Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Londonexplores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove toclean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitaryimprovement, plunged into London's dark and dirty spaces and returned withthe material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificentprojects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not alwaysmet with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slumclearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames,may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyedand reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings andexperiences of the city. From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazinearticles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgicappreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomyin 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.
Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.
Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. This reset edition makes available a modern, edited collection of rare documents specifically addressing sanitary reform. Each volume will begin with an introduction, and the documents presented have headnotes and endnotes provided. A full index appears in the final volume.
"The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state, and local--at which these functions would best be handled.
Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. This reset edition makes available a modern, edited collection of rare documents specifically addressing sanitary reform. Each volume will begin with an introduction, and the documents presented have headnotes and endnotes provided. A full index appears in the final volume.
In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details--from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet--this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.
Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. This reset edition makes available a modern, edited collection of rare documents specifically addressing sanitary reform. An extensive general introduction sets the material in context and extends the debate to provide a contemporary international perspective.
"This is the first book-length manuscript to investigate the protracted collusion between Victorian sanitary interests and nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy. Cleere challenges standard accounts of mid-Victorian sanitation reform by focusing on the aesthetic transformations brought about by the changing ideas regarding health and cleanliness. Drawing from an array of texts that inform her research agenda--including canonical and non-canonical fiction, scientific studies, art history, and home decoration manuals--Cleere links these seemingly disparate works to demonstrate how they are connected at the level of discourse and ideologies of harmony"--
Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. This reset edition makes available a modern, edited collection of rare documents specifically addressing sanitary reform. An extensive general introduction sets the material in context and extends the debate to provide a contemporary international perspective.