Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How Filthy Were the Victorians?

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

They say people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. The Victorians might have done well to live by that rule.For all of the dirt that the Victorians threw at other eras, suggesting that all those who came before them were filthy, they weren't that clean themselves.Lee Jackson joins Kate for this final episode of our filthy series to talk toilets and more. Lee is the author of ‘Dirty Old London’, ‘Palaces of Pleasure’ and ‘Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens's London’This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You're listening to Bertwetheets, the podcast that likes to roll its sleeves up and root around in the pants of history. But before we can do that, I do have to give you the fair do's warning. What is a fair do's warning? Well, it's like fair do's.

We did tell you, we did warn you, fair dinkum, fair dues. And here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way covering arranged adults subjects. Beard Adult 2. Let's crack on. 1851 in Hyde Park, London. Every day for five months, over 40,000 visitors rolled in to attend the Great Exhibition, taking in the massive glass and iron crystal palace before its relocation to South London. The visitors, for just one shilling in many cases, was spoiled for choice. They could see the world's largest diamond. They could witness steam engines,

hydraulic presses, and early fax machines. They could lay their eyes from private. from all around the world, like sugarcane from the Caribbean, and fun inventions like the gun umbrella and an ice cream freezer. But one of the most exciting things that people were cramming in to see was the new public toilets. Well, I guess it's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? But these were the first public flushing toilets. Ooh, fancy.

And that seems like a huge step forward for cleanliness, right? But just what the fuck were they doing before that? Well, I am ready to find out if you are. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. In many ways, the Victorian shaped the world that we live in today. This month, we've been digging through the filth of history, and we've found that a lot of people who we were told,

mainly by the Victorians, were dirty, was simply not as filthy as they have been made out to be. But what about the Victorians? Oh, they love to tell you that the medieval people were dirty. They love to slag off the Egyptians. They even had a pop at ancient Rome. But just how clean were they? Huh?

Today I'm joined by Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London, and he is going to tell us just how dirty the Victorians really were. Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Lee Jackson. How are you doing? Oh, I'm feeling okay. Thank you.

A bit anxious about where this is going to go, this conversation. No. No, we're here to talk about the dirty Victorian. And this is so in your wheelhouse. You've written lots of books, but you are the author of Dirty Old London. That is true, yes. Yes. So if we're talking dirty, grimy, mucky Victorians, I think you are the man to come to.

I'll tell you that as a compliment. Yeah. The Victorian, I'm fascinated by them. They're such a strange, weird bunch of people because they existed at this really bizarre time in history, the industrial revolution, like at the start of the industrial revolution, like they didn't have cars, they didn't have phones. And then by the end of it, phones, phones, cars, cinema, all of this stuff. It's, it, the world changed so much. And presumably hygiene changed as well. Yeah, I mean, certainly the Victorians were very keen on sort of,

you know, highlighting their sanitary achievements. You know, we always think of Joseph Basilgett, the great engineer who built this sort of vast sewer network in mid-Victorian, London, which you know, we still kind of rely on today. The idea of things being sanitary. That's something that comes in in the Victorian area. They don't call it hygiene, but they call it sanitary and sanitation. And the sanitary question, as it became known in the 1840s. And it's kind of, the way to think of what I always think is, you know, how we think about sort of green issues today.

You know, over the last 30, 40 years, the question is something green or not? You know, is it is it environmentally friendly or not? is something that we might disagree on the details. And some people are, you know, green, rubber. But we all understand the concept. It's kind of embedded itself in daily life. And you get them in the Victorian period. The question is something sanitary or not.

Is exactly the same sort of overall concept, I think? And you get that from about the 1840s onwards. The Victorians, they exist in two states in the public imagination today. One way they are super clean. They have got new sewage systems. It's the birth of the modern world. and soap and beauty products and all this. And then on the other side to this,

they are filthy living in slums and squalid and awful and everyone is in hovels. It was very much two worlds. Yeah. And I think we also have to be a bit careful, obviously, about sort of just seeing everything in black and white. There's a whole grade of Victorian people, right? So from people absolutely, you know, desperate living on the streets,

to poor workers who, you know, perhaps rent a single room, to people who might manage a couple of rooms, to people who could perhaps, you know, rent a small, like, terraced house in, like, Walthamstow or the East End or somewhere. And, you know, you can build up the scale, right up the scale to people to afford a mansion in Mayfair. So there isn't one unique sort of Victorian experience. One thing that is very different from us is that they were lacking, certainly most of the Victorian period, and arguably all, they were lacking the sort of scientific knowledge we have a bacteria. Right.

They were lacking some of the sort of basic understanding we have of germs. Germ theory, yes, you know, it's a bit, it's a victim. Victorian discovery in a way, but it's not one that's widely accepted or understood throughout much of the 19th century, even towards the end of the century. So, you know, the famous example I always think of is that when the Victoria's introduced public toilets, which a bit my particular obsession, to have a wash basin was seen as additional luxury if you're willing to pay an extra penny. So you have toilets for the poor without the wash basins and toiletries. And because they weren't thinking in bacterial terms or just literally, well,

it's quite nice to have, you know, wash your hands afterwards, isn't it? but so what sort of thing. You know, the poor or dirty anyway. What terms were they speaking of them? Because this is fascinating. So germ theory, so tell us a bit about what that came in, but obviously they didn't discover germs, then everyone got that memo.

How did they understand dirt contagion disease? I mean, there isn't, again, this is sometimes a mystery of 70 thing. There isn't an absolute shared understanding that's there, I think, at the start of the 90th century. but the thing that happens, I mean the key event, certainly Victorian London is my sort of key area, but arguably nationally as well, cholera comes to Britain in 1831. It's for this sort of awful disease that's been travelling across Europe. You can sort of map its spread, the newspapers report, you know, now it's got to Moscow,

now it's got to the Baltic states and so on. And it was obvious it was going to then travel further west, and England, Britain, had lots of trade connections with the Baltic. So it's fairly clear cholera is going to get him. And it's not dissimilar to our recent experience with COVID in a way in that people are scared of what it, you know, it's potentially fatal within a day or two. Really that quick? Can be, yeah.

What kills you with colour is dehydration. And in an intense case, then if you don't have the rehydration assaults that we know to give it to give someone now, they can die within 24, 48 hours after the first saw. Wow. First visible symptoms. Obviously, you know, maybe brewing for a little bit before that. So cholera comes to the UK.

It's a bit like COVID. no one knows what it is. No one knows how to treat it. There's all sorts of weird experiments and, you know, all sorts of weird potions and pills are suggested in a lot of the sort of quack medicine, but literally no one knows how to treat it. And that's what gets the Victorians thinking about this big sanitary issue because, you know, thousands of people die, essentially. But the way it gets framed in the 18, 30s, what's cholera comes, is this notion of my asthma, which you may have heard of. It's like the idea that disease is in the end, in terms of a bad smell.

If you can smell something rotting, decaying, the sort of smell you might get rotten vegetables, rotten meat, or the smell you might get from sewers, then they think that actually is the smell that is the cause of disease. And that sort of myasmatic theory comes to predominate in the mid-century. And I think that holds true for much of the 90th century then.

And germ theory, yes, you know, you get the sort of discoveries in the 1880s and hints of it earlier on, but it doesn't really filter through to the general public until maybe the 1890s. The miasma theory, the bad smell theory, to defend them a little bit, it's not a million miles wider the mark. You can see the joined up thinking there. I mean, basically, you know, so London is a big example.

You know, we built this massive sewer network. The idea behind that was to get rid of the bad smells that were coming out of cesspools mainly to start with. And then when they emptied the cesspools and they all ended up flowing into the Thames. So to get rid of the stuff that was in the Thames. And it was the right answer for the wrong reason. that's the really intriguing thing. It was such a major development in, you know, how our cities are built and structured.

And for entirely the wrong reasons, you know, because it's actually waterborne bacteria that we should be watching for. But yeah, they kind of go together. So it wasn't, it wasn't ridiculous. And in fact, it was more to the point. It was even less than being ridiculous. It was very plausible to people. You know, people had grown up, for the most part in the 84,

they would have grown up with a cesspool in the back garden or under the house if they lived in like a crowded part of central London. And that would have been filled, that were fill up with domestic waste, shall we call it, over a period of months and then be emptied every six months, maybe every year even depending on the size of it. Oh, dear. Oh, no. And so people were kind of used to that, but they also began to think, well, you know, even in that age when there was more smell and the more room and more horrible smells about, they recognised what the smell of assessable was a horrible smell, right? And nobody actually

wanted to smell it. So to link that to the idea of health, public health, health sanitation was a really clever idea. One of most unfortunate things about the cesspools were that they were actually built to be porous so that the liquid would leak away into the soil. And the reason being, once you do that, the smell decreases and you get a more compact sludge that's easily scooped out by some poor man with a shovel, the night soil man, yeah. And of course, leaking out that liquid into the soil is exactly where waterborne bacteria can also stem from.

And of course, that's famously what John Snow found in Soho in the 1850s by mapping cholera cases. So, yes, Sestpals, not the best idea in a sense. But, you know, there's other issues with water closets as well, though, because, you know, now we flush all our waste, you know, into very serious treatment systems. Yeah, we don't even think about it, do it? I mean, the Victorians are basically just flushing it down the Thames and then later out to sea. And in the 1890s, then it was sort of treated waste and mislebe. It was all basically dumped pretty much opposite south end, if you know that area.

Oh dear. So, you know, what do you do with it? It's a really interesting thing. What do you do? How do you deal with waste? It's one of those big questions for a city. And if you look at the Victorians, I think it carries right through to us today. The history answer is you put it out of the way somewhere else.

You send it somewhere that isn't here. And we get it. We don't want to smell it. Just get it as far away from it as possible. And so, you know, today the thing is like electronic waste, right? We're dumping tons of electrical waste and such that, of massive heaps in Africa being scavenged by people living in what we would now see as kind of Victorian conditions, you know.

Or into, we're currently dumping raw sewage into public waterways. Oh yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that's the other thing. The dumping of sewage was one of the things that actually was cleaned up in quite well in the UK after, you know, from the Victorians almost, mainly down to the European Union. And once those protections were wiped out, then, yeah, it's just getting worse and worse. We're back to just chucking shit wherever we can put it. We're just back to chucking shit. But actually, like, I know that the issue of toilets is like it's innately comical because we can't stop laughing at things like that.

But it's so important to any kind of civilisation because that is key. And in this series about dirt and filth, how a large group of people are going to manage waste is absolutely central to it. And what I get the feeling of Victorian London is it expanded so rapidly, so significantly, that there was a sort of sense of like the infrastructure couldn't cope with it. So there's a sort of like how are we dealing with this? And that's just the cesspit system. Is that what they would call privies? They'd just be like an outhouse.

A privy just means I think essentially an outhouse of some kind of typically in your backyard. But if you were lived in somewhere like Soho, it would often be in like your basement because you'd have a backyard in some of the old townhouses or not much. The original cesspit would just be in a hole in the ground. and there you go essentially hole in ground you have a nice mahogany seat with a little hole in it

you know but it's a hole in the ground you have to squat over the hole you can have a seat you know I looked at I've been looking recently at the history of common garden

I found a sort of the auction details for building on I think Henrietta Street Common Garden so building up would have been built early Georgian period

maybe look up before and unusually the auction detail actually list the toilet as one of the effects that's going to be sold at the auction. And it's a magnificent affair. It's like mahogany panelled. It has some kind of tin, tin line dome over the roof. It looked like, I imagine like a little sort of Georgian temple or

something. Now, not many places were like that, I think, unless you're in a super rich, you know, but for most people, but it was just a little, it was a little shed in the garden with a hole in it. And the cesspool, yeah, it would be borous and a liquid seeped away, which meant less smell. No one knew about the consequences. And the night soil man would come around, often just once a year. Literally, these are some guys with a car and some shovels and some baskets, and they would get down to the business of emptying it. And they were called nights old men because night time was the time to do it when no one else is around, because no one else wanted to be near it when it was happening, essentially. I'll be back with Lee after this short break.

They were shared toilets. Sometimes I think about that of like what that would be like to, like, if you wake up in the middle of the night and you need to go, like, hopefully you can just like get out of bed, stumble across the hall and then you've got a space all to yourself. But in the 19th century and for all a history before that until we got private space, you'd be running outside or downstairs to a shared space in the cold. Certainly if you lived in any kind of tenements or flats or whatever of a working class kind in Central London, you'd be sharing. You know, you'd be sharing toilets.

Absolutely. I mean, again, I remember when you go about come and go on because I've been looking at it recently, but one of the courts, I sort of, you know, back streets sort of enclosed areas off, I think Bedfordbury, 70 residents. two toilets between them. So, you know, you can imagine how that gets, right? Oh, no. And of course, it makes people sick, doesn't it?

Because is that, I'm not an expert on cholera, but is that how cholera is transmitted? It's a waterborne infection, right? So as soon as you have contaminated water in any sense. Contaminated with shit. Yeah, with shit, essentially, yeah. Or, you know, I'm sure you could vomit into it too, you know, if you're in. Yes, okay. But basically, which are those would you pick?

Which would you pick? But yeah, no, it's quite. It's waterball connection, but contaminated with largely human excrement. Yeah. And it's a chaotic system. And, you know, the Thames is this sort of great barometer of what's happening. Even in the 1820s, before the coming of cholera, the decade before, it was getting filthy because the more than more people were connecting their cesspits, the sewers. Now, those sewers weren't the sewers that Basel of Dr.

built. They were ancient sewers that could be for anything, but were largely designed for rainwater. So actually what proceeds cholera is that dodgy builders are connecting houses, cesspools to the rainwater sewers so that they were lit so that instead of the liquid going to the ground, it will flow away nicely into the sewers. But no one designed those sewers for that purpose. And all those sewers end up flowing into the Thames. So it's just a mess, right? No one's planned it. It's all these kind of weird ad hoc erasure that you literally. actually have a house. If you're like a middle class person and you're renting a nice house, but they say, well, I don't like the smell of this cesspool. The builder would literally say,

if you're near any kind of sort of rainwater drain, I can do your pipe from that. And it was literally, there's literally one, these individual choices being made by people. And then, and this comes in with the beginning of the flush toilets. People get flush toilets, water's going into their cesspools. They're filling up. They're getting two full of water. More smelly. Builders say, how we can deal with that? Let's put under the pipe. And it's just chaos. It's just basically this sort of weird insanity. chaos happening across the city of like a million and a half people.

Absolutely stunk. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think obviously there's a lot of smell in Victorian London that we would not accept, but I mean, horses, you know, just horses, right, horses. I mean, the great one I always remember is that the

shopkeepers on Piccagillia, I think, like 1860s or 1870s, all their brass, you know, sort of brass finishes you get on Victorian shop fronts, the sort of little, it's all like a brass plaque underneath the window type thing. and brass physics, they were all quickly decaying because of the sheer amount of horse piss. No.

You know, we just take it for granted. You know, they took for granted to that there'd be quite a little horse stung and horse piss in the city. And that was like urban life. Strangely enough, like, the title of the book I wrote about on this some years ago is dirty old London. And it's actually a shortening of what the Victorians said because they often refer to London's, dear, dirty old London, as if it was like part of the joy and charm of being a city. that you have dirt. You know, dirt was kind of the quintessential thing

that you've seen in urban environment. They got most romantic about fog. I mean, fog, between people get very romantic about fog. And they love the idea of, you know, the sort of romantic atmosphere of fog.

Everything blurred, everything's smoky. Some people said it even purified your lungs. And okay, it turned all the buildings black and the trees. But, you know, but dear, dirty old under,

you see what referred to as that, little phrase comes with quite a few times in various bits of Victorian literature. And it's because, I think we have that as well, though, you know, the sort of gritty, the idea that,

this city has to be kind of gritty and dirty. Smok. And, you know, it's like there's something much more interesting about, say, 1970 is New York, but it was all like, you know. Yes, we do. You're absolutely right. Like, you know, something that's been sanitised. So we have this sort of dual feelings about sanitation and improvement actually as well.

Because I think we do see sort of dirt and filter sort of a part of urban life, as long as we don't, you know, catch a fatal disease from it. You know, that's the other question. But sometimes it did get too stinky even for them, because there was this issue that they referred to as the Great Stink coming out of the Thames at one point. Yeah, so this is what I've sort of incoherently rambled about, but basically you get people getting flush toilets. That goes into the cesspools.

The cesspools get too full. They connect the cesspools to existing sewers, which aren't really meant for human waste at that point. And that starts going into the Thames. And then you get this sanitary question of the 18. What are we going to do about all this? And one of the answers is, look, we need to shut down cesspools and build sewers. But the sewers, again, were all at that point just connecting to the Thames.

So in solving the problem by getting rid of the old cesspools, they just started redirecting everything into the sewers, which ended up in the Thames. So it's just this key to the fact that it's partly introduction of water closets, it's partly people thinking, oh, cesspools might not be a good idea, but then turning to sewers instead. I know and I really plan where all the sewers would go properly, so it all ends up in the Thames. And it's this so-called great stink.

There's been like 20 years of discussion before this. If you can imagine like HS2, you know, you know how long that has taken to sort of thing can plan about and it's still gone wrong. Well, that's kind of where the Victorians were with Sue was in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s. And it is this final, finals, it's a hot summer 1858. You can imagine, you know. How bad did the smell get? It just got overwhelming for members of Parliament because it was in the Thames. You know, this is always the great joke.

It was in the Thames. Parliament was next to the Thames. They were literally soaking their curtains with, like, disinfectants. a hope of getting rid of it. Oh, that is bad. They were dumping like, you know, ton blocks of chloride of lime into the river in the hope they could kind of disinfect the river. So, you know, it was bad.

That's not going to work. But I think what accounts of Victoria's who's often gloss over is, they had literally been 20, 30 years of discussion about this. And what the great steam was, it wasn't, it didn't alert people to the problem. They were well aware of the problem. But it just pushed them into paying for it. Because that's, of course, it's always the other. thing with sanitation, with any of these things.

It's like who pays for it and how much they wouldn't to stump up. And it wasn't, yeah. What would be now, you know, tens of millions and millions of pounds to build the new sewer network. And you've mentioned the name Basil Jett a couple of times, so we should give him a bit of a shout out. Who was Joseph Basiljad. Josie Basil Jets.

Joseph Basiljit was basically an engineer. I think, I hesitantly think he started out in railways. I'm fairly sure he had a sort of nervous breakdown after the railway boom of the 1840s where lots of stocks and shares sort of collapsed, but I hope I'm not thinking of someone else. Some all right into correctly. But he was an engineer. He was working for sort of sewers commissions that have been set up in the 1840s to like try and solve this question. And he was just a very good,

consistent, thorough engineer. He checked all these measurements. He was very good at making sure he got value for money that all the goods that we were supposed to be paying for came in. He tested the quality of all the concrete. He was just a very, very thorough man who kept track of this vast project, which, you know, it was on a scale kind of no one had ever attempted before. So he built, you know, he built this vast network of intercepting sewers going to east-west across London to stop all the filthy in the Thames, basically. If you can imagine London, everything goes towards the Valley of the Thames. So what he built was these fast intercepting series, it was running parallel with the Thames,

as it were, which was sweep all the rubbish eastwards. But of course, they also built the same time, the Thames Embankment, you know. So it's like, it was all massive construction project. Clever sausage. Yeah, no, he knew what he was doing. He did, didn't he? The other issue, if you're building or just dealing with a mass expanding city, is you've got sewage to have to deal with,

which very much an ad hoc basis until Mr. Basiljek got involved. The other thing you have to deal with is dead bodies. Like, what do you do with the dead when people, because they have to go somewhere? They have to, like, what are we doing with them? We burying them? Are we cremating them? What happens to them?

It's a real challenge. I mean, it's always no challenge in a big city. But the thing to remember about Victoria and lots of stages of London before hang is that it's growing, so it's growing at a rapid rate, right? So it starts at 1 million people at the start of the century, pushing 6 million by the end, obviously the boundaries expand massive as well. But it's growing at a rapid rate due to incomers, because actually people who dip there for a long time tend to die quite more quickly than people born in the countryside. It's got a high mortality rate. I mean, if you look at, even if you look at Soho, so Central London, Soho, in the 1890s, infant mortality, so children dying under one year old was something like one in six in central London in 1890. People are dying in droves because the city isn't healthy.

And part of that is contagious disease. A lot of it is poor living conditions. Some of it is poor nutrition. Yeah, there's all the reasons you might expect. So yeah, what do you do with that? Well, traditionally, you'd be buried in the parish church. So if you were a well-to-do person, space we're made in the churchyard and so on. But what happens is that a lot of the places that do exist are going and kind of getting over full.

All sorts of tricks are done to try and deal with it. In particular, you get sort of graveyards being topped up with Earth just to hide the fact that, you know, we can just get a couple more. So you think about, say, St. Anne Soho, I don't know that street. And the graveyard is substantially higher than the rest of the ground. And part of that is because it's built on a slight eminence, but also it's partly so we've got space. And you see that sort of St. Giles'ist Church as well. And they're above the road deliberately, but it's also because, yes, that gives you some more burial space, right? And because burial space was at a premium.

And so it depends, as with so many things in life, and so in 19th century London, the answer depends on how wealthy you are. So the solution that comes in the 1830s is the creation of what we would call the modern cemetery. So Kenzel Green is the first one, and not then in central London, but in the countryside, essentially, in when it's built in the early 1830s. 30s. And there's that famous run of of commercial cemeteries

which people call the Magnificent Seven, which is always very grand. And I won't be able to name. I'll struggle to name all of them now, but it's like Kensal Green, Highgate, Norwood, Nunhead, Avenue Park, Brompton, that's still only six.

I don't think anyone's going to pull you up on that. I'm very impressed you know six. Commercial cemeteries are built. And they're commercial, they're commercial ventures, right? They're not run by for the public good. They're literally property speculations where the company running it

and a manager, and they have to make money. But they create these park-like cemeteries on the model of the sort of pay all the shares in Paris and you'll pay your sum and you'll get a lovely plot and it'll be all in rustic and rural and there'll be trees and it'd be beautiful. So if you're reasonably well to do

from the 1830s, you have the answer finally. You can just go out of town, you've got these magnificent parks. If you're poor, it's much, much harder and what you actually get is a whole run of sort of burial speculators in central London but not of the sort of grand park variety. So the most famous one, I think, is Enon Chapel,

which was built just off the strand near Clare Market, that sort of area. And they built it as a chapel in theory for people to worship him. But it seems to be built largely as a speculation to bury people in the vaults. Because they had a big bolts underneath. You can bury people there. You know, got a coffin, stuff's coffin in the vaults. But after a few years, it's starting to smell quite badly. There was sort of odd insects buzzing around the chapel and all these things.

Oh, no. And also after a few years, they realized that they seemed to be. buried like at least like two or three thousand people here. And if you imagine a single building, how do you achieve that? The answer is you don't. So what they were doing is it turned out they were carting off the deceased at regular intervals and dumping them somewhere in the countryside. And you get all sorts of these weirdly mismanaged things.

Another one just off Rosemary Avenue, who's, oh, I shouldn't do my, whose name of Scopes speak. But again, it was, it was said that they were desidering recently buried bodies and burning of them. it was said, all sorts of quite gruesome stuff, right? And these were the sort of people who were just selling cheap funerals to the poor, but you couldn't guarantee that the body would be there for very long, if you can imagine. So that was that option.

And then what happens in the 1840s is there is this public outcry led by a doctor called Dr Walker or Graveyard Walker, as it became known, who gets obsessed with this notion that Graveyard is a part of the sanitary question. It's not unreasonable, actually. No, that's fair. You know, again, he thought it's due to miasma. He thought it was from the stench that was coming from these horribly managed graveyors and what have you. But yeah, he campaigned.

You know, he did letters. He did he did pamphlets. He did public meetings. He paid to close down Eonon Chapel and then held tours. And then held tours of the basement so people could see how bad it was. And it was just like, it was the full publicity campaign. And Dickens' Bleak House is sort of at the tail end of that. If you know the Grey Garden Bleak House, which is which was based on a very real one.

in Russell Court, just on Trul Lane. And so there's this big campaign. And yeah, it's actually one of the great successes in a way. The government, finally, after much debate, they thought to first of all about nationalizing undertaking so that the government were literally the person who beres you no matter what, but they couldn't get that through. But in the end, again, it's about finding the money.

They find money for local authorities to build cemeteries in the style of the grand commercial ones, which have been built 30 years ago for the rich. And so, you know, I think Islington's, Stankhamker Cemetery is the first one that's sort of out in northwest London. And yeah, so that's actually a real success. People say, look at this horror.

Can't we do something about it? The rich have been sorted with Kensal Greenwich. What could we do for the poor? And the government cops up and say, okay, we're going to lend money for local authorities to build proper cemeteries. And those are the local authority cemeteries. I'll be back with Lee after this short break. So if you're just an average Victorian, just

just trying to get by day to day and you've got like the great stink and cess pits and you know maybe somebody's thrown a body on your lawn because they ran out of space in the local cemetery I'm just trying to think how do you stay clean because being clean has always been important to people there's this myth that throughout history people were just disgusting and they were happy to be so but people were trying

to keep clean do you think that would have been an easy task in those circumstances? I mean again you know what is the average Victorian but it's no he wasn't and you know I think it was also, I think it's fair to say, yes, people want to be clean, but what they meant by clean, varied, right? That's very different. By what we might mean. So it genuinely was a novel idea in the mid-90th century, even to have a bath once a week was seen as kind of a, you know, a weird indulgence for.

So, I mean, you might have a bath once a week, maybe, but you didn't have to, you know, you just have a quick splash and you wash or whatever you were fine. But of course, you know, the big problem, if we can sort of, you know, assume that, again, let's assume that the sort of middle class and the ridge could always find water. They could always get the servants to heat them up hot water. A lot of, a lot of sort of the soaps, the things that people would use in the early half of the century were not mass produced. They would be sort of chemical type things you get from your, including the local farms. Your servants would mix them together in the house according to your liking. And then during the 90th century, you get mass produced, a pear soap and all this sort of thing. But if you're rich or middle class,

and you'll find a way through because you have hot water and you have water. That's the other thing as well, right? It will always give a take be there. I'm going to do a horrible thing and just adding a caveat to that though. Water supplies in London in the 90th century were not constant. So if you were wealthy,

you had a big system in your house to store it. So even if you're well to do, you wouldn't have constant running water. You would have to fill up your system when the water supply was turned on by the water company. So nevertheless, if you're in a decent size, take you have a decent-sized system, you'd have your giant tank somewhere and you restore that water. If you were poor, well, first of all, first of all, there's no way you'd have any space for your own water system.

How's that going to happen? You don't have money to heat up water anyway. That's just, you know, there's just very unlikely, not much anyway. I've said enough for bathing purpose. The last thing you want to use it for. You don't have access necessarily to that clean water because it depends what your source is. If it's a well, there's still quite a lot of wells in the 90th century, then maybe they have been polluted by, you know, local sanitary or in sanitary arrangements rather.

If you look here, you have access to a standpipe run by one of the water companies. Then most sort of, like, I'll talk about that sort of courtyard before. You might have like 70 people and two toilets. Well, they probably also had a standpipe. But that would be one standpipe for those 70 people. And it wouldn't be turned on all the time. Again, we'll say stamp, it's the same thing. It was not turned on all the time because the water companies couldn't keep that up.

So it was only a certain number of hours, set hours per week. a man would literally come along with a key, open it. And there would be queues with people. They'd be pale and bucket they could load their hands on. And sometimes there were fights. There were literal fights because people were getting to, you know, because imagine them to, you know, wait, queue for water. And someone says, well, you're actually, I've got two babies at home.

And I need, you know. Screw you, bitch. No, I'm. You're there. You're there already. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's so hard to sort of, I mean, it's so hard for us here and now. not half of many people living in different parts of the world at the moment. Imagine this, right?

This is the conditions that exist in many cities all over the world, right? But for us now, it's quite a hard-sy vision. That's what London was like, 150, 200 years ago. What about public hijinks? I'm just because I'm up in Yorkshire, and we've got the Harrogate Turkish baths, and I'm pretty sure they were built in the 19th century. I know we've got Armley Baths just knew where I am,

and that was built in the 19th century. So there must have been this sort of like initiative to create health spaces for people. Was there anything like that in London? Absolutely. No, I mean, public baths are, again, one of the sort of responses to the sanitary question in the 1840s. And they first begin to appear basically in sort of late 1840s in London. Certainly, I think I have that day, right.

And again, it was this idea that the government would lend somebody to local authority and that would give them chance to build a bath. And what's interesting about them is that they were, you know, an opportunity to clean. And they always went with, a laundry. So basically, typically, it would often be the men who went it to bathe because they were working hard manual labour and getting particularly filthy. The women under the hand, look at them. Mainly just goes to the laundry and do it. Thank you for that.

But the interesting thing about public bass is that, you know, and we all think, we can all think like swim bass and maybe we know a Victorian public bath still. You know, some of them still just about survive. Originally they were seen exclusively as places for people to sort of wash themselves communally, basically. So, you know, they would generally be divided on sort of a slight class ground so that you could pay a slightly more expensive version. If you were some middle class and if you're lower middle class, and if you were, you know, poor, you're going to the slightly cheaper bathroom.

But interesting, what happens to them over the century is, although they still, or so they're gender segregated for starts, right? You don't have men and women in the same core. They become more fun, actually. And by the end of the 19th century, you can see pictures of Victorian bass with lights. sort of slides and sort of almost like log bloom type things where people will launch themselves into the swimming pool. Now, I think it was meant to promote like, you know, learning how to dive, but you just can see people just having fun with this stuff. And they become more like

the modern swimming bass. So the original Victorian bass are literally more like a sort of plunge pool, like you just, you know, you wash about and then this would, you know, it would be fun. But by the end of the nice thing, you know, they become more like swimming bass for actual swimming in and just having funnier as well, they get deeper. So yeah, again, public bass is one of those great things. But women didn't use them that much actually. I think the stats show certainly to start off. I think there were issues with sort of modesty in quotes and shame, but also just they didn't have the time.

I don't have the time to be lounging around on a high diving board. Thank you very much. I wonder how clean that water was, though. Because we were talking to Alexander Meddings about ancient Rome and who's saying that despite the fact that they had bathhouses everywhere, they didn't have a system for changing the water. water. So it was the same water. I think they did, they did change the water,

but I think probably not with the consistency or the chemical sort of thoroughness that we would do today. And certainly there were massive outbreaks to say eye infections in late 19th century London, especially when children have to start going to school. So sort of schools act or sends of school, certainly by the 1890s, you get under 10s are all having to go to school.

and yeah and there's like massive outbreaks of why have versions whenever they go to a public bus because no one's watching that and you do get I mean maybe this has existed all throughout history

maybe it has but a moralisation around dirt that being dirty is somehow immoral that only and that being cleanliness is next to godliness and that seems to be a very Victorian thing as well

I mean it's certainly a sort of high I'll say high Victorian I mean where I've seen that some instances of that were more in the 1850s 8060s when public bass were coming in. I haven't seen it so much in the sort of late Victorian municipal sort of public bass of the sort we know today, which not say it wasn't there.

But yeah, there's always been that sort of, I think Wesley or someone who's a methodist really sort of pushed that early on at the sort of turn of the 19th century. But again, I think we've got to be a bit careful. I always feel a bit careful about the Victorians of framing them as like this archetypally religious Bible bashing, you know, sort of because, There was that section of Victorian society, but there was also another section who just laughed at that. I thought it was just absolutely ridiculous. So I think we have to be a little cautious about sort of tarring them with that brush.

Having said that, I do think the sort of the whole sanitary sort of question and this idea that you could remake London by building these new sewers wholesale. And that, you know, the idea that's sort of the march of science and statistics and engineering and investigation could sort of, clean up the city in a sanitary fashion, I think that does carry over into some of those who are moral campaigners who see that, well, here's a model in a way, that something can be done. If you look at the way we get dealing with cholera, why can't we apply that to sex workers or vener or disease, whatever? And it creates this sort of parallel there. I think that's there for a lot of the century. And it's funny that like looking back at some of the history, like obviously they didn't know what we know, but it is very easy to sort of laugh at them.

There seems to have been, like, resistance in some places for some of these measures. Like Florence Nightingale is a great example. When she turned up and she went, look, I think, I think maybe we should wash our hands. There was like a reaction from the doctors of like, I very much do not think we should be doing that. And now to us, that just sounds completely bonkers. Yeah, but again, it's like, as you say, it's lack of knowledge. And, you know, we're grounded things on this sort of notion of germ theory and things you can see into a microscope and scientific explanations. Victoria's had microscopes, but they don't get to germ theory until really to the very end of the century.

So you don't think you can really blame them for that. I think Florence Nightingale, though, was also a measmatist. I think she wasn't. I may be wrong here. But I think she was, but like most Victorians in the mid-90th century. So if you pressed her on the cause of disease, I think she would. have said it's the smell. She probably would have done, wouldn't she?

Artley, you've been so much fun to talk to. Thank you so much for dropping by. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Best place to have a quick look is my ancient website, Victorian London.org. And that's got links to my books, but it also has a vast encyclopedia of Victorian primary sources you can look around in for free. So there's a lot there.

Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much. You've been marvellous. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Lee for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is. You get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got a special Valentine's Day treat for you because what could be more romantic than a deep dive into the worst breakups of all time?

And if you would like us to explore a subject, if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.