Now I have no wish to minimise the London smallpox of last century, nor even to set 1797, when 522 died, against 1796, when 3548 died. I yield to none in detestation of smallpox as a preventible and therefore disgraceful affliction. Let so much pass for granted; but do not let us in any access of sanitary fury lose alike eyes and reason and rave like maniacs. If smallpox was bad, fevers were worse, and as both had a common origin, why should we make a wanton and unscientific distinction between them?
That smallpox should have been constantly present in London throughout last century was in nowise surprising. The citizens lived in a manner to invite and maintain fevers. I shall refer to their food and drink presently, and would now call attention to the fact that they were a stay-at-home generation almost beyond present-day belief. Cowper did not violate credibility when he sang--
John Gilpin’s spouse said to her dear, “Though wedded we have been These twice ten tedious years, yet we No holiday have seen.”
They had no ready means of locomotion, and indeed did not think of fresh air and exercise. An apprentice or maid from the country entered London and was immured as in a prison. We know how the lower orders in our own time huddle together like pigs, unless so far as restrained by lodging-house law, but middle-class Londoners a century ago utilised their apartments, with more decency perhaps, but with equal ignorance of the virtue of oxygen. The Londoners were a densely compacted community, and at night the streets and lanes of the city were almost as thickly tenanted as a man-of-war, but without benefit of sea-air. A Quaker told me that he served his apprenticeship to a grocer in Cheapside between 1786 and 1793, that the shop was opened at seven in the morning and closed at ten at night, that he slept under the counter, that his ablutions were limited to his countenance, and that he never went out except to meeting on First Days; adding, that he had no sense of being hardly dealt with; it was the custom of the time, and he was as his fellows. Memoirs of the 18th century prove that he spoke the simple truth. Bishop Wilson of Calcutta records that he served in the house of a silk merchant in Milk Street from 1792 to 1797, that he was occupied from six or seven in the morning till eight at night; that there was supper at 8.30, followed by prayers, and that all went to bed at ten. An apprentice in the same house said that he never put on his hat for weeks together, and that more than three years elapsed before his first holiday was granted. William Cobbett in 1783 got into a lawyer’s office in Gray’s Inn where, he relates, “I worked like a galley slave from five in the morning till eight or nine at night, and sometimes all night long. I never quitted this gloomy recess except on Sundays when I usually took a walk to St. James’s Park.” Such instances might be multiplied to any extent; and in short it comes to this, that the Londoners of last century lived from year to year _in_ their houses, and had no outdoor exercise. If they were careless about air, they were equally careless about light, and, but for the cost of candles, might have disregarded it altogether. Water was chiefly brought from wells or conduits, and was used sparingly; and it is needless to add, there were no water-closets. Even in well-ordered households, stenches were dreadful; and where there were slatterns, the condition of affairs may be faintly imagined. Horrible cesspools lay behind or beneath most of the houses, evolving pestiferous effluvia. Out of doors, the streets were scarcely less noisome. Rain was the chief scavenger. Swift, in his description of a City Shower, sets before us as graphically as Hogarth, the offices of the rain--