of evidence on this subject, collected by two separate committees of the
House of Commons, and of the almost unanimous conclusions to which that
evidence led; ‘that opaque smoke issuing from steam-engine chimneys may
be so abated as no longer to be a public nuisance; that a variety of
means are found to exist for the accomplishment of this object, simple
in construction, moderate in expense, and applicable to existing
furnaces and flues of stationary steam-engines; that a sufficient body
of evidence has been adduced, founded upon the experience of practical
men, to induce the opinion that a law, making it imperative upon the
owners of stationary steam-engines, to abate the issue of opaque smoke
is desirable for the benefit of the community;’[54] ‘that the expense
attendant on putting up whatever apparatus may be required to prevent
smoke arising from furnaces is very trifling, and (as some of the
witnesses observed) the outlay may be repaid within the year, by the
diminished consumption of fuel; that the means of preventing smoke might
also be applied to the furnaces of steam-boats, but such application
would be attended with rather more expense than on land, from the
occasional want of space, and the setting of boilers in a steam-vessel.
No doubt, however, existed, in the opinions of those examined, that the
prevention of smoke could be accomplished in steam-vessels.’[55]
[54] Report of Committee, 1845.
[55] Report of Committee, 1849.
In two local improvement Acts (those of Leeds and Manchester) clauses
have been introduced in accordance with the sense of these conclusions;
and in order to render them as little oppressive as possible to those
whose interests might be affected by their operation, the enactments
(which apply to every variety of furnace) have been so framed as to
enforce penalties for the issuing of smoke only when it should appear
(as no doubt it commonly would appear) that the proprietor had refrained
from “using the best practicable means for preventing or counteracting
such annoyance.”
Surely if such applicable means exist, it is a just and reasonable thing
that the public should be defended against offence and injury, arising
in the mere indifference or obstinacy of those who inflict them; and I
venture to hope that your Hon. Court, in renewing your application to
Parliament, may procure the enactment of a clause, giving you control
over so much of the nuisance as is wanton and avoidable.
* * * * *
There are still under the present head, some points to which I am
anxious to advert. During the two years that your Act has been in
operation, various complaints have been made with respect to nuisances
arising in particular trades; and with many of the causes of complaint
you have been unable effectually to contend. Soap-makers,
tallow-melters, gut-spinners, naphtha-distillers, preparers of patent
manure, dealers in soot, exposers of stinking hides, wire-makers,
dealers in kitchen-stuff, fish-curers, tripe-boilers, type-founders,
gold-refiners, slaughterers, varnish-makers, roasters of coffee and
chicory, whalebone-boilers, iron and brass-founders, keepers of
cattle-sheds, makers of printing-ink, dealers in camphine, cookers of
cats’-meat, and manufacturing chemists, have all, at different times and
in various degrees, been complained of.
In respect of those of the enumerated trades which deal in the
manufacture or sale of organic materials in a putrid or putrescent
state, I have already submitted to you my opinion that the City of
London, the home of a large and crowded population, is no place for
them. With regard to the many other occupations, it would obviously be
absurd, in the present state of society, to think of banishing them from
the City which their industry has contributed to enrich, and where
immemorial custom has given sanction to their continuance, unless you
could with certainty affirm of them, that they cause direct and
inevitable detriment to their neighbourhood. Every useful purpose, as
regards the health of the City, might be fulfilled by the enactment of
some moderate restriction.
Manifestly, it is opposed to the spirit of your Act of Parliament, that
any trader or manufacturer should possess the right of diffusing in the
vicinity of his house, to the detriment and disgust of his neighbours,
any product (whether in the form of running fluid, or volatile dust, or
vapour, or smoke, or odour) which is either disagreeable to the senses
or may be hurtful to the health. Many of the instances which I have
enumerated fall within this description, and yet remain unaffected by
the restrictive sections of your Act.
I would submit to the consideration of your Hon. Court, whether, in the
renewal of your Act, some comprehensive clause might not be introduced,
which should deal with these difficulties, as well as with the nuisance
of smoke--and deal with them, too, on the same principle: a clause,
which (without enumerating all trades which have been, or possibly may
become, sources of nuisance in the City, and without specifying too
narrowly the nature of the nuisances to be guarded against) should
empower your Commission generally, in respect of every trade practised
within the City, to require that its operations shall be conducted with
the least possible amount of inconvenience to the neighbourhood; and
which should enable you to enforce penalties in case of every nuisance
arising in such operations, unless it should be distinctly shown on the
part of the proprietor, that every practicable measure for abatement of
the inconvenience had been constantly and thoroughly employed.[56]
[56] Such a clause was introduced in the Act of 1851 (see page 193)
and has been worked with considerable advantage.--J. S., 1854.
I would beg to express my conviction that your possession of the
authority with which such a clause would invest you, would very largely
increase your powers of utility, in respect of many acknowledged
grievances hitherto beyond your control; and the influence of your
example, in the achievement of this great municipal purpose, would, I
doubt not, speedily lead to the adoption of general measures throughout
the metropolis, for the total suppression of smoke, and for the
mitigation of other nuisances which now exist around your territory no
less than within it.[57]
[57] This expectation has recently been fulfilled in the Smoke
Prevention Act, for which the metropolis has to thank Lord
Palmerston.--J. S., 1854.
_Burial-Grounds._
In my last year’s Report I had occasion to represent to your Hon. Court
the evils of intramural sepulture. I testified to that large
accumulation of human remains, by which, in numerous parts of the City,
the soil of burial-grounds has been raised many feet above its original
level; and I advised you of the injury which must accrue to health from
the constant organic decomposition thus suffered to proceed in the midst
of our crowded population. I likewise invited your attention to the
still greater evil of burial in vaults; I explained and endeavoured to
remove the misconception which commonly prevails, as to the preservation
of bodies under those circumstances; and I showed you how unfailingly,
sooner or later after such burial, the products of putrefaction make
their way from within the coffin (whatever may have been its
construction) and diffuse themselves offensively and injuriously through
the air. I concluded by expressing to you my strong conviction of the
necessity that some comprehensive measure should be undertaken, for
abolishing, at once and for ever, all burial within the City of London.
During the session of Parliament that has intervened between that Report
and my present one, an event has occurred, which promises to remove
effectually the evils on which I then addressed you. Her Majesty’s
government, acting at the instigation of the General Board of Health,
carried through Parliament a Bill, enacting that the Queen, by Order in
Council, may prohibit further burials within any district of the
metropolis, so soon (after the close of this year) as the General Board
of Health should have provided the means of extramural interment. The
operation of this Act of Parliament is such as, I have every reason to
believe, you will welcome within the City of London: and I look forward
to the complete cessation of burial within your territory, as a matter
for warm congratulation among all who are interested in the cause of
sanitary improvement.[58]
[58] The Act of Parliament here referred to never passed into
operation, and was repealed in 1852 by a second Metropolitan Burials
Act, under which the City Commissioners of Sewers are at present
acting as a Burial Board for the City of London. See the last Reports
of this Volume, from page 280 to the end.--J. S., 1854.
From the terms of the Act in question I find that Her Majesty’s Order in
Council is to be preceded by a Report from the General Board of Health,
stating their opinion of the expediency, that (in any particular case
reported on) burial should forthwith be discontinued. Accordingly, in
the present state of the law, it will devolve on that Board to initiate
whatever measures may be necessary for the prohibition of further
interment in the City.
Two clauses of your Act of Parliament, which have hitherto been
inoperative, may perhaps come into requisition whenever Her Majesty’s
Order in Council closes the burial-grounds of the City; viz., clause 89,
which empowers your Commission, if you shall “think fit, to provide fit
and proper places, in which the poor, under proper rules and
regulations, may be permitted to deposit the bodies of their dead
previous to interment;” and the following clause, which authorises your
Officer of Health, in case of necessity, and for protection of the
living, to cause any dead body to be removed at your expense, to
whatever building may have been provided for the reception of the dead,
previous to interment. It may hardly be necessary that I should trouble
you with any remarks on the subject of these clauses, till such time as
they are likely to come into operation.
With respect to the burial-grounds within the City, which will fall into
disuse so soon as the new Interment Act becomes operative, I trust that
your Hon. Commission will procure the power of regulating and
supervising their maintenance, so that they may no longer be hurtful to
the health of their vicinity. The arrangement of them, which would be
most advantageous to their locality, would be that of planting them with
whatever trees or shrubs may be made to flourish in a London atmosphere.
The putrefactive changes, which for some years longer must proceed in
these saturated soils, will be rendered comparatively harmless and
imperceptible, if at the same time there advance in the ground a
sufficiency of vegetation, which for its growth would gradually
appropriate, as fast as they are evolved, the products of animal decay.
It seems almost superfluous for me to observe, that, from the time when
burials are discontinued, no unnecessary disturbance of the soil should
be allowed; nor any attempts at levelling or the like, except under the
direct sanction of your Hon. Court.
Another point in connexion with these burial-grounds, to which I may
here advert (though I must recur to it hereafter) is, that while great
advantage may be expected from the discontinuance of their former uses,
if their several areas be left open and without building, so as to
subserve the ventilation of their neighbourhood, all that advantage
would be lost, and a heavier evil inflicted on the neighbourhood than
that of which it purports to be relieved, if these spaces were at any
time to be covered with houses; and I trust it may be found within the
province of your Hon. Court to obtain authority for preventing any
encroachment of this nature on the limited breathing-spaces of the City.
_Habitations and Social Condition of the Poor._
In my last Report (under its fifth and sixth heads) I particularly
solicited the attention of your Hon. Court to certain circumstances
connected with the dwellings and habits of the poor, which, though they
then lay apparently out of your jurisdiction, as defined by the Act of
Parliament, yet appeared to me of immeasurable weight in the sanitary
fluctuations of the City, as tending in their operation constantly to
thwart your endeavours for improvement, and to neutralise day by day
whatever good you could achieve.
I reported to you that there were sanitary defects, inherent in certain
large proportions of your municipal cure, which the most absolute
control of drainage and water-supply would do nothing to
amend,--constructional defects of houses and of courts, whereby their
crowded inhabitants were excluded from a sufficiency of light and air,
and were constrained, without remission or change, to breathe an
atmosphere fetid with their own stagnant exhalations. I reported to you
that, however unexceptionable might be the arrangement of such
localities in matters already within your control--however clean their
pavements, however pure their water, however effective their drainage,
yet fever and the allied disorders could never be absent from their
population; while under opposite arrangements, with nuisances around
them, with organic poisons rising from the soil or mingling in the
water, their mortality would rise to the horrors of pestilence, and
might easily renew the most awful precedents in history. I described to
you the class of miserable dwellings alluded to--‘Courts and alleys with
low, dark, filthy, tenements, hemmed in on all sides by higher
buildings, having no possibility of any current of air, and (worst of
all) sometimes so constructed, back to back, as to forbid the advantage
of double windows or back doors, and thus to render the house as perfect
a _cul-de-sac_ out of the court, as the court is a _cul-de-sac_ out of
the next thoroughfare:’ I affirmed that ‘this could never be otherwise
than a cause of sickness and mortality to those whose necessities allot
them such residence;’ and assured you of the ‘incontrovertible fact,
that subsistence in closed courts is an unhealthy and short-lived
subsistence, in comparison with that of the dwellers in open streets.’
In habitations of this kind the death-rate would of necessity be high,
even if the population were distributed thinly in the district. A single
pair of persons, with their children, having such a court for their sole
occupancy, would hardly be otherwise than unhealthy; the infants would
die teething, or would live pallid and scrofulous; or a parent would
perish prematurely--the father, perhaps, with typhus, the mother with
puerperal fever. Judge then, gentlemen, how the mortality of such courts
must swell your aggregate death-rate for the City, when I tell you that
their population is in many instances so excessive, as, in itself, and
by its mere density, to breed disease.
Statistics can give you no conception of this crowding. If you refer to
the results of the last census, you find the average population _per_
house, in the City of London Union to be 7·1; in the East and West
London Unions, 8·8; for the construction of these averages, the most
dissimilar materials are blended together; and the density of population
is apparently reduced by the very large number of business-houses which
have no resident inmates, beyond the porter or the housekeeper who has
charge of them. If you turn from the deceptions of an average to the
exact analysis of detail, you will find many single rooms in the City
with a larger number of inmates than you might otherwise ascribe to
entire houses. Instances are innumerable, in which a single room is
occupied by a whole family--whatever may be its number, and whatever the
ages and sexes of the children; where birth and death go on side by
side; where the mother in travail, or the child with small-pox, or the
corpse waiting interment, has no separation from the rest.
This is evil enough; but worse remains behind. It is no uncommon thing,
in a room of twelve feet square or less, to find three or four families
_styed_ together (perhaps with infectious disease among them) filling
the same space night and day--men, women, and children, in the
promiscuous intimacy of cattle.[59] Of these inmates it is nearly
superfluous to observe, that in all offices of nature they are
gregarious and public; that every instinct of personal or sexual decency
is stifled; that every nakedness of life is uncovered there. Such an
apartment is commonly hired in the first instance by a single pair, who
sub-let a participation in the shelter, probably to as many others as
apply. Sometimes a noxious occupation is carried on within the space:
thus, I have seen mud-larks (_chiffonniers_) sitting on the floor with
baskets of filth before them, sorting out the occasional bit of coal or
bone, from a heterogeneous collection made along the bed of the river,
or in the mouths of the sewers; and this in a small room, inhabited
night and day by such a population as I have described.
[59] I purposely refrain from any attempt to illustrate all the
horrors which are incidental to this method of life; but, as a single
exemplification of the text (chosen, not because of its rarity, but
because it happens to occur at the moment) I insert an extract from a
note, with which I was favoured a fortnight ago, by Mr. Hutchinson,
Surgeon to the North District of the West London Union: ‘I was sent
for to attend a poor Irish woman in labour, at half-past six o’clock
yesterday morning, at 17, Fox and Knot court. There were three
families, each consisting of a man and wife and two or more children,
in a small room, 15 feet by 8, all lying upon dirty rags on the floor.
I found one of the children suffering under small-pox. The adjoining
room was occupied by six grown-up persons and two children.’ In the
circumstances to which my Report refers, scenes of this description
must of necessity be _habitual_: and it is to their habit, not to
their exceptional occurrence, that my remarks apply.
Who can wonder at what becomes, physically or morally, of infants
begotten and born in these bestial crowds?
In my former Report, I drew your attention to this pestilential heaping
of human beings, and suggested to you its results; and on many
occasions, during the past year, complaints have been before your Hon.
Court which have had their real origin in this uncontrolled evil. I
revert to it because of its infinite importance. While it maintains
physical filth that is indescribable, while it perpetuates fever and the
allied disorders, while it creates mortality enough to mask the results
of all your sanitary progress, its moral consequences are too dreadful
to be detailed. I have to deal with the matter only as it relates to
bodily health. Whatever is morally hideous and savage in the
scene--whatever contrast it offers to the superficial magnificence of
the metropolis--whatever profligacy it implies and continues--whatever
recklessness and obscene brutality arise from it--whatever deep injury
it inflicts on the community--whatever debasement or abolition of God’s
image in men’s hearts is tokened by it--these matters belong not to my
office, nor would it become me to dwell on them. Only because of the
physical sufferings am I entitled to speak; only because pestilence is
for ever within the circle; only because Death so largely comforts these
poor orphans of civilisation. To my duty it alone belongs, in such
respects, to tell you where disease ravages the people under your
charge, and wherefore; but while I lift the curtain to show you this--a
curtain which propriety might gladly leave unraised, you cannot but see
that side by side with pestilence there stalks a deadlier presence;
blighting the moral existence of a rising population; rendering their
hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous; and scattering,
while society averts her eyes, the retributive seeds of increase for
crime, turbulence, and pauperism.
While I refer to these painful topics, I may remind your Hon. Court of
the Report of your Committee on Health, in respect of the same heads in
my previous communication, and may strengthen myself with their
testimony: ‘We feel it due to Mr. Simon to add, from the result of
personal investigation, that the statements contained in his Report
under this subject, distressing as they are, are not exaggerated:’ and,
as regards whatever I may have recapitulated from that Report, I would
beg leave to add, that my experience during the past year has confirmed
the opinions which I then expressed; assuring me more and more, that the
correction of these crying evils must advance simultaneously with the
other labours of sanitary reform.
Recently, while having the honour to attend your Committee of Health in
their deliberations on your Act of Parliament, I have submitted to them,
as my view of what is desirable for legislation on the subject of my
present section, substantially the same suggestions as I formerly laid
before your Hon. Court. As their recommendations must shortly come
before you for consideration, and as I entertain the deepest conviction
that the subject is of paramount importance to the cause in which you
are interested, I have hoped you would excuse my recurrence to it, and
my brief repetition of those suggestions which the incompleteness of
your Act of Parliament has hitherto prevented your adopting.
1. There are within the City some blocks of houses which are, I fear,
irremediably bad and pestilential from such errors of construction as I
have already described; and which, further, are so dilapidated, as to
show at a glance their little pecuniary value. In many instances the
destruction of such a block of houses would confer a sensible advantage
on the population of a considerable district. Of this class I could
hardly give you a better illustration than would be seen in the
ground-plan of Seven-step alley. There are other instances (frequent in
Cripplegate) where the removal of a single house at the extremity of a
court or passage would make a material difference to the ventilation of
several houses, and to the health of a numerous population.
2. Again, in very many parts of the City, you find illustrations of a
constructional error to which I have adverted as in the highest degree
pernicious to health. You find a number of courts, probably with very
narrow inlets, diverging from the open street in such close succession,
that their backs adjoin with no intermediate space whatsoever.
Consequently, each row of houses has but a single row of windows, facing
into the confined court; and thus there is no possibility of
ventilation, either through the court generally, or through the houses
which compose it. In the Out-Wards of Cripplegate, Farringdon, and
Bishopsgate, examples of this arrangement are both most numerous, and I
believe, most removable: but they may likewise be found in considerable
numbers in the In-Wards of the City; _e.g._, in the neighbourhood of
Printing-house-square, of Great Bell-alley, of Leadenhall-street, of
Aldgate, of Skinner-street, and of St. Martin’s-le-Grand.
In many of these cases, if the management of the property were under a
single control, it is possible that effectual relief might be given, by
converting any two rows of houses which are back to back, each having
windows only on one side, into a single row of houses, with doors and
windows both before and behind: and if changes of this nature were
accompanied by the removal of an occasional house, or other impediment
to the circulation of air, I would guarantee to your Hon. Court that the
next year’s register would show a very large diminution in the local
amount of preventable sickness and mortality.