SOURCE: Metz, Nancy Aycock. “Discovering a World of Suffering: Fiction and the Rhetoric of Sanitary Reform—1840-1860.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 15, no. 1 (1991): 65-81.

[In the following essay, Metz discusses the influence of public health reports on Victorian fiction.]

In the 1840's and 1850's the reports of public health physicians and the subsequent accounts of these reports in the press allowed the middle classes to discover the poor. According to H. J. Dyos, “The facts about the slums that had become merely unpalatable in the twentieth century were often shockingly fresh or simply incredible to those that gathered or digested them in the nineteenth century.”¹ “Discovery”—of slums, of preventable disease, of incest and other practices abhorrent to the reigning domestic ideal—was a literal fact of Victorian experience, re-enacted scores of times on streets whose offenses could be measured by the cubic inch of sewer poison or by the number of cholera victims added to the Bills of Mortality. It was simultaneously a figure of rhetoric, an image whose oscillating focus evokes the ambivalence of the mid-Victorian response to the urban underworld, then gyrating to the surface of public consciousness. As much as Victorian novelists absorbed the facts, conditions, and abuses exposed by the sanitary movement, they absorbed the metaphorical content of its reportage. It was, in fact, the specifically literary content of these ostensibly non-literary modes of discourse that supplied the vocabulary, dominant tropes, and rhetorical stance employed in novels of social awareness and protest.

I

In his History of Epidemics, Charles Creighton shows that typhus was almost unknown in the eighteenth century, not because it was genuinely rare, but because doctors who practiced solely among the upper classes had never seen it. In 1779, when Dr. John Hunter reported his first professional contact with domestic typhus, a disease killing thousands a year in the very shadow of metropolitan life, his description was received by the College of Physicians with all the interest that would attach to the discovery of an exotic tropical fever.² The typical victims of epidemics were no less exotic to a public largely innocent of the worst hardship unsanitary conditions caused. Even the Metropolitan Sanitary Commissioners, sent into the field to investigate the causes of the 1831-32 cholera epidemic, found themselves hampered by more than their ignorance of a new and unpredictable disease:

At that time (the Commissioners wrote in their First Report) … not only had no knowledge been acquired by experience of the true character of this disease, but nothing was known of the real condition of the classes which proved to be its first and easy victims, nor of the state of the localities in which they lived. The metropolis of the poor had nothing in common with the metropolis of the rich, and as the map of London exhibits no traces of the lanes and alleys of the poor, so the very names of these places would at that time have sounded as strange to the inhabitants of our great thoroughfares and squares as the names of the streets of a foreign country.³

In 1838 when the Poor Law physicians Southwood Smith, Neil Arnot, and John Kay investigated living conditions in the East End of London, they were not the first to discover the connections between filthy living conditions and a high incidence of diseases like typhus, consumption, and cholera. But in the half century that intervened between Hunter's investigations and those of Smith, Arnot, and Kay, the whole color of the public response to such findings had changed. Hunter's report was received by a body of professionals, primarily as an academic curiosity; Smith's report provoked an immediate and emotional outcry and sent shock waves far beyond the domain of the medical profession. What happened to the initially narrow scope of the Poor Law inquiry marks the distance between the cultural climate of the late eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth.

The historical facts can be briefly summarized. The typhus epidemic of 1837-38 hit the East End of London especially hard. With thousands seeking relief from parish authorities, the resident Board of Guardians started to look to the conditions of its neighborhoods. On its own initiative, the Board spent public money to prosecute landlords who allowed sewage to accumulate in stagnant pools or who permitted garbage to decay in dangerous proximity to helpless tenants. When the auditors disputed the Board's authority to spend money in this way, the Poor Law Commission took up the case. Ostensibly a local quarrel over the limits of constituted authority, the dispute soon embraced larger philosophical questions, thanks in part to the political ambitions of Edwin Chadwick, who commissioned the investigation. If the diseases which especially affected the poor could be prevented, then the Board's actions could be justified as a long-range economy and the precedent set for such future expenditures. Was there authority for the claim? Smith, Arnot, and Kay were summoned to investigate personally and so to lend the weight of their reputations to a far-reaching principle of public administration.

Their conclusions were published as a supplement to the Fourth Report of the Poor Law Commission (1837) entitled “Report on the Physical Causes of Sickness and Mortality to Which the Poor are Particularly Exposed and Which are Capable of Prevention by Sanitary Measures.” The following year, Chadwick asked Smith to survey twenty metropolitan districts, an investigation that resulted in an appendix to the Fifth Report of the Poor Law Commission. In August 1839, Bishop Blomfield proposed in the House of Lords that a similar investigation be launched nationally. The result, three years later, was Chadwick's landmark Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain, a remarkable compilation of firsthand reports on the living conditions of the poor, sent in by Poor Law physicians all over England and Wales.

In the short space of five years, Southwood Smith's inspection of a few typhus-ridden districts in East London had encompassed a virtual sanitary remapping of the whole country. Each constituent report represented a commissioned investigation, undertaken by a concerned professional, into territory unfamiliar to the middle classes. From the beginning of the inquiry, the interest of non-professionals had been stimulated by this peculiarly Victorian form of travel narrative. Smith's original report had created a sensation. Some refused to believe that such conditions could exist; others simply expressed a desire to see firsthand. In the wake of the publicity that followed, Smith was asked to lead parties of the curious through the neighborhoods he had described. Dickens was among those who retraced the steps of the Poor Law physicians through Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, and Rotherhithe, and his description of Jacob's Island in Oliver Twist is based on the scenes that were pointed out to him on this walking tour. Lord Normanby was another who went. Initially skeptical, he returned a convert to sanitary reform. Ashley was already sympathetic and well-informed at the time of the investigation, but his diary entry for the day he followed Smith records that even he was unprepared for the powerful sensory experience of seeing for himself:

What a perambulation have I taken today in company with Dr. Southwood Smith! Perambulated many parts of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, to see, with my own eyes, the suffering and degradation which unwholesome residences inflict on the lower classes. No pen or paint-brush could describe the thing as it is. One whiff of Cowyard, Blue Anchor, or Baker's Court, outweighs ten pages of letterpress.⁴

II

For every Smith, Arnot, and Kay who officially transcribed the state of the slums, for every Dickens, Normanby, and Ashley who followed along as lay observers, there were many to whom the conditions thus exposed were “discovered” in the earlier sense of the word by the reports of poor law commissioners and select committees and by the press summaries of these reports. This extensive body of polemical literature which sprang up in the forties embraced the subject of urban suffering in the name of a remarkable variety of causes—Christian education, temperance, immigration, to name only a few.

A great deal of the literature of Victorian sanitary reform is ephemeral, its exact impact on middle class sensibilities difficult to gauge. But the sheer volume of reportage furnishes general proof of an audience receptive to accounts of how the other half lived, an inference that is supported by the existence of multiple editions, reprints, and collections of the more colorful exposes. In the case of official documents, the audience can often be charted more precisely. We know that seven thousand copies of the Fifth Report of the Poor Law Commission were printed for public sale. If we accept Chadwick's figures, twenty thousand copies of the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population were sold in the first few months after publication. Farr's and Simon's annual reports—absorbing reading, still, in their novelistic attention to detail—maintained a steady Victorian readership. The Times estimated the audience for Simon's 1849 Report at 50,000 (more than the original sale of Pickwick Papers), claiming that “it seems likely to equal, in the fearful interest of its unvarnished disclosures, those fictitious chronicles, The Mysteries of Paris, and The Revelations of London.”⁵ The nineteenth century produced a bewildering quantity of documentation on the sanitary condition of the cities, much of it in quarto form, inaccessible to all but the most zealous private citizens. But the evidence suggests that the most important reports were read significantly outside official circles. Moreover, whatever the circulation of the reports themselves, the sometimes lengthy summaries of them published in the Times, the Quarterly Review, the Atheneum, the Illustrated London News, indeed in all the important literary and popular journals, undoubtedly achieved a broad readership and influence. Richard Altick has argued persuasively that the importance of this journalism to the audience that also read Victorian fiction should not be underestimated, that “to many readers, the fictional expressions of protest and desired reform built upon a foundation of knowledge and opinion already established.”⁶

In one sense at least, the accounts that middle class citizens read were themselves fiction. Readers who became aware of sanitary abuses through the journalism of the day took in the factual content of the public health movement through the medium of its rhetoric, a rhetoric which frequently drew on the conventions of popular fiction, melodrama, and Mysteries literature. When E. C. Tufnell, one of the Assistant Poor Law Commissioners, received his copy of Chadwick's Sanitary Report, he immediately wrote back to its author: “Your Report reads like one of Ainsworth's novels, and will I think furnish some good hints for deepening the horrors of his next Jack Sheppard production.”⁷

The comparisons went both ways. If promoters of blue book literature claimed their narratives were as compelling as the most thrilling works of fiction, Mysteries novelists justified their revelations on the grounds of authenticity. This was particularly true of G. W. M. Reynolds, whose quasi-pornographic novels and flamboyant style as a Chartist agitator earned him the disgust of Charles Dickens.⁸ Reynolds, the “Mickey Spillane of the Victorian age,”⁹ author of those best-selling Mysteries of the Court of London (1849-56), to which much of the sanitary reportage at mid-century was compared, wanted his serials to be seen as thinly fictionalized documents, as maps of a London that really existed and might be verified. Here is a typical aside from volume one of the Mysteries:

Reader, take the map of the Great Metropolis, and with “The Mysteries of London” by your side for ready reference, circle with a dark line, either with pen or pencil, each and every loathsome district or neighbourhood which you will find described in the two series of that work or in the one which you are now perusing. Then calculate the proportion which the haunts of crime and the skulking-places of poverty bear to the localities where comfort is found or where opulence and splendour reign. The result will prove that two-thirds of the mighty Babylon are covered with a plague-mist of demoralization, misery, ignorance, wretchedness, squalor, and crime.¹⁰

Along certain rhetorical lines, Reynolds's weekly installments of murder, seduction, and betrayal, of stolen documents, court intrigues, and unacknowledged kinships bear comparison to the more sober official chronicles of bad drains, inadequate ventilation, and impure water supply. Both types of narrative point in the direction of the emerging genre of sensation fiction, whose defining qualities Patrick Brantlinger has identified in a recent article on the subject.¹¹ In place of the stock secrets of kinship—lovers who turn out to be near relations, “orphans” with living aristocratic parents—sanitary propaganda stressed the biological kinship linking members of widely separated social spheres. Like sensation fiction, health reform literature stressed the sometimes remarkable coincidences that made these relationships undeniable. In the first annual reports of London's Medical Officers of Health, for example, the sudden appearance of smallpox in wealthy neighborhoods was traced in three prophetic instances: to the stricken family of a laundress who got up gentlemen's white ties, to a journeyman employed in sewing coats for a fashionable tailor, and to an upper servant living in Berkeley Square.¹² Instances such as these were ruthlessly documented as evidence of the invisible filaments connecting high and low and of the fate which obscurely involves one person in the destiny of another.

Like the most successful sensation fiction, the literature of the sanitary movement appealed to the voyeur in the reader, promising, in Brantlinger's terms, to reveal “the extreme evil behind fair appearances.” The city of London itself—the great Metropolis—was the crowning image of beauty decayed from within and below, of an outwardly progressive civilization concealing depths of human degradation and savagery. The rhetorical invitation to show the reader an insider's view of such squalor shared with sensation fiction an underlying subversiveness. If later novels like Lady Audley's Secret (1862) implicitly undermined myths of womanhood and of the sanctity of marriage, the steady stream of investigations into urban back-courts and alleys had already, by mid-century, attacked Victorian complacency with respect to its dominant institution, the home itself. In advertising a forthcoming report of the Sanitary Commission, Fraser's Magazine parodies just these sensational qualities of official reportage. The author is W. A. Guy, editor from 1852-1856 of the Journal of the Statistical Society:

The mysteries of London will be revealed; the secrets of “local self-government” laid open; and that gigantic accident of brick and mortar, the metropolis of England, will be placed before us in all its fantastic proportions. Under the guidance of this modern Asmodeus, we shall be able to take a bird's eye view of the great city, to track the footsteps of the pestilence which walketh in filth and in darkness, to watch the stealthy inroads of scrofula and consumption in the wretched hovel of the labourer. … Marylebone shall be stretched on the rack, and the City groan under the torture; and all the world shall see what sort of home for two millions of human beings this boasted centre of civilisation is.¹³

The gradual abandonment of tongue-in-cheek as the writer gets closer to the emotional heart of his subject suggests a participation in the very conventions of sensation fiction which, in the beginning of the piece, seem to be satirized.

The journalism of public health reform shared other “literary” qualities. Writers borrowed details and statistics from each other and from official documents, creating object lessons from pieces of data. They reproduced the idiom of their eyewitnesses, allowing them to create themselves as characters, each with his own narrative of suffering and accommodation.¹⁴ The best of this mid-century social reportage, including the accounts of Simon, Mayhew and others, could be read as so many capsule domestic histories. One read—and still reads—these “biographies” for many of the same reasons that made the novel the dominant genre in the nineteenth-century—to discover how the less fortunate lived, how they acquired the necessities of life, or managed without them, how they faced privation, buried their dead, decorated their homes. Moreover, writers of blue books frequently showed themselves as conscious as poets and novelists were of the power of metaphor to shape public opinion. Some metaphors were repeated so often, in so many contexts, that they can be seen as cultural artifacts, defining the qualities of the civilization that gave them currency as concretely as would an object of art or a common household commodity.

At the peak of the controversy over urban burial, more than one commentator invoked the legendary tyrant Mezentius, whose distinctive refinement of cruelty was to chain his living victims face to face with corpses until by slow degrees—their fate before them always—they succumbed to the blighting vapors of putrefaction. Was the situation of Londoners, living in enforced proximity to unregulated graveyards, really so different? By extension, the same question was being asked of city residents in the aggregate—and not simply with respect to the graveyard issue. The outlandish punishment inflicted on Roman subjects by a brutal monarch was also made to stand for the barbarism everywhere beneath the surface of the “improved” and progressive city, the product of criminal indifference and stagnation. William O'Brien, writing in the Edinburgh Review for 1850, was one who employed the metaphor in this sense. “Neglect,” he urged, “though it will not dissolve the connexion which fastens the upper to the lower ranks of our society, and is indeed a union for better or worse, may make our fate that which was inflicted by Mezentius, and link us to a festering mass of rottenness and corruption.”¹⁵

The analogy goes far toward evoking the psychological effects of the environment on ordinary sensibilities. O'Brien, an engineer, saw the condition of the cities as a grotesque welding of high and low; in his marriage metaphor, the poor are linked with the most loathsome form of human garbage, an equation that suggests as much about Victorian class anxieties as it does about sanitary matters. Of course, there was every reason for the popular imagination to dwell on the subject of putrefaction. In London at mid-century, 138 slaughterhouses polluted the streets; their byproducts were visible to any casual passers-by who did not avert his glance in time.¹⁶ No one could be insulated from stinks. Propagandists were fond of speculating that the legislator who yielded to vested interests today might be overcome tomorrow by the miasma wafting into the Houses of Parliament from the Westminster slums which those interests protected. When overflowing cesspits were discovered under Buckingham Palace, the incident quickly passed into homily. Not even royalty, it seemed, could escape defilement.

III

The generalized suspicion, potent even when unexpressed, that civilization itself had come to rest on layers of putrefaction sums up a series of more specific cultural epiphanies brought about by the investigation of epidemic disease. The awakening of Victorian culture to suffering on an unknown scale was most often expressed through the motif of exploration and discovery. The emerging cliche of “darkest London,” inhabited by “natives” whose peculiar argot, costume, and living habits challenged the complacency of the civilized observer, spoke powerfully to middle-class sensibilities, as its nearly universal adoption by journalists of the day suggests. The city had long invited a certain kind of “exploration,” to be sure. But as F. S. Schwarzbach has demonstrated, Dr. Johnson's casual invitation to Boswell that they should “explore Wapping” works off an entirely different set of assumptions than the early Victorian conception of the city as “terra incognita”:

It was the imagery and language of geographical exploration, and the attendant atmosphere of mystery, wonder and fear, that writers about the city appropriated to suggest the mixture of feelings that the labyrinthine inner city districts inspired in those who penetrated them. And yet, paradoxically—though to be sure some writers were aware of the paradox—this was a journey not outwards to some distant foreign place, but inwards to explore the city that the adventurers and their readers inhabited and walked through, perhaps, every day of their lives. And, it is worth noting, the inward journey was, like the outward, moral as well as physical, involving the discovery not only of strange territories but also of their strange and frightening inhabitants.¹⁷

In his introduction to Into Unknown England, P. J. Keating has discussed this metaphor of exploration as it applies to the period 1866-1913. His analysis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature of social discovery illuminates by comparison the response of the earlier generation. Keating stresses one element that nearly all these exposes shared, “the paradox of things being at the same time near and distant.” For the mid-Victorian “explorer,” as for the later “social investigators” like Booth and Rowntree, imagination and courage were needed to make the leap into an alien—though geographically proximate—way of life. But whereas later investigators concentrated on quantifying man in the mass, on calculating the precise dimensions of what now seemed an “abyss” of destitution, writers in the forties and fifties were more likely to focus on single images chosen for their impact on the observer's consciousness.¹⁸

As the Victorian explorer surveyed the landscape opening out before him in all its strangeness, he noted selective details. Was he struck by the fact that the slum children at play around him possessed only nicknames, “like dogs”? Did he find himself drawn toward eyes emptied of gratitude, of fear, of all traces of human nature? Was it the gin or the bad language that he noticed first? Or was he incapacitated from noting anything by the proximity of foul drains and unwashed bodies?¹⁹ Regardless of what ills might be emphasized, concerned observers expressed to the public an inexhaustible catalog of horrors. Each separate ill could not be described in detail, and even if this were possible, the ordinary names of things often seemed insufficient to the purpose; writers could communicate what they saw only in metaphor. These metaphors were likely to be a pastiche of the observer's values, professional training, and fears as a representative of civilization. For some, the particulars resolved themselves into sins to be expiated; others translated the hieroglyphics of misery into problems of social engineering. Rev. Sydney Godolphin Osborne, Charles Kingsley's brother-in-law, the writer of controversial “lay sermons” to the Times, coined the phrase “immortal sewerage” to describe what he saw as the “deep dirt pools of social life.” Editor-architect George Godwin, looking at similar scenes, wrote of them as “swamps and pitfalls,” “dark and dangerous places … which need bridging over.”²⁰

Most observers saw what they came to see. Inevitably, they created the configurations they presented in print to a public they hoped to move and persuade. But their rhetorical snapshots, though differing widely in political implication, agreed often in one respect. As much as they saw and pointed out any external elements in the scenes before them, they saw themselves seeing and pointing. They created a persona of the innocent observer, assaulted by overwhelming sensory data, and they incorporated into their descriptions of the landscape the motif of the journey through thickening streets and, often, the gesture of warning, recognition, or horror at the end. Though they did not agree on the meaning of the allegories thus created, most would have agreed that the scenes they described were alive with potential meaning, that to the intellectually receptive witness, or simply to the wanderer caught off guard in his rambles, the urban landscape “spoke” in a voice which demanded to be heard. Henry Morley's description of a spring expedition to view some improved dwellings for the poor is representative:

I entered the street in search of which I had come out. The spring was left behind me then, for all the flowers of the earth would not have concealed the filthiness of the vile stink in which I seemed to have become suddenly enveloped. Out of the large and pleasant square into a small and unpleasant one; then out of that again into a street not very narrow, with a gin-shop at the corner. The abruptness of the plunge into what was then to be seen, and smelt, and felt, filled me with sudden horror. I stood still. There was a gulf at no great distance before me, of which I saw only the top. … I went nearer … and turned away bodily sick. There—under the windows of the improved dwellings—rolled the thick, black, putrid stream of a great open sewer. … There was no need to go into the house.²¹

The co-founder of the Journal of Public Health and a frequent contributor to the Examiner and to Household Words, Morley was an adept and practiced purveyor of public health propaganda; here his prose incorporates an important hallmark of the popular style. The subjective focus on seeing the sewer, rather than on any external elements of the scene, is the most striking feature of his description. This is not simply an example of Victorian self-censorship; Morley's conscious circumlocution has a more shocking effect than could have been achieved by any number of concrete images. Though the narrative conveys an impression of sensory immersion, there is, in fact, no referent for the phrase “what was then to be seen, and smelt, and felt.” To apprehend the reality that Morley wishes to convey, in the way that he wishes to convey it, the reader must look back from the scene to the narrator, averting his glance too late, “bodily sick” from an experience so overwhelming that only its effects can be hinted at.

Many of the same conventions are evident in this excerpt from John Simon's First Annual Report (1858), published, according to Simon's biographer, “prominently and entire” in all the London dailies:²²

Let any one … who would do full justice to this frightful subject, visit the courts about Bishopsgate, Aldgate, and the upper portion of Cripplegate, which present some of the worst, though by no means the only instances of pestilential residence. A man of ordinary dimensions almost hesitates, lest he should immovably wedge himself, with whomsoever he may meet, in the long and narrow crevice which is called the entrance to some such court or alley; and, having passed that ordeal, he finds himself as in a well, with little light, with less ventilation, amid a dense population of human beings, with an atmosphere hardly respirable from its closeness and pollution. The stranger, during his visit, feels his breathing constrained, as though he were in a diving-bell, and experiences afterwards a sensible and immediate relief as he emerges again into the comparatively open street.²³

As in Morley's description, the overt subject of the piece quickly slips into the background. If at first Simon's account suggests that justice is about to be done to the “frightful subject” of “pestilential residences,” what follows moves the arena of action inside the mind of the “man of ordinary dimensions,” suddenly become a stranger in a threatening environment. The sensations presented are acutely physical, but they are not those one might expect. In this rapidly constricting environment, Simon asks his readers to imagine what it would feel like to brush up against another human being, one of those normally invisible elements in the city's moving backdrop of misery. How would it feel to be wedged in at the entrance to a court or alley, to be fixed “immovably” and involuntarily in a position of direct, tactile confrontation with one of a “dense population of human beings”? This, and not the sight of crumbling tenements or the faces of deprivation, speaks through to the sensibilities of the reader. The atmosphere of entrapment and suffocation, the liberation as the hypothetical explorer re-emerges into open streets, form the poles of a rhetorical pattern often repeated in these capsule psychological dramas of suddenly expanded awareness. More than from the cumulative effect of the scenes described, Simon's Report derives its power from the intimate terms of this discourse with the receptive reader. To its publication, the Morning Chronicle responded, in a fervent mingling of scientific and poetic metaphors, “Mr. Simon has dissected the heart's core of the London we live in.”²⁴

Morley's narrator and Simon's “man of ordinary dimensions” stand in for the reader who, typically in these accounts, experiences the drama of discovery vicariously. The journey into the underground so often depicted in the journalism of the day conventionally points beyond itself to a hypothetical shadow journey, a replication by the reader of the narrator's pilgrimage into panic, disbelief, and enlightenment. “Go and See,” Fraser's magazine instructed its readers in 1849, abandoning as “too loathsome to trust to the chance of its being read aloud” any attempt to transcribe the sanitary state of Jacob's Island during the cholera season.²⁵ Into the gap left by the impossibility of documentary realism, this gesture of challenge, admonition, and instruction often intrudes. In the preface to his collected Sanitary Papers (1854), John Simon makes eloquent rhetorical use of this figure, in prose which characteristically “points” away from the scene toward the empathy-creating moment of personal discovery.

I would beg any educated person to consider what are the conditions in which alone animal life can thrive. … Let any such person devote an hour to visiting some very poor neighborhood in the metropolis, or in almost any of our large towns. Let him breathe its air, taste its water, eat its bread. Let him think of human life struggling there for years. Let him fancy what it would be to himself to live there, in that beastly degradation of stink, fed with such bread, drinking such water. … Let him, if he have a heart for the duties of manhood and patriotism, gravely reflect whether such sickening evils, as an hour's inquiry will have shown him, ought to be the habit of our labouring population.²⁶

The well-publicized examples of Shaftesbury and others who did “go and see” and the vogue for “slumming” that for a few years brought uneasy groups of the curious to stare about the rookeries of St. Giles must have given to such rhetorical invitations an enticing air of the possible.

Certainly the message behind the invitation expressed the belief of an entire generation that social ills once “seen” unflinchingly were by that very means made remediable. W. A. Guy, writing in Fraser's, expressed the common view:

Whoever will go with the clergyman or parish surgeon of any wretched district in this country, using his own eyes and his own nose, though he will not see in one visit a tenth part of the pollution that exists above the ground, and will have imagined most imperfectly the horrors that lie underneath the soil, will yet come away eager to be at work …²⁷

In many articles, the authority of the narrative voice stood in the same relationship to the reader as would “the clergyman or parish surgeon” to the real traveller down city streets. Guidebook details allowed middle class readers of Fraser's or the Edinburgh Review to follow in the well-charted tracks of the experts, down paths leading ultimately (so the writers hoped) to the renewal of dormant social consciences. As vague as many journalists often were about the specific sights to be seen on these journeys of enlightenment, they were often zealous cartographers of the trips themselves, and their scrupulous recording of street and parish names was one way in which they drew their readers into involuntary participation. In an “Uncommercial Traveller” piece detailing the suffering endured by residents of East London, Dickens concludes in a way characteristic of this genre of reporting. “I came away from Ratcliffe by the Stepney railway station to the Terminus at Fenchurch-street. Any one who will reverse that route, may retrace my steps.”²⁸

The simple journalistic requirement of immediacy in narration must have helped to popularize the rhetorical invitation to “Go and See.” Dickens, we know, sometimes instructed his Household Words writers to transpose the factual data released in official reports into “eyewitness” accounts, and other editors, alive to the heightened drama of such a way of communicating facts, may well have taken the same license.²⁹ More than mere rhetorical flourishes, though, these narratives of journeys undertaken and sights pointed out helped writers to express a culturally shared perception of urgency and dismay, of the need for engagement and interpretation in an environment portentous with signs of an inward decay. The Reverend Robert Buchanan, preaching in Glasgow in 1853, struck well the mid-Victorian tone: “The cholera,” he said, “by fastening first and chiefly on the places where filth and physical wretchedness abound, is virtually pointing at the waste places of our neglected villages, and overcrowded cities as with the finger of God, and saying to us—‘Look here!’”³⁰

IV

Buchanan's authorial gesturing is closely allied to the impulse behind the novels of Disraeli, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, and, most fundamentally and pervasively, Dickens. In the Christmas books, for example, outside agencies “point” the way to an inner transformation. Parables of regeneration, of consciousness expanded outward toward a larger reclamation of society, these allegories owe their structures to the paradigms of myth and fairy tale. But, especially in the case of A Christmas Carol, they also borrow from contemporary journalism. When the ghost of Christmas Present, pointing out to Scrooge the human embodiments of Ignorance and Want, exclaims, “Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!,”³¹ his plea formalizes an outcry that would have been familiar to any reader of the daily papers. In Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, Kathleen Tillotson notes that fiction writers of the period were often perceived as “scouts who had crossed the frontier (or penetrated the iron curtain) and brought back their reports.”³² A close look at the rhetoric of public health advocacy in the 1840's and 1850's reveals how densely intertextual these “reports” were and how mutually informing were the appeals of fiction and journalism.

Notes

1. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies, 11 (1967), 11.

2. A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1894), II, 134.

3. Quoted in “Cholera and Quarantine,” Edinburgh Review, 96 (1852), 410. The Wellesley Index identifies the author as James Howell, probably an army medical officer. I have relied on the Wellesley Index for all the attributions in this essay.

4. Quoted in Hodder, Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (London: Cassell and Co., 1866), II, p. 16.

5. Sheppard, London, 1808-1870: The Infernal Wen (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1971), p. 253; M. W. Flynn, “Introd.,” Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain by Edwin Chadwick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1965), p. 55; The Times, 22 Oct. 1849, p. 4, col. 4.

6. Richard D. Altick, “Victorian Readers and the Sense of the Present,” Midway, 10 (1970), p. 103. “Between 1832 and 1846 the Quarterly, to cite it alone, ran at least nine long articles based wholly or in part on recent blue books and supporting literature.”

7. Quoted in R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement, 1832-1854 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1952), p. 60. In “Bluebooks, the Social Organism, and the Victorian Novel,” Criticism, 14 (1972), p. 231, Patrick Brantlinger cites evidence that “the reading public often thought of bluebooks in fictional terms.” His essay traces a “rough pattern of mutual development in subject matter” between blue books and fiction during the course of the nineteenth century.

8. For Reynold's colorful political career, see R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement (London, Truslove and Hanson, 1894), pp. 293-95; N. C. Peyrouten, “Dickens and the Chartists,” Dickensian 60 (1964), pp. 84-88. For an acute analysis of the Mysteries novel and its relationship to nineteenth-century conceptions of urban life, see Richard C. Maxwell, “G. W. M. Reynolds, Dickens, and the Mysteries of London,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32 (1977), 188-213.

9. George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 79.

10. G. W. M. Reynolds, Mysteries of the Court of London (Boston: Oxford Society, 1920), p. 84.

11. Patrick Brantlinger, “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1982), 1-28. My analysis adopts the terms of Brantlinger's definition.

12. These findings were summarized in the lead article in Household Words, 29 Aug. 1857, “A Healthy Year in London.”

13. “The Sanitary Commission and the Health of the Metropolis,” Fraser's Magazine, 36 (1847), 505.

14. In “Blue Books and Victorian Novelists,” Review of English Studies, 21 (1970) 26-28, Sheila Smith quotes several good examples of blue book character studies.

15. “Supply of Water to the Metropolis,” Edinburgh Review, 91 (1850), p. 403.

16. Dodds, The Age of Paradox (New York: Rhinehart and Co., 1952), p. 357.

17. F. S. Schwarzbach, “‘Terra Incognita’—An Image of the City in English Literature, 1820-1855,” Prose Studies, 5 (May 1982), 65.

18. Keating, Into Unknown England: 1866-1913 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 14, 20, 27.

19. For the first response, see Edwin Chadwick, Report, p. 198; for the second, see “A Nightly Scene in London,” Household Words, 26 Jan. 1856, p. 26.

20. Osborne, Immortal Sewerage: The Beer-Shop Evil (London: John W. Parkes and Son, 1853), pp. 9, 15; and Godwin, Town Swamps and Social Bridges (London, 1859; rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1972), p. 1.

21. “Death's Doors,” Household Words, 10 June 1854, p. 399.

22. Royston Lambert, Sir John Simon and English Social Administration, (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1963), p. 154.

23. John Simon, Public Health Reports, (London: Sanitary Institute, 1887) I, p. 57.

24. Lambert, Sir John Simon and English Social Administration, (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1963), p. 154.

25. “Cholera Gossip,” Fraser's Magazine, 40 (1849), 707. The author is W. A. Guy.

26. Quoted in Lambert, p. 233.

27. “Neglected Health,” Fraser's Magazine, 50 (1854), 243.

28. “A Small Star in the East,” All the Year Round, 19 Dec. 1868, p. 66.

29. See for example Dickens's letter to Morley, 19 March 1855: “I wish therefore that you would so re-touch the paper, as to make it appear to describe what you have seen during the frost—yourself—and without allusion to any particular district in London.” Nonesuch Letters, II, p. 644. Dickens was referring to Morley's article, “Frost-Bitten Homes,” which appeared in Household Words on 31 March.

30. The Waste Places of Our Great Cities: Or the Voice of God in the Cholera (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1853), p. 27.

31. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 81.

32. A Christmas Carol, (London: Dent, 1977), p. 61.