146 ENGLISHSAGA

In Wapping the courtyards were deep with filth, like pigsties, in
which incredibly ragged and often naked children crawled
seeking for vegetable parings and offal among the refuse. In
Bethnal Green there were 80,000 inhabitants living under almost
completely primitive conditions. Until the first parliamentary
Sewer Commissioners in the middle 'fifties laid down over fifty
miles of underground arterial drainage and pumped out millions
of cubic feet of nauseating sludge, almost every street was barri-
caded against overflowing sewers. London that had become a
city such as the world had never before seen was still governed
like a. village. Punch depicted the Court of Aldermen guzzling
at one of the great traditional feasts, while King Death, with
folded arms and socket eyes, gazed down on his henchmen, the
spectres of Carbonic Acid Gas, Miasma, Cholera and Malaria,
who took their toll of gaunt, ragged humans amid arphed sewers
and slime.

As for the state of the river into which all this unmastered
nastiness drained, it beggared description. Its shores were rotten
with "guano, stable dung, decaying sprats, and top dressings from
the market gardens." In the hot summer of 1858 the stink became
so foul that there was talk of removing Parliament. In a famous
cartoon England's leading comic journal apostrophied Father
Thames as a filthy old man dragging up dead rats from a liquid,
gaseous mass of black mud and dying fish.

* Filthy river, filthy river,
Foul from London to the Nore,
What art thou but one vast gutter,
One tremendous common shore.

All beside thy sludgy waters,
All beside thy reeking ooze,
Christian folks inhale memphitis

Which thy bubbly bosom brews.
• • • •

And from thee is brewed our porter,
Thee, thou gully, puddle, sink!
Thou vile cesspool art the liquor
Whence is made the beer we drink."1

The water supply of three million people was polluted. Not till