In the better-constructed sewers there are no rats. In the old sewers they abound. The sewer rat is the ordinary house or brown rat, excepting at the outlets near the river, and here the water-rat is seen.
The sewer-rat is the common brown or Hanoverian rat, said by the Jacobites to have come in with the first George, and established itself after the fashion of his royal family; and undoubtedly such was about the era of their appearance. One man, who had worked twelve years in the sewers before flushing was general, told me he had never seen but two black (or old English) rats; another man, of ten years’ experience, had seen but one; others had noted no difference in the rats. I may observe that in my inquiries as to the sale of rats (as a part of the live animals dealt in by a class in the metropolis), I ascertained that in the older granaries, where there were series of floors, there were black as well as brown rats. “Great black fellows,” said one man who managed a Bermondsey granary, “as would frighten a lady into asterisks to see of a sudden.”
The rat is the only animal found in the sewers. I met with no flusherman or other sewer-worker who had ever seen a lizard, toad, or frog there, although the existence of these creatures, in such circumstances, has been presumed. A few live cats find their way into the subterranean channels when a house-drain is being built, or is opened for repairs, or for any purpose, and have been seen by the flushermen, &c., wandering about, looking lost, mewing as if in misery, and avoiding any contact with the sewage. The rats also—for they are not of the water-rat breed—are exceedingly averse to wetting their feet, and “take to the sewage,” as it was worded to me, only in prospect of danger; that is, they then swim across or along the current to escape with their lives. It is said that when a luckless cat has ventured into the sewers, she is sometimes literally worried by the rats. I could not hear of such an attack having been witnessed by any one; but one intelligent and trustworthy man said, that a few years back (he believed about eight years) he had in one week found the skeletons of two cats in a particular part of an old sewer, 21 feet wide, and in the drains opening into it were perfect colonies of rats, raging with hunger, he had no doubt, because a system of trapping, newly resorted to, had prevented their usual ingress into the houses up the drains. A portion of their fur adhered to the two cats, but the flesh had been eaten from their bones. About that time a troop of rats flew at the feet of another of my informants, and would no doubt have maimed him seriously, “but my boots,” said he, “stopped the devils.” “The sewers generally swarms with rats,” said another man. “I runs away from ’em; I don’t like ’em. They in general gets away from us; but in case we comes to a stunt end where there’s a wall and no place for ’em to get away, and we goes to touch ’em, they fly at us. They’re some of ’em as big as good-sized kittens. One of our men caught hold of one the other day by the tail, and he found it trying to release itself, and the tail slipping through his fingers; so he put up his left hand to stop it, and the rat caught hold of his finger, and the man’s got an arm now as big as his thigh.” I heard from several that there had been occasionally battles among the rats, one with another.
“Why, sir,” said one flusherman, “as to the number of rats, it ain’t possible to say. There hasn’t been a census (laughing) taken of them. But I can tell you this—I was one of the first flushermen when flushing came in general—I think it was before Christmas, 1847, under Mr. Roe—and there was cart-loads and cart-loads of drowned rats carried into the Thames. It was in a West Strand shore that I saw the most. I don’t exactly remember which, but I think Northumberland-street. By a block or a hitch of some sort, there was, I should say, just a bushel of drowned rats stopped at the corner of one of the gates, which I swept into the next stream. I see far fewer drowned rats now than before the shores was flushed. They’re not so plenty, that’s one thing. Perhaps, too, they may have got to understand about flushing, they’re that ’cute, and manage to keep out of the way. About Newgate-market was at one time the worst for rats. Men couldn’t venture into the sewers then, on account of the varmint. It’s bad enough still, I hear, but I haven’t worked in the City for a few years.”
The rats, from the best information at my command, do not derive much of their sustenance from the matter in the sewers, or only in particular localities. These localities are the sewers neighbouring a connected series of slaughter-houses, as in Newgate-market, Whitechapel, Clare-market, parts adjoining Smithfield-market, &c. There, animal offal being (and having been to a much greater extent five or six years ago) swept into the drains and sewers, the rats find their food. In the sewers, generally, there is little food for them, and none at all in the best-constructed sewers, where there is a regular and sometimes rapid flow, and little or no deposit.
The sewers are these animals’ breeding grounds. In them the broods are usually safe from the molestation of men, dogs, or cats. These “breeding grounds” are sometimes in the holes (excavated by the industry of the rats into caves) which have been formed in the old sewers by a crumbled brick having fallen out. Their nests, however, are in some parts even more frequent in places where old rotting large house-drains or smaller sewers, empty themselves into a first-class sewer. Here, then, the rats breed, and, in spite of precautions, find their way up the drains or pipes, even through the openings into water-closets, into the houses for their food, and almost always at night. Of this fact, builders, and those best informed, are confident, and it is proved indirectly by what I have stated as to the deficiency of food for a voracious creature in all the sewers except a few. One man, long in the service of the Commissioners of Sewers, and in different capacities, gave me the following account of what may be called a rat settlement. The statement I found confirmed by other working men, and by superior officers under the same employment.
“Why, sir, in the Milford-lane sewer, a goodish bit before you get to the river, or to the Strand—I can’t say how far, a few hundred yards perhaps—I’ve seen, and reported, what was a regular chamber of rats. If a brick didn’t fall out from being rotted, the rats would get it out, and send it among other rubbish into the sewer, for this place was just the corner of a big drain. I couldn’t get into the rat-hole, of course not, but I’ve brought my lamp to the opening, and—as well as others—have seen it plain. It was an open place like a lot of tunnels, one over another. Like a lot of rabbit burrows in the country—as I’ve known to be—or like the partitions in the pigeon-houses: one here and another there. The rat-holes, as far as I could tell, were worked one after another. I should say, in moderation, that it was the size of a small room; well, say about 6 yards by 4. I can’t say about the height from the lowest tunnel to the highest. I don’t see that any one could. Bless you, sir, I’ve sometimes heerd the rats fighting and squeaking there, like a parcel of drunken Irishmen—I have indeed. Some of them were rare big fellows. If you threw the light of your lamp on them sudden, they’d be off like a shot. Well, I should say, there was 100 pair of rats there—there might be more, besides all their young-uns. If a poor cat strayed into that sewer, she dursn’t tackle the rats, not she. There’s lots of such places, sir, here, and there, and everywhere.”
“I believe rats,” says a late enthusiastic writer on the subject, under the cognomen of Uncle James, “to be one of the most fertile causes of national and universal distress, and their attendants, misery and starvation.”
From the author’s inquiries among practical men, and from his own study of the natural history of the rat, he shows that these animals will have six, seven, or eight nests of young in the year, for three or four years together; that they have from twelve to twenty-three at a litter, and breed at three months old; and that there are more female than male rats, by ten to six.
The author seems somewhat of an enthusiast about rats, and as the sewerage is often the head-quarters of these animals—their “breeding-ground” indeed—I extract the following curious matter. He says:—