Simulations de sujet

Sujet n°2: London

Doc. 1

George Cruikshank's 1829 cartoon of the horrors of urban development, 'London Going out of Town'. This particular satire refers to plans for Camden Town.

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

The Grocers! oh the Grocers! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.

But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the same time there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners to the baker' shops.

Ch. Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843.

Doc. 3

The larger London got, the worse the pollution. The sanitary reformer James Hole commented in 1866 on the fate of Kentish Town:

'The inhabitant whose memory can carry him back thirty years recalls pictures of rural beauty, suburban mansions and farmsteads, green fields, waving trees and clear streams where fish could live --where now can be seen only streets, factories and workshops, and a river or brook black as the ink which now runs from our pen describing it.'

London was spawning pauperism, misery, crime, disease: piecemeal attempts had long been made to combat these horrors with charities, infirmaries, Bible missions and anti-vice societies. But it was national events, political anti epidemiological, that precipitated radical change. In 1834 Edwin Chadwick secured the Poor Law Amendment Act, formalizing the workhouse system. This had dramatic implications, and not just for paupers, as has already been seen, but for the wider community, as workhouses became the foci of further functions. For it became clear that the infirm, sick and dying formed a high percentage of paupers and hence of workhouse inmates. Infirmaries were built, with isolation wards and fever wings, anti the Poor Law administration inevitably became intimately involved with sanitary reform, because of the high incidence of sickness among London's destitute. Smallpox, measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever felled labourers' families more shall the affluent, as did the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1848-9. Disease threatened social collapse. A letter appeared in The Times on 5 July I 849 above fifty-four signatures:

'Sur, May we beg and beseech your proteckshion and power. Wee are Sur, as it may be, living in a Wilderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as rich and great people care about. We live in muck anti filthe. We aint got no privez, no dust bins, no drains, no water splies, and no drain or suer in the whole place. The Suer Company, in Greek Street, Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice watsomedever of our complaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We al of us suffer, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.'

Throughout the Victorian era the majority of able-bodied applicants for poor relief were sick. In poor districts like Shoreditch and Camberwell over a third of institutionalized paupers became infirmary patients. In London, as elsewhere, the workhouse became faute de mieux a hospital, hinting that the capital was but a gigantic sickhouse.

The new Poor Law authorized guardians to appoint medical officers, and by the late 1830s the larger London unions were each employing several doctors, seeing patients in the workhouse and even paying house calls. Demand for parish medical services soared. In 1853, when smallpox vaccination became compulsory, Poor Law doctors in effect became public-health officials.

A rationalist administrator, Edwin Chadwick expected to cure pauperisim through the 'less eligibility' philosophy of the workhouse system, a self-operating mechanism for eliminating pauperism [I]: the workhouse being intended as nastier than work. Yet destitution did not diminish Why then was his pet workhouse system not working? Chadwick blamed disease. By preventing labour, sickness caused penury. The struggle against disease therefore fell, he argued, within the scope of government. Disease, in his view, was caused by miasmata, gases given off by putrefying organic matter. Smell was disease, and filthy environments were to blame. [II] Though later contested by many medics, this miasmatism spurred Chadwick's sanitary reformism. He became evangelical for the sanitary idea.

Cholera concentrated the mind. Asiastic cholera spread across Europe, reaching England in 1831. Little was done by the government, beyond calling a day of national prayer and fasting. By autumn, 5,000 had died from the epidemic, but still no counter-measures were taken.

Awareness grew that public-health hazards were rising. The capital's death rate stood at 25.2 per thousand, compared with 22.5 for England as a whole. In poor districts, like St Giles-in-the-Fields, one in three children died before reaching the age of one. Symptomatic was the worsening condition of the Thames, as late as 1800 clean enough for salmon to be caught [III] and for Lord Byron to go swimming by Westminster Bridge. 'He who drinks a tumbler of London Water,' Sydney Smith told Lady Grey in 1834, 'has literally in his stomach more animate beings than there are Men, Women and Children on the face of the Globe.' Pollution was, ironically, the offshoot of progress. Wider provision of piped water supplied by London's private water companies led to growing use of flushing water-closets. Instead of being deposited in cesspits, human waste was now gushing into sewers and so into the Thames. Yet most private water companies extracted their piped water from the river between Chelsea and London Bridge. London's sanitation thus became an increasing hazard -- though the bacteriological explanation was still quite unknown to Chadwick and his generation.

Roy PORTER, London, A Social History, 1994.