Sewage

“Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / Dead cats and turnip tops” all ran into the streets whenever it rained, wrote Jonathan Swift in his poem, “Description of a City Shower.”

You could tell you were approaching London by the stench of sewage and other waste dumped on the outskirts of town. Streets were covered with human excrement and urine, since many people used the streets to relieve themselves and often chamber pots were dumped outdoors. Add to this all the animals walked to market – cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry -- and the stuff they left behind, and then the rotting stuff left over after they were slaughtered … well, you get the idea.

If you were middle or upper class, you might have the plumbing to be able to dump your excrement without having to go outside. Then you hired a “night man and rubbish carter” or “night soil collector” to come nightly to empty your cesspit under the house. If your home had this kind of plumbing, it stank to high heaven because the odors came right back up the pipes (think about the smell of a pit toilet at a park). Fortunately, in 1775, Alexander Cummings invented the U-bend filled with water, which prevented the smells from rising. U-bends are still in use today. Now can I make the joke about 18th century crappers really smelling like crap?

Oh, and all of this leaked into the water supply.

(Olsen, 59, Waller, 95. Picard, 14-15 and 45-46, Waller, 95.)

Fancy chamber pot with funny verse on it. Source: Wellcome Library, London.

This is a satirical cartoon from 1788. The man with the crown is actually the Prime Minister, but I have included this to show he is sitting on a commode with the chamber pot underneath.
Source: Wellcome Library, London.