Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T05:09:04.625Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

EDWIN CHADWICK'S SELF-FASHIONING: PROFESSIONALISM, MASCULINITY, AND THE VICTORIAN POOR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Priti Joshi
Priti Joshi
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

IN THE PAST DECADE EDWIN CHADWICK has been the subject of several scholarly inquiries; indeed one can almost speak of a “Chadwick industry” these days. This is not, however, the first time he has attracted significant scholarly attention: in 1952, S. E. Finer's and R. A. Lewis's biographies initiated our century's first evaluation of him, culminating in M. W. Flinn's excellently edited reprint of Chadwick's most important text, The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (referred to as the Sanitary Report). Yet the Chadwick that emerges in recent accounts could not be more different from the mid-century Chadwick. The post-war critics saw him as a visionary, an often-embattled crusader for public health whose enemies were formidable but whose vision, extending the liberal and radical tradition, ultimately prevailed. Cultural critics, on the other hand, present a Chadwick who misrepresented (if not outright oppressed) the poor and who was instrumental in developing a massive bureaucracy to police their lives. Thus, while earlier accounts highlighted Chadwick's accomplishments, the progress of public health reforms, and the details of legislative politics, more recent ones draw attention to his representations of the poor, the erasures in his text, and the growing nineteenth-century institutionalization of the poor that the Sanitary Report promotes. Chadwick, in other words, is portrayed as either a pioneer of reform or an avatar of bureaucratic oppression.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , September 2004 , pp. 353 - 370
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams James Eli. 1995. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood. Ithaca: Cornell UP
Brundage Anthony. 1988. England's “Prussian Minister”: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832–1854. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP
Chadwick Edwin. 1965. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. 1842. Edinburgh: UP
Childers Joseph W. 1995. Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P
Cohen Emmeline W. 1965. The Growth of the British Civil Service 1780–1939. 1941. Hamden: Archon
Corfield Penelope. 1995. Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850. London: Routledge
Corrigan Philip, and Derek Sayer. 1985. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell
Cullen Michael J. 1975. The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundation of Empirical Social Research. New York: Barnes
Davidoff Leonore, and Catherine Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Driver Felix. 1988: “Moral Geographies: Social Science and the Urban Environment in mid-nineteenth century England.” Transactions–Institute of British Geographers, New Series 13. 1 275– 87.Google Scholar
Finer S. E. 1952. The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick. New York: Barnes
Flinn M. W. Introduction. 1965. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. Edinburgh: UP 1– 73.
Foucault Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: U of Chicago P 87– 104.
Foucault Michel. 1981. “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of Political Reason.” Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Vol. 2. Ed. Sterling McMurrin. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 225– 54.
Gunn Simon. 1988. “The ‘Failure’ of the Victorian Middle Class: A Critique.” The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth Century Middle Class. Ed. Janet Wolff and John Seed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 17– 43.
Hamlin Christopher. 1998. Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Harrison Brian. 1982. Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain. Oxford: Clarendon
Kidd Alan, and David Nicholls, eds. 1998. The Making of the British Middle Class?. Stroud: Sutton
Levy Anita. 1991. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898. Princeton: Princeton UP
Lewis R. A. 1952. Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement, 1832–1854. London: Longman
Logan Peter Melville. 1997. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose. Berkeley: U of California P
MacLeod Roy, ed. 1988. Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Morris R. J. 1990. Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds 1820–1850. Manchester: Manchester UP
Morris R. J. 1983: “Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780–1850: An Analysis.” The Historical Journal 26. 1 95– 118.Google Scholar
Neale R. S. 1983. “Class and Class Consciousness in Early Nineteenth Century England: Three Classes or Five?” History and Class: Essential Readings in Theory and Interpretation. Ed. R. S. Neale. Oxford: Blackwell 143– 64.
Nord Deborah Epstein. 1995. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City. Ithaca: Cornell UP
Parris Henry. 1969. Constitutional Bureaucracy: The Development of British Central Administration Since the Eighteenth Century. London: Allen and Unwin
Poovey Mary. 1995. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Roberts David. 1960. Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State. New Haven: Yale UP
Schwartzbach F. S. 1982: “‘Terra Incognita’: An Image of the City in English Literature, 1820–1855.” Prose Studies 5. 1 61– 84.Google Scholar
Thompson E. P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. 1963. New York: Vintage
Tosh John, 1994: “What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain.” History Workshop Journal 38 179– 202.Google Scholar
Wahrman Dror. 1995. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Walkowitz Judith K. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: U of Chicago P