Following on from previous posts about historical plagues, I’ll be discussing how Cholera ‘ made the nineteenth century its own’. I’ll be looking at national and literary responses to the threat of disease, and how, then and now, they have focused commentators on the two towering concerns of the ages: social equity and environmentalism.

Firstly, though, and as we’ve seen in the conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid pandemic (5G, drinking bleach, Bill Gates and George Soros), the invisible nature of disease often leads to superstitious theories. Nowadays, the conflict is between science and fake news whereas in the 19th Century, the conflict was between Religion and Science.

In 1831, five years after it began its march across Europe from Bengal, the first Cholera epidemic arrived on the shores of Durham and spread across the country. There would be further outbreaks in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, killing tens of thousands at every turn. The onset of symptoms was rapid – profuse diarrhoea and vomiting leading to dehydration and death. The transformation from healthy to sick fed the horror at the inexorable progress of this disease.

Quarantine has not been the only response to disease in the past. Throughout Christian and Pagan cultures, another protection from disease and disaster was common: prayer and fasting. These were quite common even early in the Nineteenth Century. Ironically, there was a day of national fasting and humiliation in March 1847 to atone for the sins that had brought about famine in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands!

However, these types of fasts were not just a prayer to God to remove the disaster, they also functioned as a way of fostering national community and morale through ritual. I couldn’t help but think here of the ritual of clapping for NHS staff and other front-line workers. Apart from people’s genuine desire to support these workers, there is also a feel-good factor involved and an appeal to national unity. But, there’s also a tension evident with those who see it as toothless at best, and counter-productive at worst and who ask for real political and social change. This was also the case in mid-century Victorian England when a shift in thinking began as the scientific developments of the century coincided with a disintegration of Western belief systems, or as Nietzsche put it, ‘God is dead[…]and we have killed him’.

In 1853, in response to a petition to Queen Victoria by the Presbytery of Edinburgh asking for another fast day, the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, responded that he would not support this and, mores to the point, the way to combat Cholera was to clean up dirty and cramped living conditions. As well as indicating a society moving away from the more superstitious elements of religion, it also shows a growing awareness of public health issues. Palmerston was right in identifying dirt and overcrowding as the source of disease, although not in the way that science would eventually discover.

The population of London increased from 900,000 in 1801 to 2,400,000 in 1851 (and nearly double that again by 1901). Without the necessary infrastructures of housing and running water, London was a breeding ground for Cholera.

Contemporary reports speak of residents of the notorious Jacob’s Island (check your Oliver Twist!), emptying their slops into the water below and then drawing from it for drinking. Many London residents literally lived off dirt, from those who collected animal faeces to sell to leather workers, to those who trawled the sewers looking for discarded valuables. Stories of entire lanes being infected with Cholera homed in on communal gatherings at standpipes, although it was not until later in the century that the role of water in the spreading of Cholera was understood.

 Kingsley was one of the Condition of England writers and both a minister and a respected amateur scientist, and he spans the gap between the superstitions and the science of the time. He was an avid sanitary reformer, vocally supported Palmerston’s calls for cleaning up the environment, advocated small breweries to provide safe drinking for the poor, and called for a new sanitary system in London (citing Glasgow’s as an exemplar!).

In 1854, he published a set of four sermons called Who Causes Pestilence:

These sermons were preached during the last appearance of Cholera in Great Britain. Since then, both scripture, reason, and medical experience have corroborated the views which were put forth in them. 

In the sermons, Kingsley praised Palmerston and argued that if people viewed Cholera as a visitation from God, then they were praying for him to go away! In an attempt to reconcile his religious faith with his scientific enthusiasm, he argued that God did not punish but that society, by breaking God’s natural laws by destroying the environment, brought Cholera upon itself.

Prayer was a way for man to respect God’s world, rather than a direct appeal for intervention. In a later essay he expanded on this idea by the example of men at sea who, he said, could not pray to God to save them in a storm, but could pray to God for the strength and ability to use their tools to save themselves.

Kingsley is a prime example of the ways some Victorians tried to find ways to reconcile faith with science when all around them seemed to be changing. Palmerston’s response, to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, rather more literal than Kingsley’s, meant that no fast and prayer day took place.

Sanitary reformers such as Kingsley and Palmerston, signalled a movement away from the religious superstitions of the first half of the century towards a preventative system based around a knowledge of how Cholera was caused and spread, how to prepare when an outbreak was approaching from Europe and, vitally, the development of Public Health bodies and the Port Sanitary Authorities in 1872.

As a result, the last Cholera epidemic in England was in 1866, with a small outbreak in the 1890s. Internationally, it was increasingly recognised that a Europe-wide response was needed to curb the spread of Cholera and England became the model for Cholera prevention.

Written by Dr Carol Collins, Deputy Director for Student Learning Development in LEADS