Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian LondonCleansing 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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 43
Page 2
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page 9
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page 10
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page 14
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Page 16
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
Contents
The Sanitary City | 1 |
The London Sewer | 24 |
Thames Fever | 54 |
A More Expansive Reach | 86 |
No Space for the Poor | 115 |
Intransigence and Limited Mobility | 140 |
Afterword | 168 |
Notes | 177 |
203 | |
217 | |
Other editions - View all
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London Michelle Elizabeth Allen No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
appears associated become Board Builder buildings central century cesspool chapter characters Charles clear clearances Clerkenwell Commission condition connection construction context course courts critical crowded cultural danger death degradation describes Dickens different discussion disease domestic drainage drains effect Embankment environment experience explains expressed fact filth find first follow forces Friend George Gissing Gissing’s helped housing human idea illustration imagined important improvement individual inhabitants instance John kind labor less limits living Lizzie London look March material Mayhew meanings metropolis Metropolitan moral movement Mutual novel physical picturesque played pollution poor population poverty problem provides recognize reflects refuse Report representation represents response river role sanitary reform scene seems seen sewage sewer sewerage significant slum social space spatial street suggests Thames tion town turn University Press urban Victorian vision waste