Within Virginia Woolf's Orlando she refers to London's great stink in the end of the fourth chapter, "...London, was a stark gallows tree, with a corpse nailed to rot or patch on its cross; for danger and insecurity, lust and violence, poetry and filth swarmed over the torturous Elizabethan highways and buzzed and stank--Orlando could remember even now the smell if them on the hot night," (224-225). The language describes the summer in London to remembered for its unbearable smell. This graphic reference is towards the summer of 1858 that Parliament was forced to deal with the issue of plumbing, as temperatures rose the waste left across the city slowly began to strangle the citizens. The smell of sewage became unbearable due to almost 2 million Londoners' human waste poured into the Thames river. The summer temperatures reached a high of 35 degrees celsius (95 degrees fahrenheit). Due to the conditions it became a newsworthy event, and is still remembered as the Great Stink of 1858. Orlando shared at the end of the fourth chapter how she could remember the smell even till that moment. It wasn't remedied completely until the year 1859 according to history.co.uk, and took many different chemicals poured straight into the water supply in order for the smell to go away. This made the river the most polluted in the world. The sewage system that was created due to this issue is still in place in London today!  (245)