What is the first name of the person who told his friend that he could certify that the offensive smell have been of the most head-and-stomach distending nature?
By mid-1858 the problems with the Thames had been building for several years. In his  novel Little Dorrit—published as a serial between 1855 and 1857—Charles Dickens wrote that the Thames was "a deadly sewer ... in the place of a fine, fresh river". In a letter to a friend, Dickens  said: "I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature", while the social scientist and journalist George Godwin wrote that "in parts the deposit is more than six feet deep" on the Thames foreshore, and that "the whole of this is thickly impregnated with impure matter". In June 1858 the temperatures in the shade in London averaged 34–36 °C (93–97 °F)—rising to 48 °C (118 °F) in the sun. Combined with an extended spell of dry weather, the level of the Thames dropped and raw effluent from the sewers remained on the banks of the river. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attempted to take a pleasure cruise on the Thames, but returned to shore within a few minutes because the smell was so terrible. The press soon began calling the event "The Great Stink"; the leading article in the City Press observed that "Gentility of speech is at an end—it stinks, and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it". A writer for The Standard concurred with the opinion. One of its reporters described the river as a "pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination", while a second wrote that "the amount of poisonous gases which is thrown off is proportionate to the increase of the sewage which is passed into the stream". The leading article in The Illustrated London News commented that:
We can colonise the remotest ends of the earth; we can conquer India; we can pay the interest of the most enormous debt ever contracted; we can spread our name, and our fame, and our fructifying wealth to every part of the world; but we cannot clean the River Thames.
Charles