water in Jane Austen's time

I have relied on literature to inform me about human culture.  I am not a history buff but I have read quite a lot of ficiton, set in all kinds of eras.  But novels don't usually tell the reader about societal infrastructure.

Does Charles Dickens discuss how the London of his day dealt with human piss and feces? How London got drinking water to its inhabitants?

And how come I have never wondered about such things.

Now I am wondering. When Marianne falls in love with Willoughby, she and her family are newly coping with their severely reduced financial circumstances. The father died and a half brother from an early marriage has inherited, leaving three daughters and a widow almost penniless. A rich, kind relative rents them a cottage for a nominal amount and they settle into severely reduced circumstances. Austen tells us about some of their domestic struggles. Once Willoughby gives Marianne a horse which she thoughtlessly accepts without considering that they have no barn to keep the horse and the family cannot afford to feed it, much less hire a groomsmen. And we read about the mother, who was rich all her life and never had to worry about frugality before, wanting to do things she can't afford. And we read about their gratitude when the kindly relative sends over baskets of food, a leg of an animal.

And there was no electricity.

I don't think Austen wrote much about the physical surroundings. When  her young women socialized in their endless pursuit of a husband who could support them, they are always gathering for dinners, dances, balls and parties.  Did humans of Austen's time go to balls in January, when it gets dark in late afternoon, that were lit only by candlelight? In my mind's eye, as I have read Jane Austen's work, the ball scenes and the evenings of ladies and gentlemen talking to one another after dinner are lit like such a scene would be lit in 2011. But when Elizabeth Bennet verbally jousted with Mr. Darcy, before she realized she was in love with him, if they were in a drawing room with a piano, a half dozen sofas, lots of single chairs, lots of little side tables to put down tea cups and room for roving servants and maybe a fire in the fireplace, the room must have been a little dark.

I don't think Austen has any of her characters excuse themselves to pee.

I'm just wondering:  how would Austen's stories be different if Austen had described the lighting for her readers?  I'd like to read what Austen had to say about how differently a young beauty might be seen at 10 p.m. in a large salon in a rich person's mansion versus 10 p.m. in the tiny sitting room of the parsonage.  Surely rich people had more candles and oil lamps? Surely lighting made a difference. 

And then we come to water.  I am aware, vaguely, that clear, clean water that I have always taken for granted was not univerally available to all humans in history.  In the Masterpiece Theater series Upstairs Downstairs, set in London in a time before cars and, at least in the beginning, predating electricity in houses, was water for the rich Upstairs crowd clean and clear? How did it get to people?  Was the servant class able to partake of the same water as the rich people?  Where did the water come from, how did it get distributed in a city and then in a house?  I know that humans, mostly servants, carried water within houses, but how did clean drinking water get to rich people's houses in Dicken's London?

I assume rich people used chamber pots to pee and poop and then servants emptied the chamber pots. Did the London of Upstairs Downstairs have a raw sewage system before there was such a thing as indoor plumbing?

I just watched Downton Abbey, a great new Masterpiece series set in England just before the beginning of WWI.  Downtown Abbey gets a phone installed during the first season of the show and one of the characters mentions how accepting electricity makes her feel like she is living in an H.G. Wells novel, which was a funny, well-written line, wasn't it?  I never would have expected the dowager Duchess who says the H.G.  Wells line to have ever read something like H.G. Wells. In fact, I wonder if the writers made a mistake with that very clever line. This particular character can be very fuddy-duddy, seeming to cling to tradition at all costs. There was a time when some in that upper class would have looked down upon ladies reading H. G. Wells.

I'd like to heat the dowager duchess character say something about drinking water. I guess houses had water pumps? and houses that didn't have water pumps hauled water.


thinking.