How Filthy Were the Victorians?

Summary

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society

Episode: How Filthy Were the Victorians?

Host: Dr. Kate Lister
Guest: Lee Jackson (author, “Dirty Old London”)
Date: January 30, 2026

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Overview

In this lively and often irreverent episode, Dr. Kate Lister welcomes Victorian history expert Lee Jackson to debunk the myths and explore the realities behind Victorian hygiene, filth, and the sanitation revolution. The conversation journeys through public perceptions versus realities, the infamous “Great Stink,” the evolution of public health policies, and the daily struggles for cleanliness across Victorian London’s class spectrum.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

Victorian Hygiene: Myths vs. Realities

• Dual Victorian Identity: Victorians are remembered both as pioneers of sanitation (new sewers, public toilets) and as denizens of squalor (slums, open cesspits). Reality was far less black-and-white.
• Class Matters: Experiences of filth and cleanliness depended heavily on class—from street dwellers to mansion owners, conditions varied drastically.

“There isn't one unique sort of Victorian experience... The poor are dirty anyway, so what?”
— Lee Jackson [05:36]

Sanitary Revolution: Science, Politics, and Progress

• Sanitation as a Buzzword: The term “sanitary” became to Victorians what “green” issues are today—a constant public question.
• Germ Theory vs. Miasma:
  • Germ theory was not widely accepted until the late 19th century.
  • Disease was believed to be spread through “bad air” (miasma), so eliminating foul smells was the goal—even when the real danger was waterborne infection.
• Cholera Crisis:
  • Cholera’s arrival (1831) spurred panic and a sanitary awakening: disease struck fast and hard, likened to modern COVID fear and uncertainty.
  • The massive sewer-building projects followed, catalyzed by health crises and high-profile disasters like the Great Stink.

“It was the right answer for the wrong reasons… It was very plausible to people.”
— Lee Jackson [09:30]

Sewage, Toilets, and “Dear Dirty Old London”

• Cesspools and Privies: Most homes (even middle-class ones) had primitive, porous cesspools emptied by “night soil men” once a year—liquids leaked into the soil or sewers, with dire effects for water supply.
• Sewer Chaos: Early plumbing connected waste to drains never meant for it, leading to polluted waterways and chaotic (and often deadly) public health conditions.
• The “Great Stink” of 1858: When hot weather made the Thames’ stench unbearable for Parliament, political will (and money) finally materialized to build Joseph Bazalgette’s revolutionary sewers.

“What the Great Stink was… it just pushed them into paying for it.”
— Lee Jackson [24:07]

Cemeteries, Dead Bodies, and Death in the City

• Burial Crisis:
  • Graveyards overflowed; some “entrepreneurial” chapels stacked thousands of remains, sometimes dumping or burning bodies outside city limits.
  • Commercial cemeteries (“Magnificent Seven”) arose for the wealthy; the poor suffered squalid conditions until local councils began building public cemeteries after activist campaigns.
• Infant Mortality: Central London’s mortality was appalling—1 in 6 infants died under a year old in areas like Soho in 1890.

“People are dying in droves because the city isn't healthy.”
— Lee Jackson [26:29]

Everyday Cleanliness: A Struggle

• Bathing:
  • Once-weekly baths were a luxury; most people made do with basic washing where water was accessible.
  • Water supplies were intermittent; the poor queued at standpipes turned on for limited hours, often leading to fights.
• Public Baths and Laundries:
  • Built from the mid-19th century, public baths (and laundries) aimed to improve urban hygiene. Usage was split by class and gender—men bathed, women mostly did laundry.
  • By century’s end, baths evolved into public swimming spaces, though early pools were not always clean or safe.

“Originally they were seen exclusively as places for people to sort of wash themselves communally.”
— Lee Jackson [38:44]

The Morality of Cleanliness

• Cleanliness & Godliness: Victorian discourse often equated physical and moral cleanliness; dirtiness was stigmatized but not all Victorians were strict moralists.
• Scientific Progress as Moral Progress:
  • The drive for sanitary reform paralleled moral campaigns against societal “ills” like sex work and disease.

“There’s always been that sort of…moralization around dirt…that being cleanliness is next to godliness.”
— Kate Lister [41:01]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Victorian Urban Grime:

  “Dear Dirty Old London… dirt was kind of the quintessential thing you see in an urban environment.”
  — Lee Jackson [21:00]

• On Burial Practices:

  “It was said they were disinterring recently buried bodies and burning them. All sorts of quite gruesome stuff.”
  — Lee Jackson [28:44]

• On The Great Stink’s Political Pressure:

  “Parliament was next to the Thames… soaking their curtains with disinfectants in the hope of getting rid of it.”
  — Lee Jackson [23:54]

• On Public Bathing:

  “By the end of the 19th century, you can see pictures of Victorian baths with slides—people will launch themselves into the swimming pool.”
  — Lee Jackson [39:00]

• On Victorian Water Fights:

  “There would be literal fights because people were queueing for water.”
  — Lee Jackson [35:30]

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Key Timestamps

• [03:47] Victorian identity: progress vs. filth
• [05:36] Class divides & sanitary knowledge
• [07:12] Cholera arrives; miasma theory explained
• [11:49] Cesspools, night soil men, and porous sanitation
• [18:26] Overcrowded toilets; waterborne infections
• [22:34] Fog, dirt, and urban “romance”
• [23:54] The Great Stink: Parliament forced to act
• [24:52] Joseph Bazalgette's engineering feat
• [26:29] Death, cemeteries, and the burial crisis
• [34:34] The difficulty of staying clean
• [37:43] Public baths and laundries’ rise
• [41:01] The morality of hygiene
• [44:03] Resources: victorianlondon.org

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Further Resources

• Lee Jackson’s Victorian primary source archive: victorianlondon.org

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Tone & Takeaways

Kate Lister and Lee Jackson illuminate Victorian life with humor, empathy, and vivid detail—offering listeners an honest, sometimes shocking, always engaging look at the dirt (and eventual cleanliness) lurking beneath buttoned-up Victorian society. Dirt wasn’t just a fact of life; it was a catalyst for some of the most enduring public infrastructure changes in modern history. And, as the hosts marvel, we’re perhaps not as far removed from our “filthy” history as we’d care to think.

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Transcript

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[Kate Lister]

Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Cait Lister. You're listening to Betwixt the Sheets, the podcast that likes to roll its sleeves up and root around in the pants of history. But before we can do that, I do have to give you the fair dues warning. What is a fair dues warning? Well, it's like fair dues. We did tell you. We did warn you. Fair dinkum. Fair dues. And here it is. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of subjects. And you should be an adult too. Let's crack on.

[Lee Jackson]

Foreign.

[Kate Lister]

In Hyde Park, London, every day for five months, over 40,000 visitors rolled in to attend the Great Exhibition, taking in the massive glass and iron Crystal palace before its relocation to South London. The visitors, for just one shilling in many cases, were spoiled for choice. They could see the world's largest diamond. They could witness steam engines, hydraulic presses and early fax machines. They could lay their eyes from produce from all around the world, like sugarcane from the Caribbean and fun inventions like the gun, umbrella and an ice cream freezer. But one of the most exciting things that people were cramming in to see was the new public toilets. Well, I guess it's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? But these were the first public flushing toilets. Ooh, fancy. And that seems like a huge step forward for cleanliness. Right, but just what the were they doing before that? Well, I am ready to find out if you are. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. In many ways, the Victorians shaped the world that we live in today. This month, we've been digging through the filth of history and we've found that a lot of people who we were told mainly by the Victorians were dirty, was simply not as filthy as they have been made out to be. But what about the Victorians? Oh, they love to tell you that the medieval people were dirty. They loved to slag off the Egyptians. They even had a pop at ancient Rome. But just how Clean, were they?

[Lee Jackson]

Huh?

[Kate Lister]

Today I'm joined by Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London, and he is going to tell us just how dirty the Victorians really were. Let's do it. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Lee Jackson. How are you doing?

[Lee Jackson]

Oh, I'm, I'm feeling okay, thank you. A bit, bit anxious about where this is gonna go, this conversation.

[Kate Lister]

No, no, we're here to talk about the dirty Victorians. And this is so in your wheelhouse. You've written lots of books, but you are the author of Dirty Old London.

[Lee Jackson]

That is true, yes.

[Kate Lister]

That is true, yes. So if we're talking dirty, grimy, mucky Victorians, I think you are the man to come to.

[Lee Jackson]

I'll take that as a compliment. Yeah.

[Kate Lister]

The Victorians, I'm fascinated by them. They're such a strange, weird bunch of people because they existed at this really bizarre time in history, the Industrial Revolution. Like the, the start of the Industrial Revolution. Like, they didn't have cars, they didn't have phones. And then by the end of it, phones, cars, cinema, all of this stuff, it's it. The world changed so much and presumably hygiene changed as well.

[Lee Jackson]

Yeah, I mean, certainly the Victorians were very keen on sort of, you know, highlighting their sanitary achievements. You know, we always think of Joseph Bazalgette, the great engineer who built this sort of vast sewer network in mid Victorian London, which, you know, we still kind of rely on today. The idea of things being sanitary, that's something that comes in, in the Victorian area. They don't call it hygiene, but they call it sanitary and sanitation. And the sanitary question, as it became known in the 1840s. And it's kind of the way to think of it, I always think, is, you know, how we think about sort of green issues today, you know, over the last 30, 40 years. The question is something green or not? You know, is, is. Is this environmentally friendly or not is something that we also, we might disagree on the details and some people are, you know, green rubbish. But we all understand the concept and it's kind of embedded itself in daily life. And you get in the Victorian period, the question is, something sanitary or not is exactly the same sort of overall concept, I think, and you get that from about the 1840s onwards.

[Kate Lister]

The Victorians, they exist in two states in the public imagination today. One way they are super clean, they have got new sewage systems. It's the birth of like the modern world and soap and beauty products and all this stu. And then, and then on the Other side to this, they are filthy, living in slums and squalid and awful and everyone is in hovels. It was very much two worlds.

[Lee Jackson]

Yeah. And I think we also have to be a bit careful, obviously, about sort of just seeing everything in black and white. There was a whole grade of Victorian people, right? So from people absolutely, you know, desperate, living on the streets, to poor workers who, you know, perhaps rent a single room, to people who might manage a couple of rooms, to people who could perhaps, you know, rent a small, like, terraced house in, like, Walthamstow or. Or the East End or somewhere. And, you know, you can build up the scale, right, up the scale to people who afford a mansion in Mayfair. So there isn't one unique sort of Victorian experience. One thing that is very different from us is that they were lacking, certainly most of the Victorian period and arguably all. They were lacking the sort of scientific knowledge, we have a bacteria. They were lacking some of the sort of basic understanding we have of germs. Germ theory, yes. You know, it's a bit. It's the Victorian discovery, in a way, but it's not one that's widely accepted or understood throughout much of the 19th century, even towards the end of the century. So, you know, the famous example I always think of is that when the Victorians introduced public toilets, which were a bit. My particular obsession to have a wash basin was seen as additional luxury if you're willing to pay an extra penny. So you have toilets for the poor without the wash basins and toilets. And because they weren't thinking in bacterial terms or it was just literally. Well, it's quite nice to have, you know, wash your hands afterwards, isn't it? But. But so what sort of thing? You know, the poor are dirty anyway, so what.

[Kate Lister]

What terms were they speaking of there? Because this is fascinating. So germ theory, like. So tell us a bit about what that. What that came in. But obviously they didn't discover germs. Then everyone got that memo. How did. How did they understand dirt, contagion, disease?

[Lee Jackson]

I mean, there isn't. There isn't. I mean, again, this is sometimes misrepresented. There isn't an absolute shared understanding that's there, I think, at the start of the 19th century. But the thing that happens, I mean, the key event, certainly Victorian London is my sort of key area, but arguably nationally as well. Cholera comes to Britain in. In 1831. It's this little awful disease that's been traveling across Europe. You still can map its spread. The newspapers reporting, you know, now it's got to Moscow now, it's got to the Baltic States and so on. And it was obvious it was going to then travel further west and England, Britain had lots of trade connections with the Baltic, so it's fairly clear cholera's gonna get him. And it's not dissimilar to our recent experience with COVID in a way, in that people are scared of what it. You know, it's potentially fatal within a day or two.

[Kate Lister]

Really? That quick?

[Lee Jackson]

Can be, yeah. What kills you with cholera is dehydration. And in an intense case, then if you don't, if you don't have the rehydration, the salts that we know to give it, to give someone now, they can die within sort of 24, 48 hours after the first. Wow. First visible symptoms, obviously they, you know, maybe brewing for the work before that. So cholera comes to the uk, it's a bit like Covid. No one knows what it is, no one knows how to treat it. There's all sorts of weird experiments and, you know, all sorts of weird potions and pills are suggested and a lot of sort of quack medicine, but literally no one knows how to treat it. And that's what gets the Victorians thinking about this big sanitary issue because, you know, thousands of people die, essentially. But the way it gets framed in the 1830s, once cholera comes, is this notion of miasma, which you may have heard of. It's like the idea that disease is in the air in terms of a bad smell. If you could smell something rotting, decaying, the sort of smell you might get with rotten vegetables, rotten meat, or the smell you might get from sewers, then they think that actually it's the smell that is the cause of disease. And that sort of miasmatic theory comes to predominate in the mid century. And I think that holds true for much of the 19th century then. And germ theory, yes, you know, you get the sort of discoveries in the 1880s and hints of it earlier on, but it doesn't really filter through to the general public until maybe the 1890s.

[Kate Lister]

The miasma theory, the bad smell theory, to defend them a little bit. It's not a million miles wider than Mark. You can see the joined up thinking there.

[Lee Jackson]

I mean, basically, you know, so London is a big example. You know, we built this massive sewer network. The idea behind that was to get rid of the bad smells that were coming out of cesspools mainly to start with. And then when they emptied the cesspools and they all ended up flowing into the Thames. So to get rid of the stuff that was in the Thames. And it was the right answer for the wrong reasons. That. That's the really intriguing thing. It was such a major development in, you know, how our cities are built and structured and for entirely the wrong reasons, you know, because it's actually waterborne bacteria that we should be watching for. But, yeah, they kind of go together. So it wasn't. It wasn't ridiculous. And in fact, he was more to the point. It was even less than being ridiculous. It was very plausible to people. You know, people are growing up for the most part, in the 1840s, they would have grown up with a cesspool in the back garden or under the house if they lived in, like, a crowded part of central London. And that would have been filled, that would fill up with domestic waste, shall we call it, over a period of months, and then be emptied every six months, maybe every year, even depending on the size.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, no.

[Lee Jackson]

And so people were kind of used to that, but they also began to think, well, you know, even. Even in that age when there was more smell and the more Roman about, more horrible smells about, they recognize what the smell of a cesspool is, a horrible smell. Right. And nobody actually wanted to smell it. So to link that to the idea of health, public health, sanitation was a really clever idea. One of the most unfortunate things about the cesspools were that they were actually built to be porous so that the liquid would leak away into the soil. And the reason being, once you do that, the smell decreases and you get a more compact sort of sludge that's easily scooped out by some poor man with a shovel. The night soil, manure. And of course, leaking out that liquid into the soil is exactly where waterborne bacteria can also stem from. And of course, that's famous to what John Snow found in. In Soho in the 1850s by mapping cholera cases. So, yes, cesspool's not the best idea in a sense. But, you know, there's other issues with water closets as well, though, because, you know, we now we flush all our waste, you know, into very serious treatment systems. I mean, the Victorias are basically just flushing it down the Thames and then later out to SE. In the 1890s, it was sort of treated waste. I missedly, but it was all basically dumped pretty much opposite South End, if you. If you know that area. So.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, dear.

[Lee Jackson]

So, you know, what do you do with it? It's a really interesting thing.

[Kate Lister]

How do you do with it?

[Lee Jackson]

How do you deal with Waste, it's one of those big questions for a city. And if you look at the Victorians, and I think it carries right through to us today, the historic answer is you put it out of the way somewhere else, you send it somewhere that isn't here. And we get don't.

[Kate Lister]

We don't want to smell it, don't.

[Lee Jackson]

Deal with it far away as possible. And so, you know, today the thing is like electronic waste, Right. We've dumping tons of electrical waste and such that ends up in massive heaps in Africa being scavenged by people living in what we would now see as kind of Victorian conditions, you know.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah. Or into. We. We're currently dumping raw sewage into public waterways.

[Lee Jackson]

Oh, yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that's the other thing. The, the dumping of sewage was one of the things that actually was cleaned up in quite well in, in the UK after, you know, from the Victorians almost, mainly down to the European Union. And once that, once those protections were wiped out, then, yeah, it's just getting worse and worse.

[Kate Lister]

We're back to just chucking wherever we.

[Lee Jackson]

Can just put it.

[Kate Lister]

We're just back to chucking. But actually, like, I know that, like, the issue of toilets is like, it's innately comical because we can't stop laughing at things like that. But it's so important to any kind of civilization because that is key. And in this series about dirt and filth, how a large group of people are manage waste is absolutely central to it. And what I get the feeling of Victorian London is it expanded so rapidly, so significantly that there was a sort of sense of like, the infrastructure couldn't cope with it. So there's a sort of like, how are we dealing with this? And that's just the cesspit system. Is that what they would call privies? They'd just be like a privy.

[Lee Jackson]

Just means, I think, essentially an outhouse of some crowding, typically in your backyard. Right. So, yeah, but if you lived in somewhere like Soho, it would often be in like your basement because you'd have a backyard. And in some of the old townhouses, or not much, the original cesspit would just been a hole in the ground. And there you go, essentially holy ground. You have a nice mahogany seat with a little hole in it, you know.

[Kate Lister]

But it's a hole in the ground.

[Lee Jackson]

You have to squat over the hole. You can have a seat. You know, I looked at. I've been looking recently at the history of Covent Garden. I found a sort of the auction details for a building on, I think I think Henrietta Street Common garden. So building that would have been built sort of early Georgian period, maybe, maybe a little before. And unusually, the auctioneer actually lists the toilet as one of the effects that's going to be sold at the auction. And it's a magnificent affair. It's like mahogany paneled, it has some kind of tin line dome over the roof. It looked like, I imagine like a little sort of Georgian temple or something. Now not many places were like that I think, unless you're in a super rich, you know, after. For most people it was just a little, it would be a little hook, you know, a little shed in the garden with a hole in it and the cesspool, yeah, it would be porous. So the liquid seeped away, which meant less smell. No one knew about the consequences. And the night soil man would come around often just once a year, literally. These are some guys with a car and some shovels and some baskets and they would get down to the business of emptying it. And they were called night soil men because nighttime was the time to do it when no one else was around, because no one else wanted to be near it when it was happening. Me, essentially.

[Kate Lister]

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[Kate Lister]

They were shared toilets. Sometimes I think about that, that of like what that would be like to like if you wake up in the middle of the night and you need to go like, hopefully you can just like get out of bed, stumble across the hall and then you've got a space all to yourself. But in the 19th century and for all of history before that, until we got private space, you'd be running outside or downstairs to a shared space in the cold.

[Lee Jackson]

Well, certainly if you lived in like any kind of tenements or flats or whatever of a working class kind in central London, you'd be sharing, you know, be sharing.

[Kate Lister]

That's not nice.

[Lee Jackson]

Absolutely. I mean again, I know when we go about common garden, because I've been looking at it recently, but like one of the courts, I sort of, you know, back street, sort of enclosed areas off, I think Bedfordbury, 70 residents, two toilets between them. So, you know, you can imagine how that gets right.

[Kate Lister]

Oh no. And of course it makes people sick, doesn't it? Because that is that I'm not an expert on cholera, but is that how.

[Lee Jackson]

Cholera is a waterborne infection? Right. So as soon as you have contaminated water in any sense.

[Kate Lister]

Contaminated with.

[Lee Jackson]

Yeah, with essentially, yeah. Or, or, you know, I'm sure you could vomit into it too, you know, if you're.

[Kate Lister]

Yes, okay, but basically which of those would you pick?

[Lee Jackson]

But yeah, no, it's waterboard connection, but commented contaminated with a larger human Excrement. Yeah. And it, It's. It's a chaotic. It's a chaotic system. And, you know, the Thames is. Is this. Is this sort of great barometer what's happening. Even. Even in the 1820s, before the coming of cholera's, the decade before, it was getting filthy because the more and more people were connecting their cesspits, the sewers. Now, those sewers weren't the sewers that basalt built. They were ancient sewers that could be for anything, but were largely designed for rainwater. So actually, what precedes cholera is that dodgy builders are connecting houses, cesspools, to the rainwater sewers so that they will lit, so that instead of the liquid going to the ground, it will flow away nicely into the sewers. But no one designed those sewers for that purpose. And all those sewers end up flowing into the Thames. So it's just. It's just a mess. Right. No one's planned it. It's all this kind of weird ad hoc erasure. This. You literally have a house. If you're like a middle class and you're renting a nice house, but they say, well, I don't like the smell of this cesspool. The builder will literally say, if you're near any kind of sort of rainwater drain, I can do you a pipe from that. And it was literally. There's literally one. These individual choices being made by people. And then. And this, it comes in with the. With the beginning of the flush toilets. So people get flush toilets, water's going into their cesspools, they're filling up, they're getting too full of water, more smelly. Builders say, oh, we can deal with that, let's put another pipe. And it's just chaos. It's just basically this sort of weird insanitary chaos happening across the city of like dunk. Million and a half.

[Kate Lister]

People stunk.

[Lee Jackson]

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think obviously it's a lot of smell in Victoria that we would. We would not accept. I mean, horses, you know, just horses. Horses. I mean, the great one I always remember is that the shopkeepers on Piccadilly, I think, like 1860s or 1870s, all their brass, you know, sort of brass finishes you get on Victorian shop fronts, the sort of little sort of like a brass plaque underneath the window type thing, and best fittings, they were all quickly decaying because of the sheer amount of horsepower. No, you know, we just take it for granted. You know, they. They took for granted that there'd be quite a lot of Horse stung and horse piss in. In the city. And that was like urban life. Strangely enough, like, the title of the book I wrote about on this some years ago is It's Dirty Old London. And it's actually a shortening of what the Victorians said, because they often refer to London as Dear Dirty Old London, as if it was like part of the joy and charm of being a city that you have, you know, dirt was kind of the quintessential thing that you see in an urban environment. They got most romantic about fog. I mean, fog returns could get very romantic about fog. And they love the idea of, you know, the romantic atmosphere of fog. Everything blurred, everything smoky. Some people said it even purified your lungs. I know Kate turned all the buildings black and the trees, but, you know. But Dear Dirty Old London, you see, that referred to as that. That little phrase comes up quite a few times in various bits of Victorian literature. And it's because I think we have that as well, though. You know, the sort of gritty.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, yeah.

[Lee Jackson]

The idea that this city has to be kind of gritty and dirty and, you know, it's like there's something much more interesting about, say, 1970s New York. But it was all like, you know.

[Kate Lister]

Yes, we do.

[Lee Jackson]

Yeah. Rather than say, like, you know, something that's been sanitized. And so we have this sort of dual feelings about sanitation and improvement actually, as well, because I think we do see dirt and filter sort of a part of urban life, as long as we don't, you know, catch a fatal disease from it. You know, that's the other question.

[Kate Lister]

But sometimes it did get too stinky even for them, because there was this issue that they referred to as the great stink coming out of the Thames at one point.

[Lee Jackson]

Yeah. So this is what I've sort of incoherently rambled about. But basically you get people getting flushed toilets that goes into the cesspools. The cesspools get too full. They connect the cesspools to existing sewers which aren't really meant for human waste at that point. And that starts going into the Thames. And then you get this sanitary question of the 84. What are we going to do about all this? And one of the answers is, look, we need to shut down cesspools and build. Build sewers. But the sewers, again, were all at that point just connecting to the Thames. So in solving the problem by getting rid of the old cesspools, they just started redirecting everything into the sewers, which ended up in the Thames. So it's just this Cuban's infectious part. It's partly introduction to water closets, it's partly people thinking accessibles might not be a good idea, but then turning to sewers instead. And no one had really planned where all the sewers would go properly. So it all ends up in the Thames and it's this so called great stink. There's been like 20 years of discussion before this. If you can imagine, like HS2, you know, you know, how long that has taken to think and plan about and it's still gone wrong. Well, that's kind of where the Victorians will be. Sewers in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s. And it is this final, final. It's a hot summer, 1858. You can imagine, you know, how bad.

[Kate Lister]

Did the smell get?

[Lee Jackson]

It just got overwhelming for members of Parliament because it was in the Thames. You know, this is, this is always the great joke. It was in the Thames. Parliament was next to the Thames. They were literally soaking their curtains with like disinfectants in the hope of getting rid of it. They were.

[Kate Lister]

That is bad.

[Lee Jackson]

They were dumping like, you know, ton blocks of chloride of lime into the river in the. They could kind of disinfect the river. So, you know, it was, it was bad and that's not gonna work. But I think what, I think what sort of accounts of Victorian suicide that often sort of gloss over is there had literally been 20, 30 years discussion about this and what the great steam was. It wasn't, it didn't alert people to the problem. They were well aware of the problem, but it just pushed them into paying for it. Because that's, of course it's always the other thing with sanitation, with any of these things, it's like who pays for it and how much are they willing to stump up? And it wasn't, you know, what would be now, you know, tens of millions and millions of pounds to build a new sewer down low.

[Kate Lister]

And you've mentioned the name Bazalgette a couple of times, so we should give him a bit of a shout out. Who was, who was Joseph Bazalgette?

[Lee Jackson]

Joseph Bazalgette was basically an engineer. I think. I hesitantly think he started out in railways. I'm fairly sure he had a sort of nervous breakdown after the railway boom of the 1840s, where lots of stocks and shares sort of collapsed. But I made it. I hope I'm not thinking of someone else some more. Right, incorrectly. But he was an engineer. He was working for sort of sewers commissions that had been set up in the 1840s to like try and solve this question. And he was just a very good, consistent, thorough engineer. He checked all these measurements. He. He was very good at making sure he got value for money, that all the goods that we were supposed to be paying for came in. He tested the quality of all the concrete. He was just a very, very thorough man who kept track of this vast project which, you know, it was on a scale kind of no one has ever attempted before. So you built, you know, you built this vast network of intercepting sewers going sort of east, west across London to stop all the filth hitting the Thames. Basically, if you imagine London, everything goes towards the value of the Thames. So what he built was these fast intercepting, so it was running parallel with the Thames, as it were, which was sweep all the rubbish eastwards. But of course, they also built the same time the Thames Embankment, you know, so it's like it was all massive construction project. Sausage. Yeah. Nobody knew what he was doing. He knew what he was doing. He didn't.

[Kate Lister]

He. The other issue, if you're building or just dealing with a mass expanding city, is you've got sewage to have to deal with, which very much an ad hoc basis until Mr. Bazalgette got involved. The other thing you have to deal with is dead bodies. Like what you do with the dead when people, because they have to go somewhere, they have to like, what? What are we doing with them? Are we buried in them? Are we cremating them? What happens to them?

[Lee Jackson]

It's a real challenge. I mean, it's always been a challenge for big cities. But the thing to remember about Victoria and lots of stages of London beforehand is that it's growing. So it's growing a rapid rate. Right? So it starts at 1 million people at the start of the century, pushing 6 million by the end. Obviously the boundaries expand massively as well, but it's growing at a rapid rate due to incomers, because actually people who lived there for a long time tend to die quite, quite more quickly than people who are born in the countryside. It's got a high mortality rate. I mean, if you look at. Even if you look at Soho, so central London, Soho in the 1890s, infant mortality, so children dying under one year old was something like one in six in central London in 1890. People are dying in droves because the city isn't healthy. And part of that is contagious disease. A lot of it is poor living conditions. Some of it is poor nutrition. Yeah. There's all the reasons you Might expect. So. Yeah. What do you do with that? Well, traditionally you'd be buried in the parish church. So if you were a well to do person, space were made in the church and so on. But what happens is that a lot of the places that do exist, again, they're kind of getting over full. All sorts of tricks are done to try and deal with it. In particular, you get sort of graveyards being topped up with earth just to hide the fact that, you know, we can just get a couple more in. So you think about, say, St. Anne Soho. I don't know if you know that, if you know that street. Yeah. And the graveyard is substantially higher than the rest of the rest of the ground. And part of that is because it's built on a slight eminence. But also it's partly. So we've got space and you see that sort of St. Giles Church as well. And they're above the road deliberately. But it's also because. Yes, that gives you some more burial space. Right. And because burial space was at a premium. And so it depends, as with so many things in, in life and certainly 19th century London, the answer depends on how wealthy you are. So the solution that comes in the 1830s is the creation of what we would call the modern cemetery. So Kensal Green is the first one, and not then in central London, but in the countryside essentially, when it's built in the early 1830s. And there's that famous run of sort of commercial cemeteries which people call the Magnificent Seven, which is always very grand and I won't be able to name, I'll struggle to name all of them now, but it's like Kensal Green, Highgate, Norwood, Nunhead, Aveny Park, Brompton. There's still only six.

[Kate Lister]

Don't worry, I don't think anyone's going to pull you up on that. I'm very impressed with this.

[Lee Jackson]

So commercial cemeteries are built and they are commercial. They're commercial ventures. Right. They're not run by for the public good. They're literally property speculation regulations with a company running it and a manager and they have to make money. But they create these park like cemeteries on the model to sort of pay all the shares in Paris. And you, you know, you'll pay your sum and you'll get a lovely plot and it'd be all in rustic and rural and there'll be trees and it'd be beautiful. So if you're reasonably well to do from the 1830s, you have the answer. Finally, you know, you can just go out of town. You've got these magnificent parks. If you're poor it's much, much harder. And what you actually get is a whole run of sort of burial speculators in central London, but not of the sort of grand park variety. So the most famous one I think is Enon Chapel, which was built just off the Strand near Clare Market, that sort of area. And they built it as a chapel in theory for people to worship him. But it seems to be built largely as a speculation to bury people in the vaults. Because they had a big vaults underneath. You can bury people there, you know, get me coffin, stuff coffin in the vaults. But after a few years it's starting to smell quite badly. There was sort of odd insects buzzing around the chapel and all these things. And also after a few years they realized that they seem to have buried like at least like 2 or 3,000 people here. And if you imagine a single building, how do you achieve that? The answer is you don't. So what they were doing is, it turned out they were carting off the deceased at regular intervals and dumping them somewhere in the countryside. And you get all sorts of these weirdly mismanaged things. Another one just off Roseberry Avenue. Who's shouldn't do my name escapes me. But again, it was, it was said that they were disinterring recently buried bodies and burning them. It was said all sorts of quite gruesome stuff. Right. And these were the sort of people who were just selling cheap funerals to the poor. But you couldn't guarantee that, you know, the body will be there for very long, if you can imagine. So that was that option. And then what happens in the 1840s is there is this public outcry led by a doctor called Dr. Walker or Graveyard Walker as it became known, who gets obsessed with this notion that graveyards are part of the sanitary question. It's not unreasonable actually, you know, that's fair. You know, again, he thought it was due to miasma, he thought it was from the stench that was coming from these horribly managed graveyards and what have you. But yeah, he campaigned, you know, he did letters, he did, he did pamphlets, he did public meetings. He paid to close down Enon Chapel and then held tour and then held tours of the basement so people could see how bad it was. And it was, it was just like it was the full publicity campaign. And Dickens. Bleak House is sort of at the tail end of that. If you know the, the graveyard in Bleak House which is. Which was based on a very real one in Bristol Court just on Lane. And so there's this big campaign and yeah, it's actually one of the great successes in a way. The government finally after much debate, they thought first of all about nationalizing undertaking so that the government were literally the person who bearish union no matter what. But they couldn't get that through. But they in the end, again, it's about finding the money. They find money for local authorities to build cemeteries in the style of the grand commercial ones which have been built 30 years ago for the rich. And so, you know, I think Islington's St. Pancras Cemetery is the first one that's sort of out in northwest London. And yeah, so that's actually a real success. People say look, look at this horror. Can't we do something about it? The rich have been sorted with Kensal Green. What can we do for the poor? And the government coughs up and says okay, we're going to lend money for local authorities to build proper cemeteries and those the local authority cemetery we know today.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Lee after this short break.

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[Dan Snow]

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[Kate Lister]

So if you're just an average Victorian just just trying to get by day to day and you've got like the great stink and cesspits and, you know, maybe somebody's throwing a body on your lawn because they ran out of space in the local cemetery. I'm just trying to think, how do you stay clean? How do you. Because being clean has always been important to people. There's this myth that throughout history people were just disgusting and they were happy to be so, but people were trying to keep clean. Do you think that would have been an easy task in those circumstances?

[Lee Jackson]

I mean, again, you know, what is the average Victorian. But it's, it's. No, it wasn't. And you know, I think it was. It was also. I think it's fair to say, yes, people want to be clean, but what they meant by clean varied, right. By what we might mean. So it genuinely was a novel idea in the mid 19th century, even. Even to have a bath once a week was seen as kind of a, you know, a weird indulgence for. So, I mean, you might have a bath once a week maybe, but you didn't have to, you know, you just have a quick splash and you wash or whatever you find. But of course, you know, the big problem, if we can sort of, you know, assume that. Again, let's assume that the sort of middle class and the ridge could always find water. They could always get the servants to heat them up. Hot water. A lot. A lot of sort of the sort of soaps and things that people would use in the early half of the century were not mass produced. They would be sort of various sort of chemical type things you'd get from your. Including those local farms. Your servants would mix them together in the house according to your liking. And then during the 19th century, you get mass produced pear soap and all this sort of thing. But if you're rich or middle class, at the end of day, you'll find a way through because you have hot water and you have water. That's the other thing as well, right? It will always give or take. Be there. I'm gonna. Horrible thing. I'm just adding a caveat to that, though. Water supplies in London in the 19th century were not constant. So if you were wealthy, you had a big cistern in your house to store it. So even if you're well to do, you wouldn't have constant running water. You would have to fill up your cistern when the water supply was turned on by the water company. So nevertheless, if you, if you're in a decent sized house, you have a decent sized cistern, you'd have your Giant tank somewhere and you would store that water if you were poor? Well, first of all, there's no way you'd have any space for your own water system. How's that going to happen? You don't have money to heat up water anyway. That's just, you know, there's just very unlikely. Not much anyway, you know, certainly not for bathing purposes. Last thing you want to use it for. You don't have access necessarily to that clean water, because it depends what your source is. If it's a well, there's still quite a lot of Wells in the 19th century, then maybe they have been polluted by, you know, local sanitary or insanitary arrangements. Rather, if you're lucky, you have access to a standpipe run by one of the water companies. Then most sort of, like, I'll talk about that. That's all. That sort of courtyard before, you might have like 70 people and two toilets. Well, they probably also had a standpipe, but that'd be one standpipe for those 70 people, and it wouldn't be too. And it wouldn't be turned on all the time. Again, we say stamp. It's the same thing. It was not turned on all the time because the water companies couldn't keep that up. So it was only a certain number of hours, set hours per week. A man would literally come along with a key, open it, and there will be queues with people, every pail and bucket they could lay their hands on. And sometimes there were fights, there were literal fights because people were getting to, you know, because imagine having to, you know, wait queue for water. And someone says, oh, God. Someone says, well, you know, actually, I've got two babies at home and I need, you know, screw you. No, you're there, you're there already. So it would be. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's so hard to sort of. I mean, it's so hard for us here now, not hard for many people living in different parts of the world at the moment to imagine this, right? This is the conditions that exist in many cities all over the world, right? But for us now, it's quite hearty vision. That's what London was like 150, 200.

[Kate Lister]

Years ago, you know, what about, like, public hygiene? Cause I'm up in Yorkshire and we've got the Harrogate Turkish baths and I'm pretty sure they were built in the 19th century. And I know we've got Armley Baths just near where I am, and that was built in the 19th century. So there must have been this Sort of like initiative to create health spaces for people. Was there anything like that in London?

[Lee Jackson]

Absolutely. No. I mean, public baths are again, one of the sort of responses to the sanitary question in the 1840s. And they first begin to appear basically in sort of late 1840s in London. Certainly I think I have that day. Right. And again, it was this idea that the government would lend somebody to local authority and that would give them chance to build a bath. And what's interesting about them is that they were, they were, you know, an opportunity to clean and they always went with a laundry. So basically, typically it would often be the men who went to bathe because they were working so hard manual labor and getting particularly filthy. The women, on the other hand, look at them, mainly just goes to laundry and ticket washing.

[Kate Lister]

Right, thank you for that.

[Lee Jackson]

But it's interesting. The interesting thing about public baths is that, you know, and we all think, we can all think like swim baths and maybe we know a Victorian public bass still, you know, some of them still sort of just about survive. Originally they were seen exclusively as places for people to sort of wash themselves communally, basically. So, you know, they would generally be divided on sort of the slight class grounds, so that you could pay a slightly more expensive version if you are some middle class and if you're lower middle class and if you were, you know, poor, you're going to the slightly cheaper bathroom. But interesting what happens to them over the century is, although they still, although they're still slightly austere to us, so they're, they're gender segregated for starts. Right. You don't have men and women in the, in the same pool. They become more fun, actually. And by the end of the 19th century, you can see pictures of Victorian bass with light sort of slides and sort of almost like log plume type things where people will launch themselves into the swimming pool. Now, I think it was, it was meant to promote like, you know, learning how to dive. But you just can see people just having fun with this stuff and they become more like the modern swimming bass. So the original, the original Victorian bass are literally more like a sort of plunge pool that you just, you know, you wash about. And this was, you know, fine. But by the end of the 19th century, no, they become more like swimming bass for actual swimming in and having fun in as well. They get deeper. So, yeah, again, public bass are one of those great things, but women didn't use them that much actually. I think the stats show certainly to start off with, I think there was, there were issues with sort of modesty in quotes and shame. But also just. They didn't have the time, you know.

[Kate Lister]

I don't have the time to be lounging around on a high diving board. Thank you very much. I wonder how clean that water was though, like. Because we were talking to Alexander Meddings about ancient Rome and he was saying that despite the fact that they had bathhouses everywhere, they didn't have a system for changing the water. Yeah, no, so it was the same water.

[Lee Jackson]

I think they did change the water, but I think probably not with the consistency or the. The chemical sort of thoroughness that we would do today. And certainly there were. There were massive outbreaks to say eye infections in. Oh, no, late 19th century London, especially when sort of children sort of. When. When children have to start going to school. So sort of schools act or sense of school. Certainly by the 1890s you get, you know, under, under tens of all having to go to school and. Yeah, and this like massive outbreaks of infections whenever they go to a public bus because no one, no one's watching that.

[Kate Lister]

And you do get. I mean maybe this has existed all throughout history. Maybe it has. But a moralization around dirt that being dirty is somehow immoral. That only. And that being cleanliness is next to godliness. And that seems to be a very Victorian thing as well.

[Lee Jackson]

I mean, it's certainly a sort of high. If I say high victory. I mean where I've seen that some instances of that were more in the 1850s, 1860s when public bass were coming in. I haven't seen it so much in the sort of late Victorian municipal sort of politbas of the sort we know today, which not say wasn't there, but. Yeah, there's always been that sort of. It's a sort of. I think. I think Wesley or someone who was a Methodist sort of really sort of pushed that early on in the sort of turn of the 19th century. But again, I think we've got to be a bit careful. I always feel a bit careful about the Victorians of framing them as like this archetypally religious Bible bashing, you know, sort of. Because there was that. There was that section of Victorian society, but there was also another section. You just laughed at that. I thought it was just absolutely ridiculous. So I think we have to be a little cautious about sort of towering them with that brush. Having said that, I do think the sort of. The whole sanitary sort of question and this idea that you could remake London by building these new sewers wholesale and that, you know, the, the idea that Sort of the march of science and statistics and engineering and investigation could sort of clean up the city in a sanitary fashion. I think that does carry over into some of those who are moral campaigners who see that, well, here's a model in a way that something can be done that, you know, if you look at the way we get dealing with cholera, why can't we apply that to sex workers or venereal disease, whatever. And it creates this sort of parallel there. I think that's there for a lot of the century.

[Kate Lister]

And it's funny that, like, looking back at some of the history, like, obviously they didn't know what we know, but. And, but it is very easy to sort of laugh at them. Like, there seems to have been, like resistance in some places for some of these measures. Like Florence Nightingale is a great example. Like when she turned up and she went, look, I think. I think maybe we should wash our hands. There was like a reaction from the doctor. Like, I very much do not think we should be doing that. And now, to us, that just sounds completely bonkers.

[Lee Jackson]

Yeah. But again, it's like, as you say, it's lack of knowledge and, you know, we're grounded things on this, this sort of notion of germ theory and things you can see under a microscope and scientific explanations. Now, Victoria's had microscopes, but they don't get to germ theory till really to the very end of the century. So I don't think you can really blame them for that. I think Florence Nightingale, though, was also a miasmatist. I think she wasn't. I don't think I may be wrong here, but I think she was like most Victorians in the mid mid 19th century. So if you pressed her on the cause of disease, I think she would have said it's the smell.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, she probably would have done, wouldn't she? Oh, Lee, you've been so much fun to talk to. Thank you so much for dropping by. If people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[Lee Jackson]

Best place to have a quick look is my ancient website, victorianlondon.org and that's got links to my books, but it also has a sort of vast encyclopedia of Victorian primary sources. You can look around it for free, so there's a lot there.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much. You've been marvelous.

[Lee Jackson]

Thank you very much.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Lee for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to, like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got a special Valentine's Day treat for you because what could be more romantic than a deep dive into the worst breakups of all time? And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email [e-mail] this podcast was edited by Tim Arstel and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society A podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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