Reading Notes

Describing the district of Lambeth Marsh, London, in the late nineteenth century, author, Simon Winchester writes in, "The Professor and the Madman", "So it was instead a place of warehouses, tenant shacks, and miserable rows of ill-built houses. There were blacking factories (shoe polish makers, like the one in which young Charles Dickens worked) and soap boilers, small firms of dyers and lime burners, and tanning yards where the leather workers used a substance for darkening skins that was known as "pure" and that was gathered from the streets each night by the filthiest of the local inhabitants -- "pure" being a Victorian term for dog turds... Lambeth was widely regarded as one of the noisiest and sulphurous parts of a capital that had already a grim reputation for din and dirt...A hundred years ago it was positively vile. It was still then low, marshy, and undrained, a swampy gyre of pathways where a sad little stream called the Neckinger seeped into the Thames. *The land was jointly* *owned by the archbishop of Canterbury and the duke of* *Cornwall*...(Surprise, surprise!) John Ayers