“London was always the greatest sanitary challenge,” notes Lee Jackson in this absorbing study of the capital and its massive expansion during the nineteenth century (80). The crowded, bustling city was legendarily dirty—prone to foul “stinks” and widely dubbed “the smoke.” After several outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, Parliament invested millions in vast engineering projects designed to give Londoners adequate sewerage and improved plumbing and drainage. Yet “far from cleansing the great metropolis,” as reformers, planners, and sanitation advocates boasted at the time, “the Victorians left it thoroughly begrimed” (2). In the battle against London's dirt, soot, mud, and disease, Jackson contends, “filth emerged triumphant” (6).

The starkest challenge for Parliament was how to absorb and house the city's expanding population. Between 1801 and 1901, the population of London increased from one million to over six million, Jackson observes, with suburbia rapidly paving over green fields and the growth leading to an exponential rise in human waste and a clamor for clean drinking water. An investigation in 1832 found that less than 10 percent of slum properties in Holborn possessed a water closet, yet even in wealthier Mayfair the wells serving residences were often polluted by cesspools leaking their fetid contents. Although seemingly accustomed to finding small amounts of mud and sediment in their drinking water, “the gentlefolk of Westminster,” writes Jackson, were shocked to discover in 1827 that “they had actually been imbibing a solution composed of their own ‘ejectamenta’” (3).

Rising concern about cesspool miasma (foul air resulting from decaying matter) led to the creation, in 1842, of organizations such as the Metropolitan Improvement Society, which targeted polluters—chiefly, manufacturers and breweries—by threatening legal action. They had ample reason for concern. A Punch cartoon from the time decried the Thames's “sludgy water,” “reeking ooze,” “mephitis,” and “foul abominations,” explaining of the unappealing contents: “Thou, vile cesspool, art the liquour / When is made the beer we drink!” Even Londoners far from the river complained of being “stunk out” (84) of their houses by blocked drains emitting foul odors. With sewage discharged twice daily into the Thames at Beckton and Crossness, the Times described the river as “hissing like soda-water with baneful gases, so black that the water is stained for miles, and discharging a corrupt charnel-house odour” (5). During the estuarine tide, the sludge would be swept back into the city, releasing gases so noxious, the Daily News noted, they “seemed to explode in the bed of the river and come up like mud volcanoes” (103).

Anxiety about the associated health risks led to a demand for citywide solutions. As the Times opined in 1848, “Grosvenor-square must care for Bermondsey; Belgravia can no longer think slightingly of Bethnal-green. . . . The filthy spots we have named . . . may gradually infect other quarters of the town” (84). Yet the challenge of piping clean water across the city was immense. “For some of the poorest Londoners,” notes Jackson, “even polluted cisterns were an impossible luxury. They were obliged to queue at standpipes, quarrelling with their neighbours over their place, storing water in ‘pails, old fish-kettles, and casks’, lugging them up flights of stairs to badly ventilated, overcrowded rooms” (88).

Dirty Old London relays these facts and reforms in a style so compelling they bring the squalor of Victorian London vividly to life. Chief among Jackson's protagonists is Edwin Chadwick, the social reformer and evangelical hygienist whose 1842 report, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, argued so fervently for the promotion of a sanitary ideal, it made “improved sewerage seem imperative” (93). Chadwick's obsession with the city's grime and filth escalated into concern about the population's personal habits, including how often people washed, where they tended to relieve themselves, and how often they went to church or chapel. While Chadwick ultimately lost to Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works, in securing approval to build miles of new sewerage and several new pumping stations to relieve the city, it was Chadwick and his evangelical associates, Jackson argues, who prevailed in their moral thinking about personal cleanliness, even when they were proven wrong about the medical consequences of miasma. To them, he writes cogently, “it was almost as if outer dirt signified inner wrong—the negative of ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’” (217).

The need for adequate sewerage and plumbing, though pressing, did not end the city's overwhelming problems with pollution. By the 1890s, Jackson notes, “it took 300,000 horses to keep London moving, generating 1,000 tons of dung daily, not to mention a large volume of urine” (28). And then there was air pollution. When a giant incinerator was built in Battersea to burn through twenty-four tons of refuse in a day, the smell and dust it generated routinely reached Whitehall and Parliament Street. When Londoners elsewhere tried to ventilate their rooms, a thick layer of soot would coat their furniture and clothes. Another source of pollution and illness was thick, sulfurous fog—a boon for crime—that induced nausea and coated with carbon and phosphates everything from buildings and sculptures to lungs.

With chapters ranging from the dust collectors who picked up trash on an ad hoc basis to the city's revised policies on the burial and cremation of the dead, Jackson's study is a compelling account of Victorian efforts at reforming the metropolis and improving the health of its citizens. The grandeur of redesigning the capital of a vast empire often collided with the practical impediments of a filthy, smoke-choked city. The resulting drama is fascinating and engaging. Jackson gives a witty, well-researched, and thoroughly readable account of the Victorians' “alchemical dream” of turning dust and filth into gold (26).