One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  The select committee on the Thames was due to report on its deliberations on 19 July. Disraeli had already told Queen Victoria on 8 July that the ‘Thames Purification Bill is drawn, & will be introduced probably in a week’.87 True to his word, he introduced the all-important amendment to the 1855 Metropolis Local Management Act on Thursday, 15 July. His plan was to propose a bill in principle, and not to let MPs get bogged down in detailed discussions of the various projects which it was the committee’s duty to compare and assess. He did so with a flourish, beginning by interrupting the business of the House of Commons to bring his bill:

  Sir, I took the liberty of moving that the orders of the day should be postponed in order that I might bring under the attention of the House a Bill the object of which is the purification of the river Thames. The condition of the waters of that river has fallen upon the inhabitants of this metropolis, generally speaking, as an unexpected calamity; but I believe there has always been an observant minority in the community which has expected the catastrophe that has recently occurred … Sir, all that they then predicted has been more than fulfilled. That noble river, so long the pride and joy of Englishmen, which has hitherto been associated with the noblest feats of our commerce and the most beautiful passages of our poetry, has really become a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors. The public health is at stake; … there is a pervading apprehension of pestilence in this great city; and I am sure I am only taking a step that will have been anticipated when I ask leave to introduce a Bill which will attempt – and I trust the attempt will be successful – to terminate a state of affairs so unsatisfactory and fraught with so much danger to the public health.88

  By ‘an observant minority’ Disraeli meant not only the newspapers but also experts including Bazalgette and the great scientist and discoverer of electromagnetism Michael Faraday, who had written to The Times on 9 July 1855 warning about the state of the Thames in that summer’s heat. Faraday wrote to the editor saying he had ‘traversed this day by steamboat the space between London and Hungerford bridges’ between 1.30 and 2 p.m., at low tide. He had been assailed by the foul smell and ‘opaque brown fluid’ of the river. The river ought not ‘to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer’; finally, ‘if we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness’.89 Punch had immediately followed up Faraday’s letter with a cartoon showing him on a boat, holding his nose with one hand and handing his card to a filthy Father Thames with the other.

  The evil had been unintentionally exacerbated by Edwin Chadwick’s mistaken notion in the 1840s that it was better to pour sewage into sewers which emptied into the Thames than to continue to fill – and overfill – the 200,000 cesspools which had accumulated in London.90 Water usage in London had doubled between 1850 and 1856, and by 1858 the city’s population had reached nearly 2.5 million.91 As the People’s Paper pointed out on 10 July 1858, the Parisian administration, faced with similar problems of removing sewage safely, wished to ‘suppress’ its present practice – emptying cesspools into carts to run on rails along the public streets – but was not inclined to follow London’s disastrous custom of ‘poisoning the sewers’ and consequently the Thames.92

  Disraeli continued, asking the question (already answered in his mind and that of the government) ‘Is this a local or a national business?’ In other words, who should pay? The answer was that London should pay. Then came the fact that though the Metropolitan Board of Works, operative since early 1856, had not been noticeably successful, it had been considering the subject over ‘a long period of time’, and should now be tasked with carrying forward the scheme to be adopted. The costs were estimated at £3 million, the term during which a special tax of not more than three pence in the pound would be levied was to be forty years, and the government would guarantee both capital and interest. The Board of Works was to be given ‘perfect freedom as regards the construction of the works’.93 As soon as Disraeli had put the motion, a speaker rose to make a point of order about the ‘rules of the House’; Palmerston came to Disraeli’s aid by proposing a solution to the point of order. Several speakers were determined to dig down to the details it was Disraeli’s intention to avoid. He wisely let them do so for a while. One speaker gave the house a history lesson about the unpopularity of special taxes among the populace, instancing a Hackney Coach Tax and a Coal Tax. A Mr John Locke declared that ‘the Bill shadowed forth by the Chancellor of the Exchequer was very much like the play of Hamlet, with the principal character omitted’. The house was still ‘in utter ignorance whether any plan had been suggested’; and what of the Metropolitan Board of Works? Did it deserve to be given carte blanche to manage the business, as Disraeli had announced? Finally: ‘What, then, was the meaning of the present Bill, which had been brought down to the House with such a great flourish. Nobody understood it. Her Majesty’s Government had not explained what was to be done. All they said was, “We will place unlimited confidence in a body who have hitherto done nothing.”’94

  This was a veritable hit, but Disraeli did not rise to it. Next, presumably to Disraeli’s consternation, though he did not express it, several members of the parliamentary committee on the Thames spoke up doubting the wisdom of handing over power to the board. The committee chairman, Kendall, said his members ‘had suggestions pouring in upon them from engineers, chemists, and all quarters in England, Ireland, and Scotland’, which they had not yet had time to digest fully. Sir Benjamin Hall went back in time to explain his own part in the deliberations of the new Metropolitan Board of Works in 1856; he had been blamed for bickering about Bazalgette’s plan then and causing delays over arguments about who should foot the bill for any such project.95 He announced that he thought intercepting sewers were a good idea, but not sufficient to solve the whole problem. A ‘much greater work must be undertaken’, one which should be financed by the whole country, namely the embankment of the Thames.96 Lord John Manners agreed with Disraeli, his friend and fellow Young Englander in their earlier days, that general principles must be agreed first, before the house adopted a particular plan. He supported the bill, assuring his colleagues that they would find it ‘carefully and skilfully framed’. Other members of the committee brought up the usefulness and cost of deodorising with lime. Colonel Sykes declared that ‘there have been so many Thames doctors, with their prescriptions, both in the House and out of the House’, that he had ‘hitherto abstained from increasing the list and offering [his] nostrum’. But now he must speak up in favour of the bill and the Bazalgette plan to combine drainage of the river with its embankment. He reminded the house that more than twenty years earlier the historical painter John Martin had suggested such a plan, but was ignored.97

  Having let them all have their say, Disraeli summed up in breezy, flattering fashion. He wished to congratulate ‘the inhabitants of the metropolis upon the manner in which, generally speaking, the proposition of the Government has been received’. (How did he know what ordinary Londoners thought? Those who wrote letters to the newspapers were often critical of the do-nothingism of parliament on the subject, and who knew what those who did not write letters thought?) As for the highly unpopular Board of Works, Disraeli took a risk and boldly declared that ‘one result of the Bill will be to convert’ the board into a ‘real corporation’. ‘I cannot doubt that a body of Englishmen, elected by a large and enlightened constituency, like the inhabitants of this great city, will do their duty, and that their conduct will entitle them to the confidence and respect of their fellow-citizens.’ No one should worry about the money involved, since the government was prepared to underwrite the expense and at the end of the operation they should all find themselves ‘entirely out of debt’. This calculation, ‘made by a person [unnamed] of the highest authority’, will ‘display the magic influence of compound interest when applied with prudence and discretion’.98 In other words, all w
ould be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, according to the finance minister (who never in his life got himself ‘entirely out of debt’ and who knew precious little about the workings of ‘compound interest’). But confidence was all. Disraeli was given leave to bring in his bill and it passed its first reading.

  After further debates and readings, the heat and dust settled, and Disraeli’s bill was passed by the end of the month with very little in the way of amendments offered by either house. The Illustrated London News celebrated on Saturday, 24 July, noting that the bill for the purification of the Thames had now gone through and the work was in the hands of the Metropolitan Board of Works, which, as it remarked, was not a popular body, being elected by vestries with their narrow local interests.99 The paper, though sceptical, realised that Disraeli had played a clever hand:

  When Mr Disraeli introduced [the bill], one suspected, the moment he began, that not much in the way of a measure was to be expected, for he spoke in his loftiest style, and all his opening sentences were downright blank verse, which was not exactly adapted to a bill which commits the metropolis hand and foot to Mr Thwaites and his concentrated essence of vestry board, with the dangerous addition of the command of three millions of money.100

  Nevertheless, the uneasiness felt at subsequent readings of the bill was quelled, according to the Illustrated London News, because people seemed to expect a mess but were ready to let the Metropolitan Board of Works take the responsibility – and blame – if the plan failed.

  Disraeli was therefore triumphant, the consensus being that his Thames Bill was the best piece of legislation of the parliamentary session. The newspapers continued to snipe at the Thames committee over the next weeks, with Punch naming a cod ‘select body of investigators’ on 17 July, among whom were Mr Crucible the chemist, Mr Meter, ‘engineer to the Economical Gas Company’, Mr Puddinghead, Lord Muggins, Professor Blowpipe, Mr Wiseacre, Mr Sump, and others.101 But the main thing was that something – at last – was being done.

  If there was an irony in Disraeli, with his extraordinarily chaotic personal finances, being nominally in charge of the nation’s Treasury, a parallel irony existed in the case of one of his shrewdest observers, the great philosopher-critic of capitalist economics, Karl Marx. On the day Disraeli introduced his Thames Bill, 15 July, Marx wrote the most miserable of many begging letters to his friend Engels in Manchester. Engels was in the habit of sending frequent £5 notes to London to keep the Marx family afloat while Marx spent his days in the reading room of the British Museum preparing his great work on capital and writing copious articles for German and American newspapers. On 29 March 1858 he thanked Engels for the latest £5 and talked of the arrangement to publish his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in instalments. Joking grimly, he told Engels that he had been ill and taking medicine for his liver, with many relapses ‘owing to prolonged work by night, and, by day, a multitude of petty annoyances RESULTING FROM THE ECONOMICAL CONDITIONS OF MY DOMESTICITY’.102

  On 15 July Marx had reached rock bottom. In a long letter at which he asked Engels ‘not to take fright’, since it was not intended as an appeal ‘to your already unduly overloaded exchequer’, he outlined the parlous state of his finances. He could not get on with the work of writing articles, from which he earned small amounts, because he was spending all his time ‘running around in fruitless attempts to raise money’. His wife Jenny was ill and a ‘nervous wreck’; the family doctor had advised her to go to the seaside to rest, but of course there was no money for that. He had borrowed from friends, from loan societies, from the newspapers he wrote for, yet he had ‘not a penny left over even for the most urgent day-to-day expenses’. Enclosing a statement of recent expenditure on rates, gas, baker, butcher, cheesemonger, coalman, and school fees and clothes for his three daughters, he declared that since 17 June there had been kein pfennig im Hause (‘not a penny in the house’); the current state of his indebtedness amounted to nearly £112, owed to the above-itemised creditors. In his desperation Marx toyed aloud with the idea of moving from north London to Whitechapel in the East End, where he might find a ‘working-class lodging’, but he could not bring himself to subject his wife and ‘growing girls’ to such privation. ‘i have now made a clean breast of it’, he told Engels, since ‘I must speak my mind to somebody’. He only asked for Engels’s advice on ‘what to do’. ‘I would not wish my worst enemy to have to wade through the quagmire in which I’ve been trapped for the past two months, fuming the while over the innumerable vexations that are ruining my intellect and destroying my capacity for work.’103

  So much for Marx’s home life during this hot summer. His true-hearted friend Engels replied the next day, offering £30 and suggesting Marx should raise the rest from London friends and the People’s Provident Assurance Society, an institution set up in 1853 on socialist principles.104 All the while Marx, always alert to the political situation in Britain and in the rest of Europe, and with a determination to reach back in history to define causes and their consequences, wrote his series of remarkably knowledgeable articles on politics and economics. He also wrote on popular topics of the day, such as the incarceration of Rosina Bulwer Lytton in Inverness Lodge, which he tackled only a week after his desperate letter to Engels. Despite his poor health and anxiety about money, he managed to write a number of newspaper articles in 1858 which contained detailed historical and statistical analyses for which a good deal of research in parliamentary reports (known as ‘Blue Books’) and scholarly works lodged in the library of the British Museum was required.

  Marx’s articles, though relatively brief, differed from the day-to-day accounts of public affairs in newspapers like The Times; they resembled rather the long scholarly analytical essays which appeared in the great quarterly reviews, the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and the Westminster Review. There was a scornful assessment of the career of ‘Mr Pam’ in February, when Palmerston lost office after appearing to cave in to French attempts to intervene in British justice over the plot to assassinate Napoleon III; a brief study of Disraeli’s budget in April (of which Marx approved); an analysis of Canning’s proclamation on Oudh in May; and an informed essay on ‘The Increase of Lunacy in Great Britain’ in August.105 Marx’s main concern was to write his great work on capital, if he could only regain good health and financial security. Since he lived quietly and did not move in London’s fashionable or literary circles, and since his articles were printed in foreign or out-of-the way newspapers, like the People’s Paper, which was in constant financial difficulty, Marx’s writings remained largely unknown to his British contemporaries. He followed with interest the careers of Dickens and Disraeli – he was an avid reader of Dickens’s novels – and after 1859 of Darwin, but none of them followed his.

  Rothschild enters the Commons at last

  During July 1858 Disraeli was polishing off many pieces of legislation, doing the work of two men while Lord Derby was incapacitated by gout in the early days of the month. Though the Era reported on Sunday, 4 July that the prime minister had recovered and was back in the House of Lords, Queen Victoria noted that Derby, who was invited to Buckingham Palace for dinner that day, looked ‘much pulled down’.106 He had rallied by the middle of the month, visiting Victoria and Albert at Osborne House, their residence on the Isle of Wight, when he ‘was in great force’ and telling jokes, ‘though still not quite free from the gout’.107 Various bills were reaching their last readings and amendments, including the India Bill, which was passed largely thanks to the excellent work of Lord Stanley. Disraeli had assured Derby on 17 June, when the latter was away from parliament because of his gout, that Stanley had ‘gained golden opinions’ in the House of Commons that day, from the opposition’s Lord John Russell, among others. Russell had praised his ‘fairness and candour, coupled with an evident determination to apply his high abilities to the consideration of this most important question’.108 By 8 July, thanks to Disraeli’s and Stanley’s combined eff
orts, the India Bill passed ‘amid general honour, & congratulations from all sides’, as Disraeli told the queen.109

  The Medical Act was less of a success. Carried through by Lord Cowper as a final effort to achieve some sort of medical reform after years of attempts to shift vested interests, and suffering from lack of vocal support from Derby or Disraeli, whose interests lay with India and the Thames, it passed after its third reading in the House of Commons on 9 July and a quick subsequent passage through the Lords. The act in its final form was much watered down from the revolutionary bill drafted by John Simon and supported by the universities and general practitioners, but even the conservative political influence of the Royal College of Physicians and Royal College of Surgeons could not halt the march of progress completely. At least the Medical Register was set up and measures were put in place to deter unqualified practitioners.110