Street life had its own wonderments, and one chapter serves up a fabulous account of food-sellers and their wares. An alley off Farringdon Street, circa 1860, had one privy to service 400 occupants.īut this is not a relentless chronicle of misery. Between 18 the city’s population ballooned by one million, putting a strain on transport, food distribution and, most seriously, housing.įear and moralistic fervour induced the Government to pass the Poor Laws, which drove the destitute into the workhouse.įlanders properly devotes a long chapter to slum living, and explains how social ‘improvement’ did anything but slum clearances simply dispersed the poor to adjacent neighbourhoods, which in turn became slums through overcrowding and inadequate sanitation. The poor were, naturally, the most vulnerable to disease, and if this book tells us anything about Victorian London it is that poverty was its most shameful secret. The city’s crypts, according to Dickens, smelt of ‘rot and mildew and dead citizens’. Parliament itself began to choke and drove through legislation on a city-wide sewer project.īut proper sanitation came too late for those wiped out by cholera and other fevers. It was as nothing to the Great Stink of 1858, when the smell from the Thames riverbed, putrid and fermenting in temperatures of 33C (90F), became overpowering. The Streets, by Anthony Quinn, is published by Jonathan Cape and reviewed in New Fiction
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