Alethea Hayter
A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846
The following extract is reproduced with permission from Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846. A ground-breaking contribution to non-fiction set in 1846, A Sultry Month documents the most influential artists and writers of the time, from Wordsworth and Dickens, to Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, across one sweltering summer. To order a copy, visit Faber.
This June was the hottest summer month that anyone could remember. For the first twenty-two days of the month the average day temperature was 84 degrees in the shade, 105 degrees in the sun. Kent had had six weeks without rain, and midday temperatures of 104 to 116 degrees. On the morning of Friday 19th June the temperature in some parts of the country reached 96 degrees in the shade. The heat had begun in the very first days of the month. Already by 2nd June Browning was complaining that it was very warm, and warning Elizabeth Barrett to be careful of her health. By the 5th the temperature in her room was 80º, and though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo. ‘Oh – it is so hot,’ she wrote to Browning. ‘There is a thick mist lacquered over with light – it is cauldron-heat, rather than fire-heat.’ He meanwhile was at church, and seeing people faint with the heat. A week later it was still ‘too hot to laugh’; even the mornings burned and dazzled in white heat; it was so overcoming that even Flush was cross, and Miss Barrett had to take him out in the carriage at half-past seven in the evening to get a breath of coolness by the silvery water of the Serpentine in the dusk of Hyde Park.
…….It was murderous weather. Wherrymen, out in boats on the Thames all day, died of sunstroke; farm labourers died of heatstroke after a day’s mowing; many people all over the country were drowned while bathing. There were rumours of Asiatic cholera at Hull and Leeds, there were typhus outbreaks in London. There were proclamations that dogs must go muzzled, for fear of rabies. Anyone not in robust health suffered and sickened in the stifling weather. ‘The great heat of London . . . made me quite ill again,’ complained Mrs Carlyle, and from Manchester she heard from Geraldine Jewsbury, ‘The Heat is terrible, for our air is so thick and heavy that, when heated, it is like a casing of hot lead.’
……. For the hay harvest the weather was a boon, and by the third week in June the hay in the south of England was all cut, and much of it stacked. The wheat crop was doing well, but the prolonged drought was destroying the barley and oats, there were heath fires all over the country, and the gardeners were in despair. Grass everywhere was burnt brown, the peas and beans were wilting, the mignonette in the London windowboxes was withered and dry. It was a wonderful year for roses, though; Browning brought Elizabeth Barrett bunches of them from his parents’ garden in New Cross, and she herself actually drove out to Hampstead Heath and picked a dog rose there, quite early in the month. Everything was early – Miss Mitford’s famous strawberry parties at Three Mile Cross were already collecting all her neighbours. But hot and fine as it was, one could not reckon safely on the weather for outdoor parties; there were sudden and violent storms all over the country, many people were killed by lightning, in some places the very air smelt of fire, and the raindrops that fell were the largest ever seen. Dickens, who left England with his family on 31st May and travelled up the Rhine in a heat ‘more intense than any I have ever felt’, described the huge thunderstorms that boomed and rumbled among the Swiss mountains. The wooden walls and floor of the pretty lakeside house which he had taken at Lausanne were hot to the touch all the night through, and his children were so tanned that they looked ‘as if they were in one perpetual sunset’.
…….The stored-up heat of the houses caused many fires in London, and there were other disagreeable effects of town life in the heat. On this 19th June ‘a correspondent requests us to call the attention of the authorities to the offensive condition of the sewers, the effluvia from which, in this hot weather, is most offensive’ announced the Daily News, the paper which Dickens had founded a few months earlier. The rapid development of London in recent years had overstrained the sewers, as everyone could now perceive. ‘The Heat has been so savage that not only we Italians, but the East Indians, have suffered much from it. I never knew hot nights so oppressive and hot days so little agreeable,’ wrote Milnes to a friend, while his future wife Annabel Crewe, whose spelling was not always perfectly reliable, recorded in her diary on 19th June: ‘Heat of weather quite unparralled in England’.
…….The only pleasant thing to contemplate was ice. A ship called the Ilizaide came into St Katharine’s Docks with 664 tons of ice in large blocks; little boys hung all day round the depots of the Wenham Lake ice, as though the mere sight of the great white blocks would cool them; sherry cobblers with ice (and no doubt quantities of typhoid germs) in them were a favourite drink. But it was impossible to keep cool, or look as if you were cool. ‘This hot weather puts us all into Falstaff ’s state,’ wrote Wordsworth to Crabb Robinson, conjuring up an unlikely vision of the stately old poet ‘larding the lean earth’ with his sweat as he pottered about Rydal Mount. The papers were full of advertisements for clothes to keep cool in. ‘The Delightful 44 Coolness of the Golden Flax Cravat Collar, together with its perfect fit, however loosely tied on, recommend it especially during this weather’. For the women, ‘dresses of the most aerial textures, tulles, barèges, muslinés, organdies, tarlatans, and Chinese Batiste were alone wearable during the late insupportable heat’. If you had lost a relation within the year, you could go to Jay’s, or The London General Mourning Warehouse as it was then called, and get ‘Muslin Dresses for Half-Mourning. The extreme heat of the season has given an extraordinary impetus to the sale of PRINTED MUSLINS’. In a world without refrigerators, it was also useful to be told of Carson’s Meat Preservers, by which meat could be cured in twelve or fifteen minutes and ‘all taints avoided, even in the hottest weather’, or of ‘Lemon and Kali, a cooling beverage’ advertised by a chemist in Cornhill as ‘of inestimable value to those whose duties oblige them to perambulate the crowded streets of large towns in hot weather’.
…….But crowds, even out of doors, were a thing to avoid. An article in the Illustrated London News describes the ‘languid limbs, and lazy lounging gait of people who passed . . . in the street, or crowded to the Serpentine’. Indoors it was far worse; evening parties were too hot to attend, even though the doors were taken right off their hinges, and morning concerts were a sea of waving fans, an undulation of fainting ladies.
…….The theatres were half empty. Macready’s season at the Princess Theatre, where he had been playing King Lear and a new play called The King of the Commons, finished on this Friday 19th June. ‘Acted King James better than usual, wishing my last night at the Princess’s to leave a pleasing impression – as I think it did. Called for and very warmly received,’ he noted in his diary, adding a sarcastic note about the poor receipts at 45 the Haymarket and Drury Lane that week. If the theatres were empty, the open-air pleasure gardens, Vauxhall, Surrey Gardens and Cremorne, were crowded every night with people watching the fireworks and the balloons which floated about in the night sky. The river steamers, cutting their way up and down the crowded Thames, were packed with people trying to get some cool breezes.
……. Those who had the money and the time even for these modest diversions were the best off. It was a grim time for those who had to work indoors. At Wolverhampton, where on the 18th the temperature was 96 degrees in the shade, the works had to be stopped because the workmen could not support the unprecedented heat. In London, work went languidly on in stifling warehouses, and those with business in the City felt the pavements burning through the soles of their boots as they went to and fro, and were thankful when a passing water-cart gave an illusion of freshness to the dusty street.
…….One of those whose business took them into the City in these suffocating days was Haydon. After a day out borrowing money from a silk manufacturer friend in Spital Square, he records ‘Terrifically hot today’. He was back there a week later, dining with a friend who had promised to lend him £1,000, but who now had to admit that the money was not forthcoming. The disappointment was sharp, and Haydon did what he rarely did – drank too much, and felt the results for days afterwards. He could not work much; his days were spent in sitting staring at his half-finished picture, or ‘harassing about to no purpose in the heat’. One morning he made a great bonfire in the courtyard of his house and spent all day, in that tropical weather, burning great masses of letters and documents. At night he 46 could not sleep, and this increased his nervous irritability. His family wanted him to see a doctor, but he refused. He had always suffered in hot weather and had a passion for fresh air; his favourite wind was an east-north-easterly in February, and he was always flinging open windows, in his own and other people’s houses. Heat made him feel as though there were too much blood in his brain, which must somehow be relieved.
Alethea Hayter (1911-2006) read modern history at Oxford, and after a period writing for Country Life she joined the British Council, retiring in 1971. Her many books include Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1962), The Wreck of the Abergavenny (2002) and the acclaimed Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968). She was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
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