning, many parts of his London sewer system would continue to be used well into the 1960’s. And everytime you walk down a street in any American city or town, and you glance to your left or right and see a metal sewer grate lining the curb, you should think of Joseph Bazalgette, for it was his design which utilized these then innovative iron grates to siphon off the refuse, offal and standing water that until then had been left to build up along the sidewalks of every city causing the spread of disease and stench.
The construction of the world’s first modern underground sewer system would stop the spread of the dreaded disease cholera in London, and provide clean drinking water, while maybe not fully eliminating the Great Stink in the air, which would continue to crop up in the city during the latter part of the nineteenth and right on into the twentieth century. But none of those later flare ups would ever equal the severity of “The Great Stink of 1858”.
And, while those who still held steadfastly to the miasma theory of contagion were definitely wrong, and we can today look back at their seeming ignorance and chuckle, had it not been for the miasma created by “The Great Stink of 1858” then perhaps innovative ideas like those of Michael Faraday regarding the dangers of pollution, and those ideas of John Snow on the nature of contagion would never have come together into the world’s first environmental movement and precipitated the creation of the world’s first modern sewer system by Joseph Bazalgette.
Maybe, it’s not too much of an historical stretch to say that without “The Great London Stink of 1858” fewer of us would have fresh water to drink and the plague of the dreaded disease cholera would still haunt all of us today, just like it haunted those Londoner’s of the 1850’s who insisted sickness came from a stench filled cloud.
Great article! Interesting, original and very well written!
ReplyDeleteThank you very much and thanks for reading!
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