The pre-industrial urban environment and the pattern of disease in eighteenth- century Westminster

Leonard Schwarz and Jeremy Boulton

Department of Modern History, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT. [email protected] Department of History, Armstrong Building, University of Newcastle, Newcastle NE1 7RU. [email protected]

This continues into the second half of the eighteenth century the analysis of the sextons’ day books for St. Martin’s that Henry Meier has described for the seventeenth century. During the later period St. Martin’s had a population of c. 30,000. We shall examine the pattern of mortality, particularly its geographical incidence. By matching the sextons’ data with data on the relative wealthy (Westminster electorate) and the poor (previous entrance to the parish workhouse), as well as a detailed geography that includes maps of the parish sewers, we are able to map the incidence of disease in a manner that has not hitherto been possible for a large British urban area before the later nineteenth century.

London was traditionally the national reservoir of infections and, as Landers has shown, this was reflected in its mortality regime. By studying the data for at least half a century we shall be able to pinpoint this process at the level of the street and the courtyard. We shall, for instance, be able to investigate the extent to which the mortality decline of the later eighteenth century was achieved by a decline in the mortality of certain ‘hot spots’, such as the workhouse, that may have been exporting fevers into their neighbourhoods. A major difference with the nineteenth century was the vulnerability of immigrants to lethal infection: this varied across time and its decline was a major factor in the halving of London’s crude death rate during the century after 1740; our data makes it possible to investigate this.

Leonard Schwarz is Reader in English Urban History in the department of History at Birmingham University. He is the author of London in the age of industrialisation (1992), the chapter on eighteenth-century London in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2 and several papers on English social structure in the eighteenth century. With Prof. Boulton he is co-director of the Wellcome-funded project ‘Death, disease and the environment: contextualising individual causes of death in London, 1747-1825.

Jeremy Boulton is Head of School and Professor of Urban History in the School of Historical Studies, University of Newcastle. He is co-director of the Wellcome-funded project named above. He is the author of Neighbourhood and society (1987), the chapter on seventeenth-century London in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2 and many articles on different aspects of London’s economy and society in the early modern period.

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