Cleansing the City — (2007)

Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London

By Michelle Allen

“Professor Allen is to be congratulated on rescuing those who had a pessimistic view of reform, or who opposed it in principle, from obscurity or the facile dismissal of scholars. She investigates what is clearly a powerful and recurring undercurrent in Victorian thought and elevates it into the mainstream.”

Anthony Wohl — author of Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain

Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London explores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove to clean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts. Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitary improvement, plunged into London’s dark and dirty spaces and returned with the material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificent projects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not always met with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slum clearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames, may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyed and reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings and experiences of the city.

From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazine articles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgic appreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomy in an era of networked sanitary services. Cleansing the City emphasizes the disruptions and disorientation occasioned by purification—a process we are generally inclined to see as positive. By recovering these sometimes oppositional, sometimes ambivalent responses, Michelle Allen elevates a significant undercurrent of Victorian thought into the mainstream and thus provides insight into the contested nature of sanitary modernization.