Dirty Old London by Lee Jackson

I love to read fiction from the Victorian time period.  In fact, Charles Dickens is one of my very favorite authors and I love the Bronte sisters and Oscar Wilde as well.  In light of this, it seemed like a natural fit for me to pick up Dirty Old London by Lee Jackson during my month of reading nonfiction.  This novel is all about how the Victorians dealt with various types of filth, and it paints quite a graphic picture of what is was like to live in London during this time period.

The chapters in this novel are arranged by types of filth, with topics ranging from garbage collection, to toilets, to cemeteries, to air pollution.  London at the beginning of the 1800s was a huge city without modern conveniences.  All travel was by horse.  There was no indoor plumbing.  There were no sewers.  There were no public restrooms.  Factories belched out huge quantities of soot into the air everyday.  Churchyard cemeteries were literally overflowing with corpses.  All this together created an intensely dirty and smelly environment. Jackson goes into detail on each of these topics, and more, to give readers a good idea of how unsanitary things were and how the Victorians worked to make improvements in these areas.

Indeed, Jackson shows that by the end of the time period, the Victorian had made some significant strides in public health.  Flush toilets were invented, an impressive sewer system was constructed under the streets of London, cemeteries were moved to large plots outside the city, public housing was being developed to alleviate the heinously filthy conditions of London's slums, and public restrooms were constructed in parks and other city spaces.  By the 1900s, conditions had definitely improved.  While the city was still far from being perfect in relation to filth management, the Victorian time period saw a number of innovations that made life a bit easier...and less disgusting.

One small criticism I had while reading this book was the amount of time spent discussing the governmental aspect of cleaning up. While I found the subject matter highly interesting, I still struggled to get through some of the chapters.  This was one of those books that I tended to fall asleep while reading, which is why it took me such a long time to finish.  Part of the issue was the endless political in-fighting that Jackson described.  Much like today, any innovation the government tried to put forward during this time period (especially one designed to help poor people) was challenged by self-interested conservatives.  It took forever to get anything done in service of public health, and describing all the various bills and committees that were formed and failed takes up a significant portion of the book.  I wish that a bit more focus had been placed on describing the actual living conditions and innovations of the time period, and less time on government troubles.  This isn't really Jackson's fault though, because history is history and he was just reporting the facts.  The facts, however, got pretty boring.  

All of this information makes perfect sense in hindsight, but I'd never thought about it before.  When I read a Victorian novel, I'm thinking about the fashion, the modesty and the manners.  I'm not thinking about how the characters were relieving themselves in a box in their basement that would have to be shoveled out later or how everyone would have been covered in a film of soot all the time.  This book, while boring at times,  was still fascinating, and will change the way I interpret the setting of books written during this period.  Sorry, Charles Dickens.  London in the 1800s just got a little less charming.