Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth by Lee Jackson (review)

Cultural studies of filth in all its forms have abounded in recent years, both in academic and popular contexts, encapsulated in the Wellcome Trust’s 2011 exhibition Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life. The dirt of the past—be it rubbish, sewage, smoke, dead bodies, or slums—exerts a fascination because so much of it has been banished from sight—and smell—leaving our (Western) cities sanitized, but arguably anodyne, environments in comparison to what they once were. Yet, as academic studies like Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (2004) and Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2008) have demonstrated, interest in filth isn’t only indicative of nostalgia for dirt; rather, it can lead to a questioning of the cultural basis of what constitutes the social in many different contexts. As Mary Douglas’s seminal study Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) demonstrated, dirt is not an inherent categorization, but instead a concept that always belongs to a particular social system, namely, as a specific violation of the order of that system. Thus, studying dirt offers a window onto the ways in which the social is constructed.

In one sense, Lee Jackson’s Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth is exemplary in presenting a picture of how such categories of dirt were defined and managed in Victorian London, dealing, in turn, with wastes (ash, mud, rubbish, excrement, and corpses), bodies (washing and excretion), buildings (slum housing), disease (cholera and typhus), and pollution (smoke, soot, and general miasma). Each of the chapters is structured around an introduction charting—in often horrific detail—the reality of filth in Victorian London (whether the effects of overflowing cesspools, blocked sewers, saturated graveyards, unwashed bodies and houses, or polluting fogs). These vividly descriptive passages are then offset by a concomitant focus on the ways in which London’s administrators and reformers responded in their attempts to address varying aspects of this all-pervasive filth (some more successfully than others). Throughout, there is a consistent attention to detail—evidence of meticulous archival research on the part of the author—as well as many instances of Jackson’s acute eye for the eccentric or the overlooked: for example, the fact that an Englishman abroad could always be recognized by his turned-up trousers, a response to dealing with often ankle-deep mud in London’s streets; or the city’s vestrymen paying visits to particular walls to establish whether they stank sufficiently to merit the construction of a public urinal (29, 159). Such details do not merely entertain, but also add a rich level of interest to the text that is often missing from drier academic accounts. Indeed, Jackson’s flowing prose emphasizes the materiality of filth in Victorian London, and its visceral qualities that so preoccupied those who tried to face up to it.

As one would expect from a popular account, Dirty Old London doesn’t contribute directly to any theoretical readings of this subject; but, in relation to Victorian London, these have already been fleshed out in detail in David L. Pike’s Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (2005) and Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (2000). Yet, despite its overt emphasis on description rather than analysis, there are points where the book resonates with the current politics of neoliberalism (London being an exemplar of how many world cities are being transformed today by a super-rich elite). Throughout the book, Jackson emphasizes just how many of the environmental problems that dogged Victorian London—whether piles of waste matter, clogged sewers and cesspools, mud-choked streets, or soot-saturated air—were created by an administrative system that placed profits above the interests of the public. The gradual—and often uneven—shift from a London governed by vested interests to one overseen by officials who emphasized public interests is...