The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (review)

The Chimney of the World is a thorough history of smoke generated by the combustion of coal in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Manchester, the city John Ruskin called "the spiritual home of smoke" (p. 1). The book is divided into three sections: "The Nature of Smoke," "Stories about Smoke," and "The Search for Solutions." The latter has two short subsections that set out to examine the technological responses to smoke. Historians of technology may be disappointed that Stephen Mosley does not delve very extensively into the attempts to abate smoke nor into technical explanations of why these were not successful. Writing such a book was not, however, Mosley's intention, so he should not be faulted for this shortcoming.

What Mosley does intend is to position his study as an environmental history, and in this he succeeds admirably. In a brief introduction he notes that until recently historians have asserted that nineteenth-century industrial cities, and most notably Manchester, were so exceedingly smokey because people had not yet become sufficiently indignant to do anything about it. Mosley's research shows that there was actually vociferous and widespread indignation over Manchester's smokey atmosphere, but that powerful countervailing forces militated against effective abatement. The result was more than a century of some of the most notorious air pollution in the industrial world.

In the introduction, Mosley observes that one could characterize his three sections as being about nature, stories, and responses, respectively. He cautions that the reader should not conclude that he is developing the usual sort of nature/culture dichotomy. Rather, he sees each of those themes as interrelated facets of the story of Manchester's industrialization. Accordingly, he explores Manchester residents' evolving experience of smoke, their assessments of its positive or negative values, and their ever more complex understandings of what could or could not be done about it.

Mosley's middle section—"Stories about Smoke"—is particularly well done. He observes that there is nothing inevitable about popular opposition to smoke. For people to conclude that a smokey environment is not desirable or necessary, and then decide to try to take action to abate it, they had to counter ideas deriving from smoke's positive associations. Smoke meant work and livelihoods; no smoke meant no work and therefore misery. The English also associated smoke with good feelings about hearth and home, and some people even believed that it was a disinfectant and therefore a curative for diseases.

Early in Manchester's industrialization, though, residents also began to recognize burdens that smoke imposed, especially on housewives trying to keep households and clothes clean. They saw that soot and chemicals in smoke made Manchester's architecture look ugly and actually caused damage to buildings. They began to realize that smoke led to illness and death from respiratory ailments. And those with technical expertise recognized that smoke indicated inefficient combustion of coal and therefore represented waste. With a nod toward Mary Douglas's notion of dirt as "matter out of place," Mosley delineates the history through which people in Manchester came to believe that smoke meant something was amiss. He marshals a wonderful array of anecdotes, song lyrics, and cartoons of the period to document the ways in which people found meaning in smoke.

The third section of The Chimney of the World shows that people in Manchester were far from complacent about their smokey environment. It covers the technical, political, and legal measures they pursued in trying to rectify what many considered an untenable situation, and it also shows how the complexities of early industrialization, described in the second section, thwarted good intentions.