London 1800s what was it like

Several outbreaks of Cholera in the midth century, along with The Great Stink of , when the stench of the Thames caused Parliament to recess, brought a cry for action. Until it was widely thought that disease was spread through foul air or miasma. It seemed obvious to the Victorians, even the learned ones, that if it stinks, it must be causing disease. Henry Whitehead to prove that the disease was spread not through foul odors and bad air, but by contaminated water.

Cholera is spread simply by one human digesting the bacteria in the excrement of other infected humans. Snow and Whitehead solved this riddle not by direct study of the bacteria, but by spatially projecting pedestrian patterns of where residents got their drinking water.

Joseph Bazalgette By this method they were able to show that all the Cholera victims in the area drank from the same Broad Street pump. The well had been contaminated with raw sewage coming from the homes of Cholera sufferers. The pump handle was removed, and the epidemic ended. Sir Joseph Bazalgette , chief engineer of the new Metropolitan Board of Works , put into effect a plan that finally provided London with adequate sewers as part of the Victoria Embankment project completed in The Metropolitan Police, London's first police force, was created by Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel hence the name Peelers and, eventually, Bobbies in with headquarters in what would become known as Scotland Yard.

The old London watch system, in effect since Elizabethan times, was eventually abolished. The Victorian answer to dealing with the poor and indigent was the New Poor Law, enacted in Previously it had been the burden of the parishes to take care of the poor. Warren's Blacking Factory The new law required parishes to band together and create regional workhouses where aid could be applied for.

The workhouse was little more than a prison for the poor. Civil liberties were denied, families were separated, and human dignity was destroyed. The true poor often went to great lengths to avoid this relief. Charles Dickens, because of the childhood trauma caused by his father's imprisonment for debt and his consignment to Warren's Blacking Factory to help support his family, was a true champion to the poor.

He repeatedly pointed out the atrocities of the system through his novels. Journalist Henry Mayhew chronicled the plight of the London poor in articles originally written for the Morning Chronicle and later collected in London Labour and the London Poor With the turn of the century and Queen Victoria's death in the Victorian period came to a close.

Many of the ills of the 19th century were remedied through education, technology and social reform Throughout his work Charles Dickens relishes in the description of food and drink in such a way as to make the most meager meal seem a feast. From Pip and Joe comparing slices of bread in Great Expectations to the Ghost of Christmas Present's magnificent spread, Dickens celebrates the culinary delights of his day. There is much roast fowl and joint of mutton, plum pudding and boiled beef.

Drinking is ubiquitous in Dickens. From the peasants in Paris soaking up the spilled wine in the street in A Tale of Two Cities to Mr Micawber's famous punch, everyone seems to have a drink in their hand. This partly reflects the fact that, in Dickens' London, alcohol was safer to drink than the water.

Charles Dickens, by all indications, was a moderate drinker himself. While diligently pointing out the evils of overindulgence, he also had no patience with the Temperance Movement , which he lampooned in Pickwick Papers. Indeed Dickens had a falling out with his friend and illustrator George Cruikshank when Cruikshank, formerly a heavy drinker, became a zealous supporter of abstinence.

I am certain that if I had been at Mr Fezziwig's ball, I should have taken a little negus -- and possibly not a little beer -- and been none the worse for it, in heart or head. I am very sure that the working people of this country have not too many household enjoyments, and I could not, in my fancy or in actual deed, deprive them of this one when it is so innocently shared. Demoralisation and Total Abstinence An article written by Dickens and printed in the Examiner on October 27, , rebuking a call for total abstinence to combat drunkeness.

This means that there are links that take users to sites where products that we recommend are offered for sale. If purchases are made on these sites The Charles Dickens Page receives a small commission. Read this hilarious short sketch, Omnibuses , written by Dickens for the Morning Chronicle on September 26, It was later included in Sketches by Boz. Also read Henry Mayhew's interview with an omnibus driver.

Charles Dickens London. Oxford Street s. This film credit BFI made 33 years after Dickens' death still gives a good idea of what the London streets of Dickens' times would look like. Smithfield Market. But it was also conjured by Charles Dickens — his novel Our Mutual Friend —5 describes Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam on the moonlit Thames hooking in suicide victims and fishing through their pockets. As it happens, I myself live in Limehouse.

Wealthy widow Mary Emsley, 70, lived on the Grove Road, near Victoria Park, in a three-storey house with a garden big enough for pear trees. She was what we would today describe as a buy-to-let property investor. She owned a great number of houses, from Aldgate all the way out to the town of Barking. Many of these were unhappy dwellings; they were grotesquely overcrowded and overseen by a hardnosed landlady who was entirely unsympathetic towards those facing hardship.

Any tenant who was late delivering rent even by a few days — no matter how grievously ill or suddenly thrown out of work — could expect no grace. They would be promptly evicted.

Emsley thus acquired a fearsome reputation. Even though she employed rent collectors, she went about the poorest streets collecting some of the unpaid debts herself. Mary lived alone — her only child had died in infancy and her remaining family consisted of step-children, nieces and nephews.

Unlike her neighbours, Mary declined to employ either a maid or a cook. The neighbours would see her as the sun went down sitting at her window, gazing at the sunset. The old lady was known to never let anyone in after dark. Her head had been smashed in and her blood was all over the walls. In her hand was a roll of wallpaper. Different groups gathered in different areas.

The wealthiest of all sorts were to be found in detached villas in the leafy suburbs of Balham, Barnes, Hampstead, Highgate, Richmond and Sydenham.

The growth of urban transport , though not without its problems, facilitated the move to the suburbs, making the daily trip to work in the centre easier as the century progressed.

Indeed, from the second half of the century the growth of the metropolitan population was almost entirely confined to the outer suburbs. On the eastern side of the metropolis the first thirty years of the century saw great reception halls for international commerce - St Katherine's Dock, the East and West India Docks, the New Docks at Wapping and the Commercial Docks at Rotherhithe — consuming land adjacent to the Thames.

The docks created, in the process, a series of new communities to house the tens of thousands of people — dockers, chandlers, and sailors - needed to make them work.

But close by these elegant areas there were also appalling slums, notably the central "rookery" of St Giles where Charles Dickens went on patrol with Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Police. Giles was known to both its inhabitants and the police. The infrastructure of the metropolis creaked under the strain of expansion, especially in the first half of the century. Even as street lighting and macadam reached in to many of the less pleasant corners of the city, arrangements for the disposal of the detritus of urban life became more difficult.

The air became ever more polluted with the smuts and dank stinks of a coal fired world. London's famous fogs are mentioned in the Proceedings over ten times as often in the years after as they are in the preceding years.

Other types of pollution became equally overwhelming. The sewers and nightsoil men grew increasingly inadequate to the task of removing the tons of human faeces produced each day.

Even the bodies of the dead became a constant problem. The churchyards filled to overflowing, beyond the point where liberal doses of quicklime could speed the process of decay. Significant improvements came with the Metropolitan Board of Works established in , which embarked on a major programme of sewer construction and street and housing improvement schemes. Individual streets and other place names can be identified in trials by using the Personal Details search page or keyword searching.

London was the centre of what, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was hailed as "the workshop of the world". But London itself was not an industrial city; many of the manufacturing processes found in eighteenth-century London had moved to northern parts of the country where labour, land and raw materials were cheaper.

London was an administrative centre for both the nation and the empire as well as for banking and commerce, and its economic and social structure reflected this. The dockers and the growing number of clerks were an obvious aspect of the metropolitan economy. Less obvious were the tens of thousands of women who acted as domestic servants for the burgeoning middle class. According to the census of there were over , female domestic servants in London.