The Citizen's Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (review)

If one of the goals of Pamela Gilbert's prolific output over the past decade or so is to convince us that health and disease were central concerns of the Victorian period, then she has surely succeeded. Her books, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels (1997), Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004), and now The Citizen's Body and its companion volume, Cholera and Nation (2008), trace the ways in which understandings of disease shaped personal experience, urban space, middle-class behaviors, and public institutions in the nineteenth century. In The Citizen's Body, which examines the relationship between definitions of the healthy body and what she calls "citizenship," she argues that determining someone's "fitness for citizenship" (3) became especially important in the period between the 1832 and 1867 reform acts, when new criteria were needed for assessing a person's right to participate in government. For Gilbert, the mid-Victorian political and philosophical conception of the liberal individual was inseparable from the material, physical, and physiological concerns of the body. The ideal citizen not only possessed but also embodied desirable values through self-containment, cleanliness, and good hygiene. Further, as Gilbert asserts, the process of demonstrating these qualities took place in the social sphere, an increasingly significant arena that mediated between public, political spaces and private, domestic ones.

In section I, she situates her subject historically, observing that after 1832, in an era that looked forward to an expanding franchise, many asked what might be expected of those with the right to vote—what qualities or values might be roughly equivalent to the requirement of property ownership? One needed to demonstrate that one was educated, responsible, rational, and self-contained; as Gilbert asserts, this last quality was the most crucial and complex, entailing not only the containment of desires but also the containment and control of one's body and bodily functions. One's moral condition was linked to one's physical condition. Thus, when middle-class observers deemed the lower echelons of the working classes unsuited for inclusion among the voting populace, they often turned to the rhetoric of disease and sanitation to make their point. The broader outlines of this argument will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read James Phillips Kay or edwin Chadwick, but Gilbert's treatment of this issue, especially her examination of a range of primary sources, shows just how pervasive, accepted, and long-lived that rhetoric was.

An ability to recognize the distinctions between public and private was crucial to the development of the qualities expected of these new citizens, and the role of housing and domesticity in reinforcing those distinctions is the subject of section II. The ideal home was both the prerequisite and the model for respectable self-containment, for, like the home, the healthy body was clean and well aerated, removing wastes efficiently and maintaining privacy. Her treatment of these social reform documents looks beyond the more obvious sanitary horrors that have usually drawn critical attention and yields some unexpected readings as a result. The Citizen's Body considers, for example, George Godwin's commentary about the small signs of domestic effort or aesthetic taste that appear in some working-class homes as well as the incongruous turn to poetry or literary allusion that sometimes occurs in these works. An examination of Octavia Hill's attempts to effect housing reform concludes section II. Here, Gilbert locates the continuities between Hill's domestic, familial role and her housing reform activities, and between the sympathy she expressed for the poor and her efforts to reeducate their desires, in a discussion that recuperates the importance of Hill's work while also registering its nuances and inconsistencies.

Section III extends the historical argument of the book's first two sections to literary analysis. An examination of Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845...