one power plant or steel mill or nuclear processing station of today, would far out weigh the effect of horse droppings of the 1800's.

But not ten thousand coal fires, which is what London had to cope with.

How many cases were there in the 1800's of babies being born with no arms, or other horrific birth defects, or horrible cancerous tumours cropping up in the inhabitants of towns that just "happended" to be down river of a chemical plant ?

Do you really want a list? You could look at St Helen's in Lancashire, whose glass-blowing industry of the seventeenth century onwards blew neat fluorine into the atmophere and blackened the countryside for miles around. Even then, the area around Biringham was known as the "Black country", because mineral extraction and processing is the most polluting, poisonous activity that mankind has ever indulged in. Even Ozti the Iceman had copper poisoning his bones. Romans in the city of Bath got lead poisoning from their drainpipes.

These things did exist.

] ( I hope this doesn't seem to "political" for board supervisors. I am trying to express an opinion on environmental matters of the 1800's, not make a political statement, which I know is frowned upon here )

Point taken. However, I must say that your 'opinion', which you are expressing as 'facts' of the environment is perhpas too rosy. There have always been some parts of the earth that have been made hideous by man's activities. I could give you a list of locally-polluting industries all over JA's England. But what would be the point? She didn't write about them, so let's not bother, either.

] I have read Bleak House but I don't think is is fair to compare lifestyles during Dickens time and Jane Austens.

I agree. We invented the phrase 'V-word' for the idea that JA and Dickens lived in the same environment. And we don't discuss Dickens here, because he's largely irrelevant to understanding JA's time.