Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers by Paul Dobraszczyk (review)

The rather melodramatic title of Paul Dobraszczyk’s study of the construction of the London main drainage system between 1848 and 1868 does justice neither to its scholarly rigor nor to the ambivalence toward the works captured in the leading argument. Rather than simply monstrous, the spaces of the drainage system were “understood . . . [in] different, and often contradictory ways” (14). Dobraszczyk is well aware that this argument has become a commonplace of scholarship on spatial representations of Victorian London (he cites in particular Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon [2000] and my book Subterranean Cities [2005]). Where Dobraszczyk has something new to offer is in the representations on which he focuses: the contract drawings for the sewer works; the wood engravings of the works done for London’s illustrated press; and the architecture of the pumping stations, which were the public face of the network otherwise out of sight beneath the ground. Exhaustively researched, beautifully illustrated, and carefully argued, Into the Belly of the Beast breaks no ground theoretically and adds little to the historical record, but it does provide welcome and reliable detail about a massive upheaval in the built environment of mid-century London.

Following a brief methodological introduction, the book is divided into three sections, “Planning,” “Construction,” and “Architecture,” each containing two chapters. One of the strengths of the book is Dobraszczyk’s dynamic use of his visual sources. For him, a map is never merely a source of information; it is always a visualization of space, and he is an adept reader of them. He begins the first chapter with the large-scale Ordnance Survey Map undertaken by Edwin Chadwick in order to plan a citywide sewage system. The aboveground map was then supplemented by a subterranean survey, which was combined with the prior map at the unprecedented scale of ten feet to one mile. The result successfully conceptualized above- and underground London within a single map; however, Dobraszczyk argues, the fragmented and decaying lines of the old sewer disturbed the unifying order of the Ordnance Survey. The following chapter addresses the figurative language underlying debates over the proposed improvements, in particular, Chadwick’s desire for a model of perfect circulation in which human waste would be recycled into fertilizer. When Joseph Bazalgette replaced Chadwick, becoming assistant surveyor to the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, he shifted priorities toward an intercepting system that prioritized the purification of the Thames. The clean flow of Bazalgette’s “vision of rationality cutting through and reorganizing the chaotic underground world of the city” trumped the “organic idealism” of Chadwick’s circulatory scheme (59, 45).

The third chapter analyzes the ways in which technical representations functioned in the construction of the main drainage system. Dobraszczyk is adept at demonstrating the dual function of these representations in guiding engineers and contractors and in providing the basis for the wood engravings of the popular press. Moreover, Bazalgette would use the contract drawings (fifty-one in total) to illustrate talks to specialized audiences and in public exhibitions. While it is predictable that the engravings tended to simplify technical notations and add the drama of human figures and topographical detail, it is fascinating to read that Bazalgette used color drawings when he presented the plans to the Board of Works. Dobraszczyk rightly suggests that color was an ornamental addition, for aesthetic or rhetorical purpose rather than utility. The main drainage works were never only utilitarian, nor were debates over planning and funding ever only practical. In the fourth chapter, Dobraszczyk addresses the function of the works as spectacle, drawing on work by Rosalind Williams and others on the industrial sublime. Rather than viewed in isolation, exaggerations of scale in the underground works would be paired on the newspaper page with calmer horizontal views at ground level, along with text that would educate the reader in the technical details of the works. At other moments, and in other illustrations, the works...