Dan Snow's History Hit - Disease and the Victorians

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Dr Emma Liggins is an expert on Victorian Gothic literature. She joined me on the pod to examine how great female writers of the 19th century - such as Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontes - responded to the impact of fatal diseases on their home lives. How did their literary perspective influence their views on contagion and quarantining? We also discussed Emma's work on haunted houses, and how the nightmarish terrors of a deadly fever distorted the domestic space.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a treat I've got for you this time. We're talking about pandemic disease again. We're talking about pandemic disease and the Victorians. Dr Emma Liggins is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has spent her career studying how 19th century writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontes responded to their familiarity with pandemic disease. It would have been a part of their lives and it reflects in their writing. In fact, she believes that Victorian Gothic, this kind of spooky genre of writing, which turns the home into a place of nightmarish terror,

that is in part a response to the waves of disease these people would have been having to cope with. And it's a fascinating interview to make at this time with COVID still very much affecting communities all around the world. If you subscribe to History Hit TV, it's my new digital history channel. It's like Netflix for history. You can watch hundreds of hours of documentaries or listen to hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of these podcasts. All the back episodes are available there. Go to History Hit TV, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get your first month for free and the following month for just one

pound, euro or dollar dollar it's a pretty sweet deal so please go and check that out join the ever-growing army it's all going well history at tv we're filming at stonehenge on wednesday we've got lots of exciting stuff coming up a little bit later in the month as well so watch this space in the meantime here's dr emma liggins enjoy emma thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thank you for inviting me, Dan. It's great to be here. Conversations that we're all having about coughing etiquette and pandemic disease and mortality, morbidity. This is something that would have been very, very familiar to people in the 19th century, presumably.

Yeah, certainly. I mean, I think it was an age where they were very familiar with disease and death, with fears of contagion, but also in an era where they don't have the same kinds of medical knowledge that we have now, when it was still ideas about how disease was spread were very much changing throughout the century. the century. You've talked about it almost the supernatural, a sense of people feeling haunted, cursed by disease. And actually people recently, you know, not just COVID, but the headlines from around the world, there has been a sense like even in this far more secular age, you know, we feel cursed, benighted. Definitely. And there are these very different understandings, I think, in the 19th century of where disease comes from so my research is very much on the Victorian supernatural so that's something that I look out for these sort of representations of haunting in the culture but certainly disease was talked about that in that kind of register so in the ghost stories that I look at as well as in some of the medical reports this

sort of language of children particularly being haunted by these sort of deadly killers or houses being haunted by illness and those are very much the sort of ways in which some Victorians sort of thought about themselves and I suppose sort of where the disease was coming from, there were some people who believed that disease was a punishment, you know, from God. Others were sort of thinking about it in terms of immorality or dirt, how disease might have been spread in some of the big industrial cities. So lots of sort of conflicting ways of thinking about contagion at the time. And this is something that historians, I think, have been very interested in when they're

looking back at the period. You know, there's not just one way of thinking about contagion. It's a word whose meanings were kind of elusive. People weren't quite sure where disease was coming from. Take a mid-19th century Victorian British family. What would be their experience of loss or mortality? And what were those diseases that were most talked about in FID? Was it sort of pulmonary diseases like we have today, influenza kind of disease? Or are we talking about diseases through the oral faecal route, cholera your dysentery or that kind of thing i mean i think there were throughout the century there were these epidemics of diseases like cholera that you mentioned which was kind of

rife in in lots of the big cities like manchester and london but there was also diseases like diphtheria tuberculosis and scarlet fever, which I seem to have noticed were more references, the more reading I'm doing at the moment, that scarlet fever was a big killer of children in the mid-19th century. So I think a lot of families would have experienced loss from scarlet fever, particularly. Or sometimes when you're kind of reading reports there are children who seem to be dying of fever which isn't necessarily specified maybe it's typhoid which was another disease that is mentioned a lot but sometimes they're not quite sure

one of the ghost stories that I've been looking at recently by Margaret Oliphant called The Open Door. The boy in that story seems to be suffering from brain fever. So, so many different examples. And I think quite a lot of families, whether they were from the middle classes or the working classes, would have experienced the deaths of children. It's an age of high infant mortality, as we know. But, you know, if you're thinking about the lives of some of these Victorian names, Charles Darwin lost one of his daughters and two of his babies. So three out of his 10 children died. And Emma Darwin was very traumatised by the loss of her daughter, Elizabeth Gaskell. Her baby son died of scarlet fever in 1845

and some of her writing is kind of drawing on her experience of mourning and loss and that sort of knowledge of having nursed these sick children as well, that lots of the sick children would have been nursed in the home, you know, not in hospitals at this time too. So it was a very sort of raw experience. Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria's grandson, was killed from Russian influenza, so-called Russian influenza in 1890, I think it was. So it affected all classes, I suppose. So death wasn't ever present. And how did that make itself clear in the literature that you studied? So I'm sort of interested in looking for these sort of Gothic techniques and characteristics that appear in Victorian fiction. So in ghost stories, but also in more realist fiction, you do have these very sort of dark representations of the deaths of children,

sort of dark representations of the deaths of children, particularly, or houses that are sort of transformed by this experience of mourning. So I mentioned Elizabeth Gaskell earlier on, who's the Manchester novelist who wrote industrial novels, but also, you know, widely known as a writer of ghost stories and short stories. So in her realist fiction, like the industrial novel called Mary Barton from 1848, there's a scene set in a cellar,

a kind of dark, stinking, wet cellar of industrial Manchester where the children are dying, the husband is dying because he can't get to the fever hospital. That's a scene where Gaskell talks about this sort of dark loneliness and the overwhelming anxiety of nursing feverish members of the family and that's something that kind of resonates quite a lot with some of the experiences that people are having at the moment in the time of COVID, that kind of experience of loneliness and anxiety. The writer that I've also mentioned as well, Margaret Oliphant, who's a Scottish novelist and short story writer, and her daughter died of fever in Rome at the age of 10. Some of her baby children died as well. And she was often writing in her ghost stories about these experiences of mourning and loss

and that desire to communicate with the dead. So in some of the ghost stories, there are these sort of forgotten voices that come back from the past and this sort of anguish of trying to communicate with some of these lost figures when sometimes kind of religious beliefs might provide a kind of consolation that belief that you could communicate with those who had been lost and you know and that's something I think that does really come through in quite a few mid-Victorian ghost stories, you know, the desire to communicate, but also that sort of uncertainty about whether that was possible.

So that sometimes the ghost story becomes perhaps a kind of way of thinking about trauma, that sort of trauma of loss and difficulties of communication. And then in Dickens, I mean, everyone's getting sick in Dickens. Is it Esther in Bleak House who exposes herself to smallpox? I'm quite struck by that because she's from a sort of middle-class background, isn't she? And so her interaction with that little boy off the street who has smallpox. There's a fear, isn't there? You see it during this pandemic of different socioeconomic groups,

of different ethnicities and of contagion. And that's why Esther's kind of transgressive behaviour in that book, where she scoops up that little boy and then ends up getting very sick herself. No, exactly. And that's, you know, another really important characteristic of quite a lot of this writing. I think that idea about the infection across the classes, you know, the bleak house from 1853, that's obviously a really good example to be thinking about. And that sometimes these women like Esther or like Margaret Hale in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South, who's the middle class heroine there, they're sort of exposing themselves to disease by trying to do good in the community, you know,

which is obviously kind of a direct parallel to what's going on today, the NHS staff and the importance of doing that in order to kind of try to prevent the spread of disease. A figure like Florence Nightingale, who's obviously another famous Victorian woman who Elizabeth Gaskell did know and corresponded with her family. to sort of find new ways of dealing with disease, ways of kind of minimising that spread of disease. Well, that's quite interesting, isn't it, for a 90-year-old? Because Florence Nightingale was at the same time incredibly modern, but also very religious, wasn't she? So is there a tension in this writing between desperately sad people

that have lost and trying to communicate with lost loved ones, but also reformist urges and trying to communicate with lost loved ones but also reformist urges and trying to enhance science and engineering to try and banish the diseases. Definitely you can certainly see that that tension that you mention in quite a lot of these mid-Victorian texts that the attitudes to religion are changing throughout the century but also scientific progress continues very much and the sort of new understandings perhaps of how disease is spread and the development of germ theory, how important is quarantining, keeping family members separate is maybe a more modern but also not modern isn't it that idea if you

think about it because of looking back to sort of diseases like the plague but you know I think you do always see these tensions historians very much have looked at sort of Victorian literature in terms of these sort of new medical understandings and developments and sometimes these sort of gothic characteristics that come through in the writing, sometimes a bit like that fear of modernity, about, you know, where is science actually taking you? What is the best way to deal with disease?

You know, a novel like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is, you know, earlier than the Victorian period, the earlier 19th century, and is also very much is, you know, earlier than the Victorian period, the earlier 19th century. And he's also very much about, you know, medical progress and kind of perhaps the dangers or the opportunities of science. But that also talks about how infection can be spread within the family. There's a mother figure who dies in there from being infected from nursing another member of the family. So I think sometimes these sort of Gothic texts pick up on those dangers of the spread of infection within the family or within the home. So giving a sort of like darker side to domesticity.

to domesticity so sort of illness and this spread or fear of contagious illness becomes part of these sort of dangers of domesticity you know sometimes when we're thinking about the victorians we're thinking very much about you know cozy domestic ideals and happy families and it's all very kind of rosy but you know that there was this sort of constant darkness and fears of death and disease that punctuate so many Victorian texts I think whether they're realist or gothic. Something I never understood about Victorian texts until this time around is like as you say the scariness of being at home sometimes but also just the isolation and the strangeness that's something that people are talking about a lot at the moment I mean we're obviously blessed I suppose

with our ability to communicate remotely like you and I are now but there is something about the disjointed nature of life when under the threat of pandemic disease as well. No definitely I think you know and ideas about isolation and strangeness would have been so familiar to the Victorians that they're very important. I think aspects of quite a lot of their writing, you know, and that people are experiencing, as we're saying, under current circumstances, the idea that maybe you shouldn't leave your homes or you shouldn't go out in public. You should distance yourself from members of the family. But that idea about how that becomes a very strange experience is something that's written into Victorian texts, I think, about feeling isolated or feeling confined within the home

because you're not supposed to go out, about feeling sort of anxious about how to care for your sick child who you might not have the money or the medical supplies to care for properly the home can then become a kind of strange or uncanny space you know which is obviously something that ghost stories have always drawn on about how the home is, you know, a familiar space, but also a very unfamiliar space, an unhomely space as well. Well, half the utilities in the Victorian home, we're going to kill them anyway. I had a very weird relationship with this subject because when I was worrying about my dad earlier on in the

outbreak, because we have such an emphasis in the 21st century on physical intimacy don't we we talk about sex and wellness we talk about hugging the importance of physical contact hugging that feels like something we had to kind of backtrack on and had my dad got very sick I suddenly thought well I wouldn't rush to go and nurse him right I mean or would I I don't know like we've all been wrestling with this and that's something that the Victorians would have been very familiar with we probably haven't come to terms with it yet sort of different understandings of intimacy i suppose as well between their period and hours but you know maybe because disease was so much more prevalent these sorts of issues were sort of maybe more at the

forefront of their minds you know that's sort of hard to make a kind of general point about this, I suppose. Certainly, you know, I've sort of noticed these references to quarantining, even sort of looking back over things that I think I know quite well over the last couple of months. Obviously, these references now jump out at us, don't they? That various stories or texts are talking about, oh, yes, that was a period when I was quarantined from my family or my daughter or I didn't attend this funeral because I was sick like Emma Darwin doesn't go to visit her dying daughter because she's heavily pregnant and can't travel but is also kind of worried about infection so she doesn't attend the funeral a few years later her

and Charles Darwin go and try and find the gravestone and they can't find it and this is a very kind of traumatic experience for them you know it's not where they think it's going to be in the churchyard and I think that's all quite sort of interesting to think about you know I was interested to follow in the news about what people were saying about funerals and how funeral etiquette now had to be changed and you could only have a certain number of people obviously and it wasn't the same kind of perhaps ritual that people are used to or that the Victorians might have been used to they're known for having these very elaborate funerals. But again, that depends which social class you are in. But the ritual of mourning and of following through

the funeral or selecting the headstone and so on, that's all a kind of important part of dealing with loss, obviously. And I thought that was just sort of interesting to reflect on that when we were being given and still are this kind of advice about, you know, what happens after death and at the moment and how that perhaps sort of increases this strangeness, doesn't it? Absolutely. That seems to be something that people have been really finding it difficult to adapt to. Dr. Emma Liggins, thank you so much indeed for joining us on the podcast. If people want to follow more of your work, where can they do so? You can go to the Manchester Metropolitan University website and you'll see lots of information there, some links to some of my work. But my book that I've been working on on ghost stories,

which is called The Haunted House in Women's Ghost Stories, Gender, Space and Modernity. That's due out in August this year. So you might want to have a look at that if you're interested in this kind of material. Definitely. Please go and check that out, everyone. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan.

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