The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

Holmes story two houses have remained empty for some time ‘on account of him that owns them, who won’t have the drains seed to, though the very last tenant what lived in one of them died o’ typhoid fever’.⁷³ Professionals made the same association. The Plumber warned, ‘There are a “thousand gates to death!” Few are wider, or open more readily, than those in our own homes’ – the drains.⁷⁴ After all, the linking of houses to a communal sewer was a new concept. For the first part of the century, people had continued much as they had before, with cesspools beneath their houses. And as late as 1888 Mrs Haweis was still writing, ‘between you and me, the old cesspool, if properly emptied and deodorized