At Home - Bill Bryson [194]
The breakthrough event for flush toilets was the Great Exhibition, where they became one of the featured attractions. More than eight hundred thousand people patiently endured long queues to experience the flush toilets—a novelty for most of them—and were so enchanted by the noise and cleansing swirl of water that they rushed to have them installed in their own homes. Perhaps no expensive consumer item in history has taken off more quickly. By the mid-1850s, some two hundred thousand of them were working away in London.
The problem was that London’s sewers were designed only to drain off rain water and couldn’t cope with a steady deluge of solid waste. The sewers filled up with a dense, gloopy sludge that wouldn’t wash away. People known as flushermen were employed to find blockages and clear them. Other sewery professions included toshers and mudlarks, who delved through muck, in sewers and along fetid riverbanks, for lost jewelry or the odd silver spoon. Toshers made a good living, all things considered, but it was dangerous work. The air in the sewers could be lethal. Since the sewer network was vast and unrecorded, reports abounded of toshers getting lost and failing to find their way out. Many were rumored to have been attacked and devoured by armies of rats.
Murderous epidemics were routine in the lightly sanitized, pre-antibiotic world. The cholera outbreak of 1832 left an estimated sixty thousand Britons dead. It was followed by a devastating influenza epidemic in 1837–38 and further cholera outbreaks in 1848, 1854, and 1867. Between and amid these attacks on the nation’s tranquillity came deadly bursts of typhoid fever, rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and smallpox, among many others. Typhoid fever alone killed fifteen hundred people or more a year from 1850 to 1870. Whooping cough killed about ten thousand children a year from 1840 to 1910. Measles killed even more. There were, in short, an awful lot of ways to die in the nineteenth century.
Cholera wasn’t terribly feared at first, for the decidedly unworthy reason that it was thought primarily to affect poor people. It was accepted wisdom almost everywhere in the nineteenth century that the poor were poor because they were born to be. Although a few impoverished people might generously be described as undeserving, most were by nature “improvident, reckless and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratification,” as one government report crisply summarized it. Even Friedrich Engels, a far more sympathetic observer than most, could write in The Condition of the Working Class in England: “The facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness.”
So when in 1832 people in the crowded inner cities began to drop in large numbers from a brand-new disease from India called cholera, it was generally viewed as just one of those unfortunate things that befell the poor from time to time. Cholera became known as “the poor man’s plague.” In New York City, more than 40 percent of the victims were poor Irish immigrants. Blacks were disproportionately affected, too. The state medical commission in New York actually declared that the disease was confined to the dissolute poor and “arises entirely from their habits of life.”
But then cholera began to strike down people in well-to-do neighborhoods, too, and very quickly the terror became general. People had not been so unnerved