If a cockney Rip Van Winkle were to revisit his old haunts, the changes produced by the introduction of gas would probably surprise him the most of all he would see. He would be astonished to find respectable people, and even unprotected females, going alone, unarmed and without fear, at night, up the by-streets which in his days were deemed so dangerous, and he would soon perceive that the bright gaslights had done more than all the laws, the magistrates, and the police, to drive out those crimes which can only flourish in darkness. The intimate connection between physical light and moral and intellectual light and progress is a subject well worthy of an exhaustive treatise.
We must, however, drop the general subject and come down to our particular paraffin lamp. In the first place, this is the cheapest light that has ever been invented—cheaper than any kind of oil lamp—cheaper than the cheapest and nastiest of candles, and, for domestic purposes, cheaper than gas. For large warehouses, shops, streets, public buildings, etc., it is not so cheap as gas should be, but is considerably cheaper than gas actually is at the price extorted by the despotism of commercial monopoly.
The reason why it is especially cheaper for domestic purposes is, first, because the small consumer of gas pays a higher price than the large consumer; and secondly, because a lamp can be placed on a table or wherever else its light is required, and therefore a small lamp flame will do the work of a much larger gas flame. We must remember that the intensity of light varies inversely with the square of the distance from the source of light; thus the amount of light received by this page from a light at one foot distance is four times as great as if it were two feet distant, nine times as great as at three feet, sixteen times as great as at four feet, one hundred times as great as at ten feet, and so on. Hence the necessity of two or three great flames in a gas chandelier suspended from the ceiling of a moderate-sized room.
In a sitting-room lighted thus with gas, we are obliged, in order to read comfortably by the distant source of light, to burn so much gas that the atmosphere of the room is seriously polluted by the products of this extravagant combustion. A lamp at a moderate distance—say eighteen inches or two feet, or thereabouts—will enable us to read or work with one-tenth to one-twentieth the amount of combustion, and therefore with so much less vitiation of the atmosphere, and, if we use a paraffin lamp, at much less expense.
But the chief value of the paraffin lamp is felt where gas is not obtainable—in the country mansion or villa, the farmhouse, and, most of all, in the poor man’s cottage. We have Bible Societies for providing cheap Bibles; we have cheap standard works, cheap magazines, cheap newspapers, etc.; but all these are unavailable to the poor man until he can get a good and cheap light wherewith to read them at the only time he has for reading, viz., in the evenings, when his work is done. One shilling’s worth of cheap literature will require two shillings’ worth of dear candles to supply the light necessary for reading it. Therefore, the cheapening of light has quite as much to do with the poor man’s intellectual progress as the cheapening of books and periodicals.
For a man to read comfortably, and his wife to do her needlework, they must have a candle for each, if dependent on tallow dips. They may, and do, struggle on with one such candle, but the inconvenience soon sickens them of their occupation; the man lolls out for an idle stroll, soon encounters a far more bright and cheerful room than the gloomy one he has just left, and, moth-like, he is attracted by the light, and finishes up his evening in the public-house.
We may preach, we may lecture, we may coax, wheedle, or anathematize, but no amount of words of any kind will render a gloomy ill-lighted cottage so attractive as the bright bar and tap-room; and human nature, irrespective of conventional distinctions of rank and class, always seeks cheerfulness after a day of monotonous toil. Fifty years ago the middle classes were accustomed to spend their evenings in taverns, but now they prefer their homes, simply because they have learned to make their homes more comfortable and attractive.
We have not yet learned how to supply the working millions with suburban villas, but if their small rooms can be made bright and cheerful during the long evenings, a most important step is made towards that general improvement of social habits which necessarily results from a greater love of home. We may safely venture to predict that the paraffin lamp will have as much influence in elevating the domestic character of the poorer classes as the street lamps have had in purging the streets of our cities from the crimes of darkness that once infested them.
A great deal has been said about the poisonous character of paraffin works. I admit that they have much to answer for in reference to trout—that the clumsy and wasteful management of certain ill-conducted works has interfered with the sport of the anglers of one or two of the trout streams of the United Kingdom—but all the assertions that have been made relative to injury to human health are quite contrary to truth.
The fact is that the manufacture of mineral oils from cannel and shale is an unusually healthful occupation. The men certainly have dirty faces, but are curiously exempt from those diseases which are most fatal among the poor. I allude to typhus fever, and all that terrible catalogue of ills usually classed under the head of zymotic diseases. This has been strikingly illustrated in the Flintshire district. The very sudden development of the oil trade in the neighborhood of Leeswood caused that little village and the scattered cottages around to be crowded to an extent that created the utmost alarm among all who are familiar with the results of such overcrowding in poor, ill-drained, and ill-ventilated cottages. Rooms were commonly filled with lodgers who economized the apartments on the Box and Cox principle, the night workers sleeping during the day, and the day workers during the night, in the same beds. The extent to which this overcrowding was carried in many instances is hardly credible.
Mr. R. Platt, who is surgeon to most of the collieries and oilworks of this district, reports that Leeswood has enjoyed a singular immunity from typhus and fever—that, during a period when it was prevalent as a serious epidemic among the agricultural population living on the slopes of the surrounding mountains, no single case occurred among the oil-making population of Leeswood, though its position and overcrowding seemed so directly to court its visitation. If space permitted I might give further illustrations in reference to allied diseases.
There is no difficulty in accounting for this. Carbolic acid, one of the most powerful of our disinfectants, is abundantly produced in the oilworks, and this is carried by the clothes of the men, and with the fumes of the oil, into the dwellings of the workmen and through all the atmosphere of the neighborhood, and has thereby counteracted some of the most deadly agencies of organic poisons. Besides this, the paraffin oil itself is a good disinfectant.
Even the mischief done to the trout is more than counterbalanced by the destruction of those mysterious fungoid growths which result from the admixture of sewage matter with the water of our rivers, and are so destructive to human health and life. The carbolic acid and paraffin oil, in destroying these as well as the trout, are really acting as great purifiers of the river, so that, after all, the only interest that has suffered is the sporting interest. This same interest has otherwise suffered. The old haunts of the snipe and woodcock, of partridges, hares, and pheasants, are being ruthlessly and barbarously destroyed, and—horrible to relate—hundreds of cottages, inhabited by vulgar, hard-handed, thick-booted human beings, are taking their place. Churches are being extended, school-houses and chapels built; penny readings, lectures, concerts, etc., are in active operation, and even drinking fountains are in course of construction; but the trout have suffered and the woodcocks are gone.
We may thus measure the good against the evil as it stands here in the headquarters of oil-making, and should add to one side the advantages which the cheap and brilliant light affords—advantages which we might continue