Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (review)

Cleansing the City is a fine example of the approaches championed by a “spatial turn” that has stimulated the humanities in the last decade and has started to make its way into studies of medicine and public health. Though covering much ground that will be very familiar to historians of the Victorian English sanitary movement, this book demonstrates the productive uses of critical historical geography. Michelle Allen brings some fresh interdisciplinary insights to the governmental and engineering revolution ushered in by Victorian sanitary technologies— especially how they interacted with and affected popular perceptions of London. One of her central themes is the contested character of sanitary reform. But in moving beyond an earlier historiography that focused on administrative and political conflicts or mortality and morbidity effects, Allen can explore the consequences of a concerted cultivation of cleanliness for the perceived and sensed texture of London.

Two main periodizations are made here: first, the emergence of a powerful sanitary discourse in the 1840–50s centered around the management of effluvial waste products, and second, the strains on this model in the 1870–80s, during which the attention of public health reform shifted to issues of housing the permanent underclass. Despite being somewhat awkwardly balanced (what other issues bridged the interregnum?), Allen establishes that the optimism of the first phase of environmental reform faded into a fatalism about the inherent hygienic and biological deficiencies of the mythical urban “residuum.” A chapter each is devoted to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864 –65) and Gissing’s The Nether World (1889). Both are fruitful sources with which to explore the spatially contested nature of river sanitation and model housing experiments, respectively. Allen marshals the “imaginative spaces” of the novel alongside “actual spaces” like Greenwich and Millbank, Clerkenwell and Crouch End, and their constituent embodiments of “place.”

What animates this book is Victorian Londoners’ clashing impressions of how space should be structured for everyday life. The “sense of place” created a crucial political dimension complicating public health building programs. Indeed, it was decisive for shaping a multitude of resistances to sweeping sanitary reconstructions (and destructions) in the meaning-dense fabric of the city. Exploring the place of the Thames in a broadly conceived public health discourse, for example, nicely supplements the continuing historical interest in sewers, the Great Stink, and the advent of the Embankment. Cleansing the City truly shines in its poignant attention to the river’s picturesque jumble and to contemporaries’ apologies for an aesthetics of decay—all of which collided against the sanitary movement’s orthodoxy of technical and material modernization. Allen recognizes the large body of literature that now exists on the Victorians’ anxieties of filth and (moral and physical) contamination. Her intriguing twist on this history is to draw attention to equally important “anxieties of purification” (via the critical cultural tradition of urban studies exemplified by Stallybrass and White’s Politics and Poetics of Transgression,¹ in which filth and purity are inseparable dyads in the structuralist game of meaning). Allen cogently argues that this was a key axis around which turned many conflicting spatializations of the Victorian metropolis.

This innovative engagement, however, is difficult to maintain consistently throughout. Much of the text is burdened with setting the stage of London sanitary reform: old hat to public health historians but perhaps not as well known in literary analysis fields. What fails to get much mention is the negotiation of spaces of the body and of buildings themselves. The management of vaccination, prostitution, and hospitals might fall in that interregnum of spatial imagining in the 1860s. Allen also makes bafflingly sparse mention of cholera epidemics and research—a topic with immense direct implications for London’s geographical imaginings, as shown by Pamela Gilbert.² Nonetheless, in its intended goal Cleansing the City applies...