At Home - Bill Bryson [12]
The most popular feature at the Great Exhibition was not an exhibition at all, but rather the elegant “retiring rooms,” where visitors could relieve themselves in comfort, an offer taken up with gratitude and enthusiasm by 827,000 people—11,000 of them on a single day. Public facilities in London were woefully lacking in 1851. At the British Museum, up to 30,000 daily visitors had to share just two outside privies. At the Crystal Palace the toilets actually flushed, enchanting visitors so much that it started a vogue for installing flushing toilets at home—a development that would quickly have catastrophic consequences for London, as we shall see.
The Great Exhibition offered a social breakthrough as well as a sanitary one, for it was the first time that people of all classes were brought together and allowed to mingle in intimate proximity. Many feared that the common people—“the Great Unwashed,” as William Makepeace Thackeray had dismissively dubbed them the previous year in his novel The History of Pendennis—would prove unworthy of this trust and spoil things for their superiors. There might even be sabotage. This was, after all, just three years after the popular uprisings of 1848, which had convulsed Europe and brought down governments in Paris, Berlin, Kraków, Budapest, Vienna, Naples, Bucharest, and Zagreb.
The particular fear was that the exhibition would attract Chartists and their fellow travelers. Chartism was a popular movement named for the People’s Charter of 1837, which sought a range of political reforms—all fairly modest in retrospect—from the abolition of rotten and pocket boroughs* to the adoption of universal male suffrage. Over the space of a decade or so, Chartists presented a series of petitions to Parliament, one of them over six miles long and said to be signed by 5.7 million people. Parliament was impressed but rejected them all anyway, for the people’s own good. Universal suffrage, it was commonly agreed, was a dangerous notion—“utterly incompatible with the existence of civilization,” as the historian and member of Parliament Thomas Babington Macaulay put it.
In London, matters came to a head in 1848 when the Chartists announced a mass rally on Kennington Common, south of the Thames. The fear was that they would work themselves into a froth of indignation, swarm over Westminster Bridge, and seize Parliament. Government buildings throughout the city were fortified in readiness. Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, blocked the windows of the Foreign Office with bound volumes of the Times. At the British Museum men were stationed on the roof with a supply of bricks to rain down on the heads of anyone who tried to take the building. Cannons were placed outside the Bank of England, and employees at a range of state institutions were issued with swords and ancient, doubtfully maintained muskets, many of them at least as dangerous to their users as to anyone bold enough to step in front of them. Standing by were 170,000 special constables—mostly rich men and their servants—under the command of the doddering Duke of Wellington, now seventy-nine years old and deaf to anything less noisy than an extremely robust shout.
In the event, the rally fizzled out, partly because the Chartists’ leader, Feargus O’Connor, was beginning to behave bizarrely from an as-yet-undiagnosed case of syphilitic dementia (for which he would be committed to an asylum the following year), partly because most of the participants weren’t really revolutionaries at heart and didn’t wish to cause or be part of a lot of bloodshed, and partly because a timely downpour made retiring to a pub suddenly seem a more attractive option than storming Parliament. The Times decided that the “London mob, though neither heroic, nor poetical, nor patriotic, nor enlightened, nor clean, is a comparatively good-natured body,” and, however patronizing, that was about right.
Despite this reprieve, feelings in some quarters continued