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Posts Tagged ‘Victorian London’

Privies and Water Closets by David J. Eveleigh: A Review

Posted in Georgian Life, jane austen, Jane Austen's World, Regency Customs, Regency Life, Regency Period, Regency society, Regency style, Regency World, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 3, 2010| 12 Comments »

I have reviewed several Shire Library books this past year and have yet to be disappointed. Case in point, Privies and Water Closets by David J. Eveleigh, an excellent small book on the history of fixed and portable sanitation and waste management. I have discovered that this topic is of everlasting curiosity and many of my readers have asked questions similar to the following: How well  did our ancestors manage without indoor bathrooms or running water? This book largely answers the question.

Starting with the 17th and 18th centuries, Mr. Everleigh traces the history of sanitation and the problems our ancestors had in handling waste sewage. While the topic may not seem glamorous, it is hugely fascinating, for sanitation management was intricately connected to the safety of a community’s water supply and the populace’s overall health and well-being. He classified the earliest sanitation methods as either portable or fixed.

Portable Solutions

Chamber pots were the easiest method of sanitation. Placed under beds, or a commode or closet stool, the contents could be easily emptied into a covered slop pail and carried outside. In the 17th and 18th century small rooms or closets were introduced that adjoined the bedrooms. These areas were outfitted with a comfortable commode, under which a pan would be placed.

16th century water closet

The wealthy did not handle the chamber pots, leaving the servants to clean up after them.  Chamber pots were not always so well situated, as the image below shows (p. 8).

L'apres Dinee des Anglais

English gentlemen, known for their prodigious drinking habits, were wont to relieve themselves where they were – in the dining room, for instance, or in a common room of a public inn – where they did not always aim straight and true (as the young man at left), much to the chagrin and disbelief of French travelers, some of whom wrote about this unsanitary habit.

Fixed Solutions

The privy was a fixed out house (or necessary house or house of office), with no water supply or drain and usually located some distance away from the house. A fixed wooden seat with a rounded hole was placed directly over the cesspit or “void.” Occasionally privies were attached to the side of a building, projecting out from a top floor, or reached through on outdoor entry on the ground floor of a service wing. More often than not they were placed at some distance from the main house at the far end of a garden or yard, where its contents could be used to “enrich” flower and vegetable beds.

Earth closet contents were put on the garden, Chawton Cottage. Photo courtesy Tony Grant**

In cities, neighboring privies were placed side by side in yards and drained into a common cesspool located under an alley that ran between the row of cottages or townhouses. In rich to middle class households, nightsoilmen would be paid to cart the waste away when the household was sleeping. This service was quite expensive, and quite often neglected in poorer districts where the lower classes could not (and landlords would not) hire these men until the cesspools were filled to overflowing.

A woman obtains water from a well situated near garbage cans and outdoor privies, which can be seen through the opening in the wall. (Image taken in 1931!)***

Lack of sanitation led to diseases like typhoid, dysentery, and cholera. It was common in the slum districts for cess pools to be left unlined or partially finished, allowing liquid sewage to seep into and contaminate a nearby well, cistern, or other common form of water supply. In cities the public privy was often the only “necessary” available and was shared by a number of households, sometimes as many as sixty-five. The crowding and lack of maintenance and emptying of wastes led to disease and death.

Alley with open sewer drain and privies for the surrounding houses

In Privies and Waterclosets, Mr. Eveleigh traces the improvements in street sewers, indoor plumbing and running water, and sanitary habits throughout the nineteenth century, especially after the second great cholera epidemic in Bermondsey, London in 1849, which killed 13,000 and was the result of water contaminated by raw sewage.

While the book consists of only 64 pages, authors of historical novels will find it a fascinating and welcome addition to their research library. I give this book three out of three Regency fans.

Pages: 64
Published: 2008, Shire Library 479, Shire Publications, UK
150mm x 210mm, soft cover, indexed, new
ISBN 978-0-7478-0702-5

Additional links:

*Image of water closet: Abertillery and District Museum

**Image of Chawton Cottage garden, Tony Grant, London Calling – Personal Hygiene in Jane Austen’s Day

***Image of woman at well, North East Midland Photographic Record, The University of Nottingham, 1931 (This is a correction.)

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The Labor of Street Orderlies in 19th C. London

Posted in jane austen, Victorian Era, Working class, tagged , , , , , on September 27, 2009| 3 Comments »

When horses drew every imaginable wagon in London, crossing sweepers were a common sight. In some areas of town they were regarded a nuisance, for often young boys would pester a pedestrian and sweep a clear path whether that person wanted their help or not. The practice of using crossing sweepers to clean the streets of horse manure, dust, and clinging mud lasted into the early 20th century. In the mid-19th century, Henry Mayhew chronicled the lives of working people in a series of volumes entitled London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew described a system of cleaning streets, introduced by Charles Cochrane in 1843, that instituted a more orderly system than crossing sweepers, and in which former paupers were hired so that they could support themselves.

Crossing Sweepers, 1856

Crossing Sweepers, 1856

The first demonstration or display of the street orderly system took place in Regent street between the Quadrant and the Regent circus and in Oxford street between Vert street and Charles street The streets were thoroughly swept in the morning and then each man or boy provided with a hand broom and dust pan removed any dirt as soon as it was deposited The demonstration was pronounced highly successful and the system effective in the opinion of eighteen influential inhabitants of the locality who acted as a committee and who publicly and with the authority of their names testified their conviction that the most efficient means of keeping streets clean and more especially great thoroughfares was to prevent the accumulation of dirt by removing the manure within a few minutes after it has been deposited by the passing cattle the same having hitherto remained during several days. – London Labour and the London Poor, p. 259

street sweeper

The groups of orderlies not only swept the street and removed dirt in a particular area of London (500 linear yards of a busy street, 2,000 yards of a quieter section, and 9 men in a busy intersection, like Cheapside), but they also acted as “the watchman of house property shop goods, the guardian of reticule,s pocket books, purses and watch pockets, the experienced observer and detector of pickpockets … more, he is always at hand to render assistance to both equestrian and pedestrian.” The report concluded that the street-orderly system would keep the streets of London and Westminster clean in a most satisfactory way. In return, the street-orderlies would earn a wage of 12s. Although this was a lower living wage than other workmen earned, the money lifted them out of their lives of squalor.

The system did not entirely replace the crossing sweepers, many of whom were depicted in caricatures as hounding pedestrians for services rendered. Read my article on Crossing Sweepers at this link.

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