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

In this book, Michelle Allen revisits the much-discussed subject of the sanitary development of London in the nineteenth century. Yet, as she makes clear in her introduction, she goes against the grain of the existing literature on the subject by highlighting “some of the difficulties, discomfort, and fears associated not simply with pollution but also with purification— a process we are inclined to see as generally positive” (p. 2).With a focus on a wide range of primary source material—from anonymous newspaper and magazine articles to pamphlets by sanitarians and engineers to the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing—Allen charts an important strain of resistance to sanitary reform from the 1830s to the end of the century, focusing on three themes: the London sewer, the river Thames, and housing for the poor.

The book’s key strength is its questioning of the conventional story of the sanitary revolution over the course of the nineteenth century as broadly progressive —the gradual creation of “sanitary” cities being key to modernization in almost every biography of London, and with more sustained focus in Stephen Halliday’s The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (1999). Yet Cleansing the City also fits into an emerging body of literature that questions more broadly the negative connotations of dirt in Victorian London and its associated subjects: sewers in David 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); architecture in my article “Architecture, Ornament and Excrement: The Crossness and Abbey Mills Pumping Stations” in the Journal of Architecture 12 (September 2007); literature, maps, and theater in William Cohen and Ryan Johnson’s edited collection Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (2005); and prostitution, suburbanization, and cartography in Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox’s edited collection Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2007).

What Allen’s book contributes to this already-established field of literature is an expansive drawing-together of a rich variety of source material previously unconnected. Thus, chapter 2 deftly brings together a broad range of visual and verbal representations of the Thames Embankment before chapter 3 examines the same subject in Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend (1865). Likewise, chapter 4 charts disillusionment with reform in the 1880s before exploring this in more detail with reference to George Gissing’s novel The Nether World (1889). Unlike many literary historians, Allen manages to sustain a broad focus on social geography even in the midst of her detailed readings of these two works of literature. This serves to make connections across a broad sweep of time and an equally broad range of disparate sources.

However, there are some places where these connections seem, on the one hand, forced, or on the other, taken-for-granted. For example, in the section in the first chapter dealing with those who expressed resistance to London’s sewers, Allen exhibits a tendency to gloss over the specific contexts in which these voices were raised: in fact, many were not resisting sewer spaces in general, but rather a specific realization of them, namely the main drainage system, which was planned and constructed amid fierce debate in reformist/engineering communities about its moral and technical legitimacy. A second weakness is Allen’s inconsistent treatment of visual material, which should form a vital part of any reassessment of perceptions of sanitary reform in this period. Although drawing on a wide range of visual material —from newspaper illustrations to Gustave Doré’s celebrating engravings in London: A Pilgrimage (1872)—Allen nevertheless often uses these images as illustrations alongside her essential focus on textual sources, rather than offering a close analysis of them in their own right. A truly expansive treatment of perceptions of sanitary reform in Victorian London would treat images as rigorously as texts, and not only popular...