THERE are more ways than one of looking at sewers, especially at old London sewers. There is a highly romantic point of view from which they are regarded as accessible, pleasant, and convivial hiding-places for criminals flying from justice, but black and dangerous labyrinths for the innocent stranger. Even now, in these days of new police and information for the people, it would not be difficult to find many thousands who look upon them as secret caverns full of metropolitan banditti. When the shades of evening fall upon the City, mysterious whispered "Open sesames" are heard in imagination near the trap-door side-entrances, and many London Hassaracs or Abdallahs, in laced-boots and velveteen jackets, seem to sink through the pavement into the arms of their faithful comrades. Romances, as full of startling incidents as an egg is full of meat, have been built upon this underground foundation, and dramas belonging to the class which are now known as "sensation" pieces, have been placed upon the stage to feed this appetite for the wonderful in connexion with sewers. I have some recollection of a drama of this kind that I saw some years ago at one of the East-end theatres, in which nearly all the action took place under huge dark arches, and in which virtue was represented in a good strong serviceable shape by an heroic sewer-cleanser. Much was made of floods and flooding, which the flusher, who played the villain of the piece, seemed to have completely under his control; and it was not considered at all singular by the audience, that a dozen men and women should be found walking high and dry under these mysterious arcades, as if in some place of public resort.

       Imagination generally loves to run wild about underground London, or the sub-ways of any great city. Take away the catacombs of Paris — the closed, magnified, mysterious catacombs — and the keystone of a mass of French fiction falls to the ground. The dark arches of our own dear river-side Adelphi — familiarised, not to say vulgarised, as they have been by being turned into a thoroughfare to coal-wharves and half-penny steam-boats — are still looked upon as the favourite haunts of the wild tribes of London or City Arabs, whatever these may be.

       A popular notion exists that those few sloping tunnels are a vast free lodging-house for hundreds of night wanderers; and that to those who have the watchword, they form a passage leading to some riotous hidden haunt of vice. This belief prevails very largely amongst very quiet, respectable people; the class who live in the suburbs, and feed upon "serious" literature, and shudder when the metropolis, the modern Nineveh, is mentioned in conversation, and who, by no chance, ever heard the chimes at midnight, or were caught wandering about the streets after nine P.M.

       This passion, however, is not entirely confined to people who are totally ignorant of the existing out-door world. Hundreds of traditions are cherished about secret passages said to have extended from St. Saviour's, Southwark, under the river Thames, or from Old Canonbury House to the Priory at Smithfield. The people who cherish these traditions are not easily deceived by any fancy stories about life in London as it is now; they are too knowing for that; but they like to have their little dream of wonder about life in the middle ages. In vain does Mr. Roach Smith write, or do Archæological Societies lecture, upon these fragments of old masonry, laid bare during the building of city warehouses or suburban settlements. The poor old monks are not to be saved so easily from a few damaging theories regarding their presumed habits; and the vestiges of ancient conduit heads, or covered ways to protect water-pipes,^* are always thought to be the remains of murder-caverns, or cells for the unhappy victims of religious hatred. A piece of ordinary rust, or of moist red brick, is soon pictured as the trace of blood; and those who do not take this sanguinary view of these unearthed sub-ways, are always ready to regard them as cellars full of buried gold.

* The water-pipes used in old times were not always embedded in the earth as they are now, but enclosed within a capacious arch of brickwork, into which workmen could descend to repair any decay or accident. — Ellis's History of Shoreditch.

       Next to the romantic way of regarding sewers, there is the scientific or half scientific way, which is not always wanting in the imaginative element. I remember attending an exhibition, about four years ago, at the Society of Arts, which, although it consisted only of engineering plans for the improvement of London sub-ways, was amusing from the unpractical character of the schemes proposed.

       A number of designs were submitted to the Metropolitan Board of Works for the total sub-surface re-construction of the metropolitan streets, and these designs — about forty in number — were referred to a committee of eminent engineers, whose task it was to give away certain money prizes. Nearly all the designs, as far as I recollect, exhibited the same features: a centre tunnel under the roadway, accessible by traps from the street, and containing the different pipes for gas, water, telegraphic wires, and sewage. The plan that got a prize of one hundred guineas, proposed to have arched brick vaults extending from the houses on each side of the tunnel, giving a solidity to the roadway, and increasing to a great extent the cellar accommodation of houses and warehouses. Another plan, which got a prize of fifty guineas, had no central tunnel under the roadway, but provided for the same purposes two side tunnels running parallel to each other, and connected with the houses on either side. The difference in the estimate of cost of the miles of tributary channels. This process of washing scatters and dilutes the valuable elements of fertility, until they are said to be lost beyond all hope of recovery. Men of science, capitalists, and social reformers, have consumed many years and much money in trying to restore this lost mass of valuable sewage to the hungry land; but nothing practical and remunerative, in a commercial sense, has ever been put before the public in this connexion. We have been taunted with the superior wisdom of the despised Chinese, who have no elaborate underground sewage system, and who, instead of carrying away their floods of sewage wealth into the sea, by tunnels built at the cost of millions of money, gather it every morning by public servants with more regularity than our dust is called for by the contractors, and take it away to nourish agriculture. Our reply to this taunt is, that people (adopting the vulgar superstition) who are as numerous as ants, and who have to live in boats because the land is too crowded to hold them with any comfort, must be often at their wits' end to procure food, and are, therefore, no models for a well-to-do civilised nation.

       The two chief plans put forward about thirteen or fourteen years ago to secure the sewage refuse as manure were both carried so far as to form two public companies, with acts of parliament.

       The plan of one company was to collect the contents of some of the Westminster and Pimlico sewers, and convey them by a deep underground channel to Hammersmith, where a steam-engine and other machinery were to distribute the manure in a liquid state to the market-gardens of that neighbourhood. The plan of the other company was to collect the contents of three main sewers falling into the Thames between Vauxhall-bridge and Westminster-bridge, and, after allowing the liquid part to flow into the Thames, to deprive the refuse of its offensive smell, and sell it as manure in a solid state. Both these projects fell through from their presumed commercial impracticability; but numberless plans and suggestions have, at different times, been brought before government commissions, the old Commissioners of Sewers, the present Metropolitan Board of Works, and the City Commissioners of Sewers. Even no further back than 1857, when the great intercepting scheme of the Metropolitan Board of Works, which is now in rapid progress towards completion, was under discussion, about one hundred and forty different plans were sent in by well-meaning amateurs, competent engineers, and persons interested in the great sewage question. Some of these proposals naturally bore the well-known trade mark of Laputa, while others were almost practical in all their details — not quite. Without any wish to speak disrespectfully of sewage, I have a secret sympathy with old Sir Thomas Browne's feeling, and regard this daily mass as a melancholy adjunct of our fallen state. Sewage, whether fluid or solid, mixed or unmixed, is very much like our convicts; everybody wants to get rid of it, and no one consents to have it. The hundred and forty gentlemen who kindly came forward uninvited to suggest a method of purifying the metropolis, were compelled, in the main, to suggest that some selected spots should receive what London wished to reject. These spots were not Stratford-on-Avon, Windsor Park, the Crystal Palace, the South Kensington Museum, or Belgrave-square, for very obvious reasons, but inferior settlements, inhabited by inferior people, in the inferior outskirts. Most of these unfortunate places showed no sign of indignation, because they were ignorant of the dark propositions for their defilement lurking in blue-books, or hinted at amongst the technicalities of a government engineering report. One favourite proposition was to defile the sea, near the coast, and poison the great salt-water baths to which London resorts every summer for health and pleasure. Fortunately for the bathers, the sea opposed these propositions in a quiet chemical way. The action of marine salts upon sewage — not to speak too scientifically — is so offensive, that fresh water must always be the first diluting agent employed before the whole mass is pumped into the sea.

       Amongst the different schemes lately placed at the service of the country for intercepting and removing the London sewage, many proposed to divide the metropolis into sewage districts, and deal with the offensive material on true local self-government principles. One gentleman proposed to furnish each house with three iron-tanks, hermetically sealed, in which the house sewage was to be collected each week, and then carried by drays to some railway, and then by excursion trains thirty miles into the country. Another gentleman proposed similar tanks supplied with charcoal and ashes as deodorising boxes; another proposed the Chinese plan of preserving the sewage for certain companies, under penalties, which companies were to manufacture manure by boiling the sewage with clay or sawdust. Other projectors proposed to favour the mouth of the Kensington Canal, the bank of the river Lea, the Deptford Creek at Greenwich, and Battersea Creek, with four great divisional depots, where the whole of the London sewage was to be deodorised. Another gentleman proposed to bring half the southern sewage across the river at the Thames Tunnel, and the other half across the river in iron pipes, at some higher spot not specified: the material, when delivered, to be filtered, deodorised, and utilised. The peculiarity of this scheme was the bold proposal to defile the Thames Tunnel, and wake up this wonder of joint-stock credulity from its long sleep of idleness. Another projector proposed to favour Erith, Rainham, Wandsworth, and Putney, with four great sewage receiving depots; or else to carry the whole mass to New haven, in Sussex, and throw it into the sea. Another gentleman suggested that the sewage should be collected from the houses and streets into large portable cisterns floating in the river, and that, at stated times, steam-tugs should call at each station and tow this unsightly fleet far out to sea to get rid of its contents. Several other gentlemen proposed to moor vessels at the mouths of each of the existing sewers which run into the river — one hundred and eighty-five in number — and to connect the vessels with the sewers by means of iron or flexible pipes. The water of the sewage was to pass off by filtration, and the more valuable matter was to be left in the vessels. When laden, these barks were to hawk their contents about at any ports where manure was likely to be in demand. No provision seems to have been made for back cargoes.

       One gentleman wished to take the sewage away in iron vessels, and drop it quietly, when no one was looking, into the sea; while another gentleman, evidently thinking that criminals ought to suffer a little sewage infliction for their offences, proposed to form great deodorising caverns from Blackfriars-bridge to the House of Correction. Another projector proposed to deal with the mass as if it were gas or water, and to lay it on to the country in main and branch pipes. Several projectors hit upon this plan, and two proposed to carry it out by pumping the sewage up to a sufficient height to allow it to gravitate along pipes radiating in different directions into the country. Another projector suggested that the railways should be favoured with four great out of town main sewers running parallel with their lines of roadway. Another gentleman boldly proposed to cut the Thames in half, by diverting the stream from the river at Teddington to afford a pure water-supply for London. The sewers were to be scoured by this diverted stream, and the sewage was to be removed by means of a tunnel, and emptied into the sea at Rochford, in Essex. The southern sewage was to be conveyed across the river to the north side at the Thames tunnel; and the main feature of this scheme was to provide a river channel, up which the salt water should flow unadulterated to London. Another projector proposed to divide the Thames into tidal Thames and stream Thames, and to stop the sewage, by deodorising works, from flowing into the river. Certain other projectors proposed to take one-half of the Thames Tunnel as a sewer for conveying the northern sewage to join the southern sewage. When combined, they suggested, like many others, that the whole mass should be taken to some point of the south coast and poured into the sea. One projector suggested that all communication between the sewers and the river should at once be cut off, and the sewage preserved for manure; and a lady — the one female projector amongst the number — proposed to have sewers radiating from all parts of London, from which the sewage could be poured in fertilising streams all over the country on each side of the Thames. Her final reservoir was still the unoffending sea; and she proposed to construct small reservoirs, at convenient distances, along the sewers, which were to be opened as shops, where the farmers could, call and purchase cheap liquid manure. Another projector, more fanciful than any of his competitors, proposed to carry the sewage through the air by vast atmospheric tubes on both sides of the river, beginning somewhere about Putney, and terminating, as usual, in a great deodorising reservoir on the sea-coast. Another projector proposed to construct two great sewers under the river Thames — a favourite but costly plan; — and another gentleman thought he could deodorise sewage and ventilate the sewers, by passing all the smoke of London into them. Another projector suggested that sewage should be first deodorised and then totally consumed by burning, and asked for government aid to commence experiments on the power of fire to consume solid sewage. He suggested that Erith should be the locality favoured with these terrific experiments. Another projector proposed that the Thames should beautified by throwing into it about two thousand tons of chloride of sodium per week, which would cost about thirty-nine thousand pounds sterling per annum; another gentleman proposed to boil the sewage slightly, by way of deodorisation, before it reached the sewers; another projector suggested that the ordinary course of things should be reversed, and that instead of the Thames being flushed by the sewers, the sewers should be so altered that they should be flushed by the river.

       Most of these plans, with a hundred others, are based upon an idea that the Thames would be converted into a crystal stream, if the sewage now flowing into it from nearly two hundred downward main sewers could only be diverted. The plan which Mr. Bazalgette is now carrying out, as the engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, is certainly framed to divert this sewage by a system of intercepting and outfall sewers; but Mr. Bazalgette, Mr. Haywood, the eminent engineer of the City Commissioners of Sewers, and even their government Opponents, never looked forward to such a purification of our noble river. There was a time, within the memory of our fathers, and not more remote than forty years ago, when dozens of fishing punts were moored between the London bridges, and the fishermen, mostly amateurs, had no reason to be discontented with their hauls. In those days, if business were slack at the office, the warehouse, or the shop, or if the morning postman brought no letters that took more than an hour to answer, the old gentlemen used to take their hats, wink at their clerks as they passed out under the shallow pretence of keeping appointments, and slink down the winding alleys towards the river. At one of those little, brown shops, a few of which are still left as vestiges of a decayed trade, where a tapering rod hung out like a barber's pole, and a glistening stuffed fish over the low doorway spun round like a doll at a marine-store with every breeze of wind, they called for the tackle which they had not the courage to carry through Cheapside or Cornhill, and were soon pushed off by sympathising watermen into the middle of the stream. Those were the days of Gravesend hoys; of a belief in long distances; of five-shilling rowing fares to Chelsea; but with all this peace and quietness, it is doubtful if the river were without stain and without reproach. It had nothing to do then, with the refuse of the one million of people on its banks; for the cesspool system was strictly applied to houses, and the sewers conveyed nothing but rain and waste water. For all this, however, competent authorities decline to believe in its crystal clearness, and Messrs. Bidder, Hawksley, and Bazalgette, have said as much in their great report of 1858, on Metropolitan Main Drainage. "Within the metropolis," they say, "the Thames never could have been a 'silvery' stream. There can, indeed, be no doubt that if every particle of sewage were removed from the river, the Thames, as it now exists, with its rapid tide and its enormous traffic, must still remain a muddy water, differing but little in appearance from its present condition. The referees^* themselves admit that they do not anticipate that the Thames will present the appearance of a clear stream until the projecting headlands at the termination of every Reach shall have been protected from being washed away bit by bit.

* Messrs. Galton, Simpson, and Blackwell, Government Referees on the Metropolitan Main Drainage Scheme. 1857.

       "Several causes have contributed to the present condition of the river and its banks. The removal of Old London-bridge has greatly augmented the tidal scour; the improved drainage of the land has brought down the upland waters with increased expedition after rainfall; thereby diminishing the quantity of water in the river in hot weather, and adding to the quantity of earthy matter conveyed by the floods. The agitation of the water by the action of steamboats, and the augmented velocity of the current induced by the removal of obstacles to the tidal flow. These operate to retain the mud in a state of suspension.

       "The scour, the floods, and the agitation, are the most influential contributors to the existing appearance of the river, and these will remain in operation, and continue to produce like effects, after the sewage shall have been withdrawn. We may therefore at once state, that the production of a clear or sensibly purified stream in or near the metropolis, will prove a hopeless task, unless some powerful ruler shall in a future age determine to improve the appearance of the river at the expense of its commerce, by damming back the tide at Greenwich or Woolwich. Were there no population whatever existing on the Thames, the banks of the river, from its mouth to above the western limits of the metropolitan area, would, in the present condition of things, be covered with mud deposits, in consequence of tidal action alone, and the water would remain almost as turbid as it is now." This is rather a rude blow given to a thousand of those splendid dreams which are fed even by such muddy food as London sewage. Turning our backs, to a great extent, upon sewer theorists and their theories, it may be well to make something like a stock-taking survey of underground London. Much capital has been sunk, year after year; much more will have to be sunk; and many ratepayers may like to hear in a gossiping way what they have got for their money. The task of collecting this information and setting it forth is not quite so agreeable as a tour in Iceland; but some harmless drudges must do this parochial work, as some men must black boots, empty dustholes, and sweep crossings. It is good sometimes to put the great epic, the great picture, or the great statue, aside, and to walk round the parish pump with a desire to know something about it.

       This subject, therefore, shall be resumed next week.

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