Cover of 'The Midnight Mechanic' by Andy Brown
Hugh Dunkerley
January 16, 2025

The Cesspits of London

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The Midnight MechanicAndy Brown, Sea Cow Press, 2024, 238 pages, £16.99.

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This year, the Thames Tideway Tunnel super sewer was finally completed. It took eight years to build, at a cost of £5 billion. When it is fully operational in 2025, the 16-mile tunnel will be used to hold the equivalent of 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools of rainwater and sewage which would have been released into the Thames. Eventually, the waste will be treated at Europe’s largest sewage works in Beckton. However, it is already acknowledged that this measure is only a stopgap. In sixty or seventy years, increased rainfall due to climate change will once again threaten to overwhelm the system.

Andy Brown’s new novel, set in Victorian London, demonstrates, in visceral detail, how sewage is no new problem for the capital. Its power lies in humanising the story of the nineteenth-century night mechanics, who made a living from emptying the cesspits of the city, the places where human waste was disposed of. The rich would have their own outhouses, but for the poor there were usually neighbourhood outhouses. Over months or years, the excrement would build up until it filled the cesspit. It would then have to be dug out by hand, carted away and usually sold as manure for the marker gardens that fed the city. The novel follows the fortunes of Silas, who is born into abject poverty. From the start, Silas’ story is caught up with the trade in human and animal waste. The book opens with an account of Silas and his younger brothers, Arthur and George, sneaking out at night to steal some ‘pure’ from the local dog catcher. Ironically named as it might seem, ‘pure’ is dog waste, favoured by tanners for its qualities in softening leather (the name is probably a corruption of the tanning term ‘puer’). The boys’ mother has made a miserable living as a collector of pure but is now too ill to work. Silas is determined to sell on the pure to feed his family and to pay for a doctor. These opening scenes are brilliantly conveyed, the dirt and grime of the city, the grinding poverty of the boys’ lives. But what lifts the sense of gloom is the boys’ closeness and Silas’ determination to better their lives. However, the whole enterprise ends in disaster: George falls through into a cesspit and drowns, and Silas and Arthur are arrested. The boys are tried by local magistrates, the trial revealing the prejudices and injustices of Victorian society. The boys are sentenced to be flogged and serve one month of hard labour. One of the magistrates sums up by telling the boys: ‘Poor you may remain, but immoral you shall not.’ The harsh conditions of Bridewell prison are evoked through its unyielding greyness and the lack of any sounds penetrating from the outside world. Silas begins his incarceration in the hospital wing. There, the ghost of George appears to him, as it does on a number of occasions throughout the novel. George implores Silas to ‘Clean me, clean me…’

Once free, the boys discover their mother has died. Alone and penniless, they struggle to survive, but Silas cannily finds them work with John Pearce, a night mechanic. Their first experience of the work is powerfully described:

Silas pulled on the rope and saw the first bucket come back from the underworld into the night air. His muscles burned. His scarred shoulder stung. He unhitched the rope from the bucket’s handle and, turning his face away in disgust from the stench, handed it on to his brother, the tub man.

Part Two begins twenty years later. By now Silas and Arthur have become successful night mechanics, having been left the nightsoil business by John Pearce. They still go out most nights to collect human waste. But they have taken out a lease on a house and have a team of employees. Arthur has married his childhood sweetheart, and Silas is wooing the capricious Flora Street. Silas is obsessed with his appearance, visiting the public baths every Saturday to wash away the stink of the week’s work. But change is on the way. Sewers are being built to remove London’s waste and pump it into the Thames. People are installing water closets connected to the new sewers. And to make matters worse, imported guano from South America is undercutting the market for ‘home grown’ fertiliser. The novel follows the brothers’ fortunes as they at first try to stave off change, and then are forced to either oppose it or adapt to it. To make matters worse, Flora will only marry a man who can provide her with a house with one of the new-fangled water closets.

The portrayals of Victorian London in The Night Mechanic are as visceral and powerful as many of those conjured by Dickens.

The brothers belong to The Union of Nightmen and Cleaners. In a brilliant set-piece, Brown brings the challenges facing the Hunt brothers together at a union meeting. Silas gets up to make a speech, having already listened to ‘disgruntled worker and industrial agitators addressing their sense of injustice in exaggerated and preposterous language.’ He himself is one of the moderates, but others want to take more radical action. At the end of the meeting, Silas is taken aside by Suddaby, director of the company installing the new sewers. Suddaby puts the case for the sewers, the health benefits, the convenience. Suddaby offers Silas and his team work on the sewers. Like many caught in the trap of a disappearing industry, Silas can see where things are leading.

They were powerless against the forces of change and sanitation that were cleaning up the city, street by street. Political agitation would only send them back to prison – and Silas wasn’t going to betray George’s memory with actions like that.

Things take a turn for the worse when a shadowy group blow up a sewer under construction. Arthur comes home covered in filth and with a serious fever, claiming he was drunk and fell into the river. Silas is suspicious and argues with Arthur, but the two make up and lay on a party to celebrate their dead brother’s birthday. It is at the party that one of their ex-workers, a drunk called White, turns up to cause trouble, accusing Arthur of taking part in the sewer sabotage. It seems that everything is slipping away from Silas’ grasp. He dreams he is following his dead brother through the cholera dens of the city. Brown’s descriptions lift the scene into a nightmare of poverty and disease: ‘A scrawny furrier sitting by an unglazed window sewing unspeakable pelts together – the nightmarish furs of cats and dogs lifting themselves to stand and screech beneath his bony fingers.’

Silas decides he will work for the guano importers and is offered a position. He still hasn’t told his brother when they embark on what is be their last shift as night mechanics. But their cart loses a wheel and while they are waiting for a replacement, a train passes. Silas is swept up in a moment of ‘rushing excitement’, but this is no passenger train. The wagons are carrying guano.

In the next week, the trial of the man caught after the explosion at the sewer takes place. Arthur is in the crowd outside as the man is declared guilty and transported for life. In a rare switch of point of view, we see the whole episode through Arthur’s eyes. There is a riot, Arthur is caught up and sentenced to be transported to Australia. Attending a dinner given by his new employer, Silas falls into a reverie and dreams that his long-lost brother George takes him to see Arthur in the misery of the prison hulk. The novel ends with Silas emptying his own cesspit one final time in a seeming attempt at redemption.

In the afterword, Brown describes how he was encouraged to read Dickens’ complete works. The portrayals of Victorian London in The Night Mechanic are as visceral and powerful as many of those conjured by Dickens. But Brown’s writing is his own, the novel’s spare telling channelling Brown’s expertise as a poet. This is a novel which brings together issues of poverty, social change and environmental pollution. Powerfully written, it deserves to be widely read.

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Hugh Dunkerley is Professor of Literature and Environment at The University of Chichester. His poems and stories have appeared in The London Magazine, as well as in other publications. His most recent poetry collection is Kin (Cinnamon Press, 2019).


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