The Ghost Map

(Still banging my head against the non-commenting comment button, my plaintive cries and mad-clicking going unheeded -- "Work! Work damn you!" Thanks to D. for making me laugh; I needed that!... 'Cept, you got it wrong. I'm totally a bitch. ;) )

Listening to the audio of The Ghost Map, written by Steven Johnson, narrated by Alan Sklar.

Blurble:

It is summer 1854. Cholera seizes London just as it is emerging as a modern city -- the first metropolis in history to reach a population of over two million, but lacking almost all the urban infrastructure to support it: clean water, sewers, garbage removal, toilets. It is the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. But two men are spurred to action: the Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose faith in a benevolent God is shaken by the seemingly random nature of the disease's victims, and Dr. John Snow, whose ideas about contagion have been dismissed by the scientific community, but who is convinced that he has an immediate solution to the epidemic.

I'm interested in disease/plague but also the Victorian era. This book does a wonderful job of painting a vivid picture of that pocket of time. It opens like this...

"It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least 100,000 strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer numbers. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river’s edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London’s streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage."