Cleansing the city : sanitary geographies in Victorian London / Michelle Allen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allen, Michelle Elizabeth.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. Our mutual friend.

Dickens, Charles.

Gissing, George, 1857-1903. Nether world.

Gissing, George.

Hygiene--England--London--History--19th century.

Hygiene.

Public health--England--London--History--19th century.

Public health.

Urban health--England--London--History--19th century.

Urban health.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (238 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

The London sewer: purification and the experience of urban disorder

"Thames fever": the contest for the river in the metropolitan imagination

A more expansive reach: the geography of the Thames in Our mutual friend

No space for the poor: disillusionment with reform in the 1880s

Intransigence and limited mobility: competing geographies in the Nether world.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-215) and index.

ISBN:

0-8214-4253-8

OCLC:

607873988