Big Ben is cracked, we needs must own; Small Ben is sane, past disputation; Yet we should like to know whose tone Is most offensive to the nation.
The late Mr. Henry Jephson, L.C.C., published in 1907 an exhaustive work on "The Sanitary Evolution of London." He quotes Dickens's terrible description of one of the old intramural churchyards, but makes no mention of _Punch's_ services in the cause of London sanitation. They certainly deserved and deserve recognition, for he spared no effort to bring home to a wider public than that reached by Blue Books and Reports the intimate and deadly connexion between dirt and disease. As early as the year 1842 we find in his pages this gruesome but unexaggerated pen-picture of the Thames and its tributaries:--
Vauxhall contributes lime, Lambeth pours forth a rich amalgam from the yards of knackers and bone-grinders, Horseferry liberally gives up all its dead dogs, Westminster empties its treasures into the mighty stream by means of a common sewer of uncommon dimensions, the Fleet-ditch bears in its inky current the concentrated essences of Clerkenwell, Field-lane, Smithfield, Cowcross--and is, by means of its innumerable branches, augmented by the potent ingredients of St. Giles's, Somers-town, Barbican, St. Luke's, and the surrounding districts. The fluids of the Whitechapel slaughter-houses call in their transit through the Minories for the contributions of Houndsditch, Ratcliff Highway, Bevis Marks, and Goodman's Fields, and thus richly laden pour their delicious slime into the Thames by means of the Tower-ditch. Finally, the Surrey side yields the refuse of tar-works and tan-yards, and it is allowed by all, that the people of Deptford, Woolwich, and those situated in the lower course of the stream, get the Thames water (which here sustains six different characters) in the highest perfection.
The cartoon, The "Silent Highway"-Man, was published in 1858, but it is, perhaps, the best of the many pictorial comments on the above text. The noisome state of the Serpentine--"a lake of mere manure"--constantly affronted _Punch's_ sensitive nose. Insanitary Smithfield and squalid Covent Garden elicit dishonourable mention from the early 'forties onward. But it was in 1849, the year of the cholera and typhus visitation, that his crusade against London filth--"Plague, Pestilence and Co."--began in earnest. The evil is traced to the triple source of bad drainage, overcrowded intramural burial grounds, and the unchecked pollution of the river. _Punch_ salutes Mr. G. A. Walker, the author of "Gatherings from Graveyards," as a public benefactor for his zeal in endeavouring to secure the abolition of intramural interments, and tilts savagely at obstructive Boards of Guardians, vestry clerks, and extortionate undertakers, who profited by the maintenance of the abuse. He gives us an "Elegy written in a London Churchyard," on a victim of an epidemic brought on by preventable dirt; he exhibits "the water that John drinks"; he represents Hamlet soliloquizing in a London graveyard; and in 1849 he suggests the revision of street nomenclature in accordance with official acquiescence in the then existing dominion of dirt.