Healthy Boundaries: Property, Law and Public Health in England and Wales, 1815–1872 by James G. Hanley (review)

In this important new book, James Hanley recovers a key aspect of nineteenth-century sanitary reform: the importance of legal and financial disputes regarding the limits and liabilities of private property, and how, ultimately, these disputes helped to forge a new and more expansive sense of “public health.” In some respects, Hanley’s work is very much in the mold of recent revisionist studies—Christopher Hamlin’s chief among these—which have sought to recover the politics and contingency of what was achieved at mid-century, moving beyond older paradigms of a necessary shift towards more “collectivist” forms of statecraft. ¹As Hanley notes early on, there was nothing inevitable about the municipalization of sewers; private provision was a real, if infrequently pursued, option for nineteenth-century towns. Likewise, he is keen to unpack the often subtle ideological transformations that accompanied the otherwise grubby technical work of assembling sewerage systems. What distinguishes Hanley’s account is the level and intensity of his analytical–archival gaze, which is resolutely trained on the local and the legal, and more especially on the intricacies of forming bylaws, administering rates, and redefining the rationale of fiscal impositions—a set of concerns that have been neglected in a great deal of recent (and often Foucault-inspired) scholarship on Victorian public health. The only comparable work is Leslie Rosenthal’s study of river pollution, published in 2014, which also deals with the complex interrelations of property, law and public health. ²

The opening two chapters begin in the 1810s and 1820s, meaning that the book pays welcome attention to pre-Chadwickian initiatives. The first chapter deals with bylaws and early efforts to reformulate “nuisances” as health hazards, prior to their statutory codification in 1846; the second with local struggles to redefine the benefits of drainage and sewerage schemes in terms of public health, and to redistribute their costs accordingly, across the wider rate-paying community. It is this problem that is further explored in the next two chapters, which deal with provincial developments following the advent of Chadwick’s General Board of Health in 1848, and those in the capital under the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) formed in in 1855. The fifth and final chapter examines legal struggles to define and regulate the health of private homes and common lodgers.

We all know that Victorian sanitary reform was forged in bureaucratic and parliamentary struggles. What Hanley demonstrates with rare clarity—not to mention archival rigour; the endnotes occupy almost as many pages as the main text—is that sanitary reform was just as much a product of localized legal battles over the rates, and who did and did not “benefit” from drains and sewers. It is not only that Hanley rereads key developments; he also presents entirely new and unexpected ones. Epsom’s local board of health, for instance, formed in 1851, emerges as an unlikely pioneer: it was the first provincial board to establish (in court) the principle that all ratepayers in a given district, whether they benefitted directly or not from sanitary improvements, should be subject to the same levels of taxation. Analogous innovations occurred in London, where eventually metropolitan-wide, equalized rating prevailed, helping to fund Joseph Bazalgette’s ambitious Main Drainage Scheme. These changes amounted to a remarkable reformulation of the function of taxation, besides embedding the idea that everyone, no matter how poor, had a right to health. As Hanley writes, equalized rates reflected the “conviction that the benefits of drainage, especially health, accrued to people, not property, including and perhaps especially people who were not direct rate-payers” (p. 110).

It is frustrating that Hanley does not offer a more ambitious conclusion, not least in relation to the importance of legal disputes and the courts as a means of reframing the rationality of “public health” and the...