The Iron Horse and the Iron Cow
Railways not only brought fresh, healthy food to the urban poor, they improved the conditions of working animals.
1861
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Railways not only brought fresh, healthy food to the urban poor, they improved the conditions of working animals.
1861
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
In the 1850s, London could not house enough cows for its population, so dairymen watered down their milk from cholera-infested roadside pumps, adding snails or sheep’s brains to thicken it (more). No legislation could have solved that dilemma of supply and demand. But railways did.
ONE of the most striking illustrations of the utility of railways in contributing to the supply of wholesome articles of food to the population of large cities, is to be found in the rapid growth of the traffic in Milk.
Readers of newspapers may remember the descriptions published some years since of the horrid dens in which London cows were penned, and of the odious compound sold by the name of milk, of which the least deleterious ingredient in it was supplied by the “cow with the iron tail.”*
That state of affairs is now completely changed.
What with the greatly improved state of the London dairies and the better quality of the milk supplied by them, together with the large quantities brought by railway from a range of a hundred miles and more all round London, even the poorest classes in the metropolis are now enabled to obtain as wholesome a supply of the article as the inhabitants of most country towns.
A reference to a short story in Charles Dickens’s ‘Household Words’ of November 9, 1850, in which a London dairyman was accused of adulterating milk with water from a street-side hand-pump (‘the cow with an iron tail’) and adding calves’ brains as a thickener.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What was ‘the cow with the iron tail’?