One generally associates the Thames with London, however a look at the map reveals that the river covers a much longer distance. By the time the Thames had reached London, it had passed through several large cities, a few of which I have marked on…
The textile industry in this city won it its own catchphrase: "As polluted as Bradford Beck" (Wohl 236). The poisonous chemicals dumped into the canal made it so that the air above the water could actually be set on fire (236). Upstream of Bradford…
If Woodhouse Grove represented the best of the charity schools, Drouet's Orphanage represented the worst. Drouet's was the type of place where children who had no one to look after them eded up: a workhouse orphanage. Charles Dickens wrote critically…
Woodhouse Grove School, a school for boys planning to go on to be Methodist ministers, was considered to be "a model of its kind" (Barker 122). While Eton and the other public schools were the schools of choice for those who could afford them,…
Cholera was one of the deadliest and most alarming of the epidemics during the Victorian era, and one of its most terrifying qualities was that for the first half of the nineteenth century, no one seemed to be able to figure out how it was spread. …
A curious example of local resistance to health reforms took place in Leeds during a severe outbreak of cholera in 1849. The residents ignored "calls to clean up the area and instead went and stood outside the local alkali factory for days on end"…
How was it, one might ask, that if there was a cholera epidemic throughout the whole country, John Snow was able to stop the epidemic in Soho merely by limiting it to a single pump? Another question: Most people didn't drink directly from the Thames.…
