Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (review)

In recent years, environmental historians have paid increasing attention to the history of air pollution. Alongside growing academic interest there has also been a rising awareness among public health practitioners about the importance of a better understanding of this complex subject. After all, it is through improved knowledge of historical developments in air pollution that the foundations can be laid for effective national policy and for appropriate local public health actions.

Peter Thorsheim's new book, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800, is an invaluable addition to the field. Published by Ohio University Press as part of their series in ecology and history, the book is well researched, clearly written and, importantly, eminently readable.

Early on, Thorsheim indicates that his book tells the story of how people in Britain, in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, came to understand coal smoke as pollution and to understand pollution as an entity that could be regulated by the state. Air pollution was created as a visible problem that could be addressed, although there were other serious concerns related to industrialization.

In chapters one and two, Thorsheim explains that until the late nineteenth century smoke was largely thought of as benign, and miasma—rather than smoke—was believed to be responsible for illness and death. Putrefying organic matter, along with rotting sewage, polluted the air as miasma, which could be smelled but not seen. Visible smoke was perceived as a fumigant to neutralize miasma.

Thorsheim argues that toward the end of the nineteenth century pollution was gradually redefined, and there was a conflated understanding of fog (originating from miasma) with coal smoke. This redefinition reflected an overlap, or interaction, between the rising acceptance of the germ theory of disease and an enduring belief in the causal role of environmental conditions in health. The change gave reformers a renewed focus for their endeavors to abolish smoke.

The middle chapters of the book take thematic areas and explore them in relation to the book's overarching argument. In chapter four, there is an interesting examination of concerns about the damage caused by coal smoke in a period of rapid industrialization, and about the scope of nature's restorative abilities. Gladstone's religiously based critique of air pollution is contrasted with the belief of others that dominion over nature is inevitable. A fascinating example is given of the increase in urban black moths in the late nineteenth century, and how, by the Second World War, almost no light moths apparently existed—a transition that had been reversed by the 1980s.

Chapter five explores the relationship between pollution and civilization—anxieties about progress undermining civilization and ambivalence about human urban sustainability. The natural environment was thought to exert moral rectitude, and erosion of nature might be associated with moral decline. The following chapter continues by looking at the idea of degeneration, and how degeneration in nature might run parallel to human degeneration. One possible criticism of these middle chapters is that although each could stand alone as a good essay, their rapid changes in topic cause the book to jump around somewhat.

The later chapters provide more contemporary history. Chapter seven sets out an excellent account of the changing nature of environmental activism. It also addresses the complexity of scientific aspects of the smoke pollution debate. In chapter eight, Thorsheim reviews the ineffectiveness of smoke pollution legislation through the nineteenth century. Chapter nine describes the changing nature of pollution in relation to the search for alternative sources of heat and power, while chapters ten and eleven cover more familiar territory: from the so-called great smog of 1952 to smokeless zones and the Clean Air Acts. By the 1970s, the air was virtually free of coal smoke. But herein lies the rub. Coal smoke may no longer be a significant...