The bowels of society, 1832

What's beneath the glittering splendour? Same old story.

A quick bit of news: from March 22nd, I’ll be alternating weeks here with a wonderful new writer joining me in the fold! More on that soon… plus see below for a special offer on my latest book.

Historians recognise seven cholera pandemics over the last two centuries alone. This is a disease which raged across the globe, caused by water or food contaminated with Vibro cholerae bacteria. The story of how John Snow identified its epidemiology from plotting cases in Soho, London in the 1850s is famous, and indeed I’ve written about it before:

[History by Numbers] The ghost map

And lest we think of this disease as something of the past, the seventh of those pandemics has been persisting for the last 60 years (although the worst of it abated in the 1970s).

This week we’re going back to the second of those pandemics (Snow was around for the third) – as with the first, it was known to have spread in all directions from India, first identified around 1826. By 1831, it had hit Russia in particular, killing at least 100,000 people there, and soon the rest of Europe was nervously watching its relentless march (attributed mainly in this era to ‘miasma’ or ‘bad air’).

And so we return to Charles Greville, ‘the Gruncher’ we met two weeks ago, whose diaries spanned almost five decades of the 19th century, filled with acerbic comments on the great names of the day, from the monarchs he served under to the Duke of Wellington and many others.

How can anyone like such a life? 1838

Greville, as we saw, was born into a high-ranking, well-connected family and we might not expect him to have been particularly aware of the privations of people at the other end of the social spectrum. However…

On looking through his diaries, I was particularly struck by his notes on the spread of cholera, and how it affected people from all walks of life (let alone the resonances with our modern experiences of Covid). So without further ado, here’s a brief compilation showing a very different side to the man Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli angrily described as full of “offended self love” and as a “clumsy, wordy writer”. (For balance, Greville’s friend the poet and playwright Sir Henry Taylor said Greville was “always most a friend when friendship was most needed”.) Greville certainly writes from the perspective of a frustrated civil servant, and is irritated by the ‘prejudices’ of the masses – but he is also keenly aware of their suffering.

I’m compiling a new, annotated selection of Greville’s diaries. Paid subscribers to Histories will have access to an ebook version in the ebook library here, and anyone can pre-order the printed book here for half price! (£14.99/$18.99 reduced to £7.50/c.$9.50)

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In late 1831, Greville’s antennae twitched at reports from Sunderland in north-east England, where cholera had arrived with passengers travelling from the Baltic, and he gives us a sharp portrait of the “wretchedness” suffered by the poor…

14th November 1831

For the last two or three days the reports from Sunderland about the cholera have been of a doubtful character. The disease makes so little progress that the doctors begin again to doubt whether it is the Indian cholera, and the merchants, shipowners, and inhabitants, who suffer from the restraints imposed upon an infected place, are loudly complaining of the measures which have been adopted, and strenuously insisting that their town is in a more healthy state than usual, and that the disease is no more than what it always is visited with every year at this season. In the meantime all preparations are going on in London, just as if the disorder was actually on its way to the metropolis…

The Board¹ has been diligently employed in drawing up suggestions and instructions to local boards and parochial authorities… There is no lack of money or labour for this end, and one great good will be accomplished let what will happen, for much of the filth and misery of the town will be brought to light, and the condition of the poorer and more wretched of the inhabitants can hardly fail to be ameliorated.

The reports from Sunderland exhibit a state of human misery, and necessarily of moral degradation, such as I hardly ever heard of, and it is no wonder, when a great part of the community is plunged into such a condition (and we may fairly suppose that there is a gradually mounting scale, with every degree of wretchedness up to the wealth and splendour which glitter on the surface of society), that there should be so many who are ripe for any desperate scheme of revolution. At Sunderland they say there are houses with 150 inmates, who are huddled five and six in a bed. They are in the lowest state of poverty. The sick in these receptacles are attended by an apothecary’s boy, who brings them (or I suppose tosses them) medicines without distinction or enquiry.

A few months later, cholera was much closer to home for London-based Greville.

14th February 1832

In the meantime the cholera has made its appearance in London, at Rotherhithe, Limehouse, and in a ship off Greenwich—in all seven cases. These are amongst the lowest and most wretched classes, chiefly Irish, and a more lamentable exhibition of human misery than that given by the medical men who called at the Council Office yesterday I never heard. They are in the most abject state of poverty, without beds to lie upon. The men live by casual labour, are employed by the hour, and often get no more than four or five hours’ employment in the course of the week. They are huddled and crowded together by families in the same room, not as permanent lodgers, but procuring a temporary shelter; in short, in the most abject state of physical privation and moral degradation that can be imagined… We have sent down members of the Board of Health, to make preparations and organise boards; but, if the disease really spreads, no human power can arrest its progress through such an Augean stable.

1st April

…what has happened here proves that ‘the people’ of this enlightened, reading, thinking, reforming nation are not a whit less barbarous than the serfs in Russia, for precisely the same prejudices have been shown here that were found at St Petersburg and at Berlin. The disease has undoubtedly appeared (hitherto) in this country in a milder shape than elsewhere, but the alarm at its name was so great that the Government could do no otherwise than take such precautions and means of safety as appeared best to avert the danger or mitigate its consequences. Here it came, and the immediate effect was a great inconvenience to trade and commerce, owing to restrictions, both those imposed by foreigners generally on this country and those we imposed ourselves between the healthy and unhealthy places. This begot complaints and disputes, and professional prejudices and jealousies urged a host of combatants into the field, to fight about the existence or non-existence of cholera, its contagiousness, and any collateral question.

The disposition of the public was (and is) to believe that the whole thing was a humbug, and accordingly plenty of people were found to write in that sense, and the press lent itself to propagate the same idea. The disease, however, kept creeping on…

In this town the mob has taken the part of the anti-cholerites, and the most disgraceful scenes have occurred. The other day a Mr. Pope, head of the hospital in Marylebone (Cholera Hospital) came to the Council Office to complain that a patient who was being removed with his own consent had been taken out of his chair by the mob and carried back, the chair broken, and the bearers and surgeon hardly escaping with their lives. Furious contests have taken place about the burials, it having been recommended that bodies should be burned directly after death, and the most violent prejudice opposing itself to this recommendation; in short, there is no end to the scenes of uproar, violence, and brutal ignorance that have gone on, and this on the part of the lower orders, for whose especial benefit all the precautions are taken, and for whose relief large sums have been raised and all the resources of charity called into activity in every part of the town.

The awful thing is the vast extent of misery and distress which prevails, and the evidence of the rotten foundation on which the whole fabric of this gorgeous society rests, for I call that rotten which exhibits thousands upon thousands of human beings reduced to the lowest stage of moral and physical degradation, with no more of the necessaries of life than serve to keep body and soul together, whole classes of artisans without the means of subsistence… Is it possible for any country to be considered in a healthy condition when there is no such thing as a general diffusion of the comforts of life (varying of course with every variety of circumstance which can affect the prosperity of individuals or of classes), but when the extremes prevail of the most unbounded luxury and enjoyment and the most dreadful privation and suffering?

To imagine a state of society in which everybody should be well off, or even tolerably well off, would be a mere vision, as long as there is a preponderance of vice and folly in the world…

12th July

The cholera is here, and diffuses a certain degree of alarm. Some servants of people well known have died, and that frightens all other servants out of their wits, and they frighten their masters; the death of any one person they are acquainted with terrifies people much more than that of twenty of whom they knew nothing. As long as they read daily returns of a parcel of deaths here and there of A, B, and C they do not mind, but when they hear that Lady such a one’s nurse or Sir somebody’s footman is dead, they fancy they see the disease actually at their own door.

25th July

Nothing of moment has occurred lately; the dread of cholera absorbs everybody. Mrs. Smith, young and beautiful, was dressed to go to church on Sunday morning, when she was seized with the disorder, never had a chance of rallying, and died at eleven at night. This event, shocking enough in itself from its suddenness and the youth and beauty of the person, has created a terrible alarm; many people have taken flight, and others are suspended between their hopes of safety in country air and their dread of being removed from metropolitan aid. The disease spreads gradually in all directions in town and country, but without appearing like an epidemic; it is scattered and uncertain; it brings to light horrible distress. We, who live on the smooth and plausible surface, know little of the frightful appearance of the bowels of society.

In the end, London got off comparatively lightly, with around 6,500 lives lost to this round of the disease (less than half the body count from the third pandemic). Paris lost 20,000. Meanwhile the disease travelled across the Atlantic, flaring up in New York, Washington and Detroit, as well as across Canada.

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I’m compiling a new, annotated selection of Greville’s diaries. Paid subscribers to Histories will have access to an ebook version in the ebook library here, and anyone can pre-order the printed book here for half price! (£14.99/$18.99 reduced to £7.50/c.$9.50)

1. There were regional Boards of Improvement, succeeded in 1848 by public health boards.