The Ghost Map
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THE GHOST MAP also by steven johnson INTERFACE CULTURE: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate EMERGENCE: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software MIND WIDE OPEN: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter GHOSTThe MAP The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic— and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World Steven Johnson rive rh ead book s a member of Penguin Group ( U SA) Inc. New York 2006 riverhead books Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2006 by Steven Johnson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. The passage from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is from Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn. A list of illustration credits can be found on page 300. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Steven, date. Ghost map : the story of London’s most terrifying epidemic—and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world / Steven Johnson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 1-4295-0129-4 1. Cholera—England—London—History—19th century. I. Title. RC133.G6J64 2006 2006023114 614.5'14—dc22 book de sign and map on pag e s xii and xiii by meighan cavanaugh While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. For the women in my life: My mother and sisters, for their amazing work on the front lines of public health Alexa, for the gift of Henry Whitehead and Mame, for introducing me to London so many years ago . CONTENTS Preface xv Monday, August 28 THE NIGHT-SOIL MEN 1 Saturday, September 2 EYES SUNK, LIPS DARK BLUE 25 Sunday, September 3 THE INVESTIGATOR 57 Monday, September 4 THAT IS TO SAY, JO HAS NOT YET DIED 81 Tuesday, September 5 ALL SMELL IS DISEASE 111 Wednesday, September 6 BUILDING THE CASE 139 Friday, September 8 THE PUMP HANDLE 159 Conclusion THE GHOST MAP 191 Epilogue BROAD STREET REVISITED 231 Author’s Note 257 Acknowledgments 258 Appendix: Notes on Further Reading 260 Notes 263 Bibliography 285 Index 291 A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we per- ceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the an- gel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” MAP TK ump p great marlboro ugh street little marlborough st. poland poland tyler street carnabystreet west street WORK marshall street street marshall HOUSE king street regent street dufours place place dufours broad ELEY BROTHERS bea silver street k street warwick street GOLDEN SQU ARE w a r d o u r s t r e e t t p e et m e u r p t re t e t b e e s s r w LUKE’S ST. i . c r k s t r e e t t c r t d d s a MAP TK e h y n e pete e t lan d n i e a e e m rt t et l tr o p re BREWERY r s t e pu e s che new stre r et a littl s t reet p p m u p e t st re l i tt le w i ndm i l l cambridge st. 40 BROAD ST. et g reat p u lte ney st re p p b re et m ri dle st u p This is a story with four protagonists: a deadly bacterium, a vast city, and two gifted but very different men.One dark week a hundred fifty years ago, in the midst of great terror and human suffering, their lives collided on London’s Broad Street, on the western edge of Soho. This book is an attempt to tell the story of that collision in a way that does justice to the multiple scales of existence that helped bring it about: from the invisible kingdom of microscopic bacteria, to the tragedy and courage and ca- maraderie of individual lives, to the cultural realm of ideas and ideologies, all the way up to the sprawling metropolis of London itself. It is the story of a map that lies at the intersection of all those different vectors, a map created to help make sense of an experience that defied human understanding. It is also a case study in how change happens in human society, the turbulent way in which wrong or ineffectual ideas are overthrown by better ones. More than anything else, though, it is an argument for seeing that terrible week as one of the defining moments in the invention of modern life. THE GHOST MAP Monday, August 28 the night-soil men I t is august 1854, and london is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoolog- ical 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 a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scav- engers 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 number. 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 recov- ered 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 MONDAY, AUGUST 28 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. The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “’Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens’ unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.