The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-7

Chapters 8-9

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Symbols & Motifs

The Night Soil Men

The “night soil men,” along with the “bone collectors” and the “mud larks,” were at once scavengers, recyclers, and sanitation workers. They found ways to profit off of the primitive sewage system and consequent overflowing filthiness that existed in Victorian-era London. Although their duties may seem degrading, they had a strict hierarchy of roles, with the “night soil men” at the top of the hierarchy and earning the most money.

While these are real figures in the book, they also have a symbolic significance. They illustrate a central theme of Johnson’s, which is the dynamism and creativity that exists by necessity in cities, even or especially among city-dwellers in wretched circumstances. Johnson later writes of dwellers in Third World shantytowns, who have learned to create their own highly efficient and ingenious networks due to the lack of any existing infrastructure. He draws an explicit parallel between these modern-day impoverished communities and the Victorian-era scavengers of the first chapter: “The scavengers of Victorian London have been reborn in the developed world, and their numbers are truly staggering” (216).

Cities as Ecosystems

In Chapter 1, Johnson refers to coral reefs as “the cities of the sea” (7). By this, he is referring to the highly concentrated system of waste and recycling that exists in coral reefs: a system that in turn supports a varied population of underwater life. He sees cities, for all of their sprawl and pollution, as supporting a similar diversity, due to a similarly concentrated recycling system: “There can be many causes behind extreme population density—whether the population is made up of angelfish or spider monkeys or humans—but without efficient forms of waste and recycling, those dense concentrations of life can’t last long” (7).

This is not the only time in the book when Johnson draws this parallel between cities and natural worlds. He sees cities as man-made entities, but he also sees them as their own ecosystems, with their own innate and self-supporting rituals of survival. These rituals take on a kind of automatic life of their own. In Chapter 4, Johnson states that “the great city, then, could not be understood as an artifact of human choice. It was much closer to a natural, organic process—less like a building that has been constructed and more like a garden erupting into full bloom with the arrival of spring [..]” (93).

During Victorian-era London, as Johnson writes, big cities were still relatively new and misunderstood. Many London residents tended to see their city as monstrous and as having a perverse will of its own. While this might seem a strange attitude to us now, it is also not so far-removed from Johnson’s own comparison of cities to gardens and coral reefs. In both cases, cities are understood to be dynamic living entities, and to rely on a collective “energy supply” (94)that is greater than any individual will.

Ghost Maps

The ghost map of the book’s title refers to a specific map: one that was designed and drawn by John Snow, in his efforts to prove the efficacy of his “waterborne” theory of cholera transmission. Johnson sees this map as groundbreaking and influential in its own right, paving the way for the specialized and collaborative internet maps of modern times, as well as for a more capacious understanding of cities and city living in general.

The map can also be understood to be symbolic, however, if one pays as much attention to the “ghost” as to the “map.” It can be understood to refer not only to the dead of the 1854 London cholera plague, but also to the unacknowledged dead of other plagues and epidemics, and beyond that to shadowy and marginal figures of all kinds (such as the aforementioned night soil men). Johnson wishes to shine a light on these figures, and to make the point that they deserve a place on a map as much as does any building or public monument.