Dust Piles and Damp Pavements Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature
This paper would not have been undertaken without encouragement from my colleague Deirdre d'Albertis, whose stimulating conversation has been very valuable to me during its writing, and to whom I owe many thanks; it has benefited also from comments offered by Lauren Goodlad.
1. Lytton Strachey, ''Lancaster Gate," 1922, quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), 45. [BACK]
2. F. B. Smith, The People's Health, 1830-1910 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 197. [BACK]
3. Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent, 1983), 86, 81. [BACK]
4. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845], ed. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 33. [BACK]
5. Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, 1842, ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965). [BACK]
6. Sigmund Freud, "Repression," 1915, in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1965), 107. [BACK]
7. John Kucich, "Repression and Representation: Dickens's General Economy," Nineteenth Century Fiction (June 1983): 64. [BACK]
8. Chadwick, 99. [BACK]
9. "On the Health of the Working Classes in Large Towns," Artizan (October 1843): 230; quoted in Engels, p. 43. [BACK]
10. Glasgow City Improvement Act, 1866, quoted in A. L. Fisher, "Thomas Annan's Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, " Scottish Photography Bulletin (Spring 1982): 13. [BACK]
11. Margaret Harker, "From Mansion to Close: Thomas Annan, Master Photographer," Photographic Collector 5, no. 1 (1984): 88. [BACK]
12. Anita Ventura Mozley, introduction to Thomas Annan, Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow 1868/1877 (New York: Dover, 1977), ix. This facsimile edition of Annan's book is an invaluable resource despite the poor quality of the reproductions. [BACK]
13. Maria Morris Hambourg, "Charles Marville's Old Paris," in Maria Morris Hambourg and Marie de Thézy, Charles Marville (New York: French Institute, 1981), 11. [BACK]
14. Mozley, v. [BACK]
15. Dr. Neil Arnott, quoted in Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition, 98. [BACK]
16. Harker, 91. [BACK]
17. Julie Lawson, "The Problem of Poverty and the Picturesque: Thomas Annan's Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow 1868/1871, " Scottish Photography Bulletin, no. 2 (1990): 42. [BACK]
18. Such exterior sinks were wretchedly inadequate but nonetheless they represent the most tangible and effective progress of the Glasgow sanitary reform movement to that date. [BACK]
19. Lawson, 43. [BACK]
20. Presbytery of Glasgow, Report of the Commission on the Housing of the Poor in Relation to Their Social Condition, 1891; quoted in Andrew Gibb, Glasgow: The Making of a Great City (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 142. [BACK]
21. J. C. Symons, ''Reports From Assistant Handloom Weaver's Commission," Parliamentary Papers, 1839, vol. 42, no. 159, p. 52. [BACK]
22. Catherine Gallagher, "The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew," in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 90. [BACK]
23. Wohl, Endangered Lives, 81. [BACK]
24. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor [1861-62], ed. Victor Neuherg (London: Penguin, 1985), 249. [BACK]
25. H. B. Cresswell, quoted in Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 341. I am indebted to Michael Young, who directed my attention to this passage. Jane Jacobs helpfully provides a footnote indicating that the "mud" mentioned by Cresswell is a euphemism. Cresswell's essay was published in Architectural Review (December 1958). [BACK]
26. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend [1864—65] (London: Penguin, 1971), 179. [BACK]
27. Dickens, 56. [BACK]
28. Symons, 65. [BACK]
29. "A Suburban Connemara," Household Words, 5 March 12 1851, 563. The intermittent attentions of authorities and the public's ignorance about the relation of sanitation to disease cited in Household Words were common, and thus cholera recurred frequently. In Glasgow, there were epidemics in 1832, 1848-49, 1853-54, and 1866. [BACK]
30. Mayhew, 230. [BACK]
31. Humphrey House, The Dickens World (1941; London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 167. An extensive body of subsequent literature on this topic exists, without consensus. Rather than rehearsing all aspects of this debate among literary scholars, I have relied upon contemporary sources and the work of historians of sanitation, which seem to me more authoritative in their interpretation of the documentation available. [BACK]
32. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition, 118. [BACK]
33. Charles Kingsley, Yeast (New York: J. F. Taylor, 1903), chapter 15; quoted in Christopher Hamlin, "Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease," Victorian Studies 28 (Spring 1985): 403. [BACK]
34. Hamlin, 382ff. [BACK]
35. Justus von Liebig, Agricultural Chemistry (Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology) (London: Taylor and Walton, 1842); quoted in Chadwick, 123. [BACK]
36. Henry Bowditch, "Letter on Sewage," Second Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1871), 235; quoted in Hamlin, 396. [BACK]
37. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 76. The phrase "suburban Sahara" echoes "suburban Connemara," used in the Household Words thirteen years earlier (see note 29). [BACK]
38. Dickens, 257. [BACK]
39. Dickens, 862. [BACK]
40. Kucich, "Repression and Representation," 65. [BACK]
41. Dickens, 876-77. [BACK]
42. Quoted in Wohl, Endangered Lives, 101. [BACK]
43. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 25-26 June 1853; quoted in Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 110. [BACK]