Edwin Chadwick was the leading voice calling for vast improvement in sanitation and public health in 19th-century Great Britain. Born in Manchester, Chadwick most assuredly was influenced by his politically progressive father who admired the ideas of radicals such as Joseph Priestly and Thomas Paine. The family moved to London in 1810, and Chadwick received his education from private tutors and studied for the law. While undergoing his legal studies he worked parttime as a journalist for several newspapers and honed his skills of inquiry and clarity of writing, two traits that would serve him well in later years.
Chadwick developed an important circle of acquaintances in London. His articles for several professional journals attracted the friendship and encouragement of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the leading British Utilitarian thinkers of the age. In fact, Chadwick and Bentham lived together for a short period of time. Chadwick joined the London Debating Society, a club for Utilitarians and assisted Ben-tham in the completion of several of his works. During this period, Chadwick developed and refined his concept of the ‘‘sanitary idea,’’ a notion that drove his professional career and led to the health and sanitation reform movement in Great Britain.
Chadwick’s true influence began when he entered the civil service. In 1832 Prime Minister Earl Grey appointed him as the Assistant Commissioner of the Poor Law Commission and a year later elevated him to the Chief Commissioner’s post. In 1833 he was part of a Royal Commission that investigated the condition of children working in factories. His research was so thorough that he was chosen to write the majority of the report published in 1834. That paper urged Parliament to limit the child workday to six hours. Although this recommendation did not win approval, it did eventually influence Parliament to pass the Ten Hours Act in 1847. Chadwick also made several other proposals not acted upon, such as holding employers responsible for accidents on the job, restricting liquor sales, urging healthy recreational opportunities for the masses, providing pensions to discharged soldiers and sailors, and teaching them a trade during their military service.
Chadwick’s work gained him some notoriety and in 1834 he was appointed as secretary to a new Poor Law Commission that monitored compliance with the Poor Law Amendment Act from 1836 to 1848. This body prodded Parliament to take action to improve the lot of the urban poor and destitute. Chadwick’s intense belief in the righteousness of his cause at times created problems as his opponents viewed him as arrogant, obstinate, single-minded, and intolerant and placed him in the utilitarian movement camp. A depression in 1837 led to thousands of laborers entering Victorian workhouses. During the general elections of 1837, Chadwick was the target of demonstrations by the lower classes, who protested his efforts to limit such public relief. These groups wanted funding where he believed that financial support For improving public health and factory conditions would accomplish the desired end to relieve suffering.
One significant area of concern was epidemic disease, a curse that ran rampant in Great Britain between 1830 and the early 1840s. In 1831 Asiatic cholera first appeared in the nation and claimed more than 50,000 lives. Influenza followed, and in parts of 1833 the number of burials doubled and then quadrupled in London. From 1838 to 1842, the number of typhus cases averaged 16,000 a year. Scarlet Fever killed 20,000 in 1840 alone, and Whooping Cough snuffed out 50,000 lives in the years 1838 to 1840. Timing was crucial. In 1837 and 1838 cholera and typhoid epidemics decimated London’s poor population. In response Chadwick successfully lobbied for the creation of a sanitary commission in 1839 to address the health crisis created by the outbreak of these diseases.
Chadwick had been intrigued by reading a report on the conditions of industrial towns and decided to conduct his own research. Between 1838 and 1842 he interviewed and gathered reports from more than 2,000 local officials, factory owners, and physicians. In 1842 at his own expense he privately published his most significant work, The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population. The report stated that disease was directly related to living conditions and that public health reform was sorely needed. As part of the report, Chadwick provided statistics comparing the life expectancy of professional classes, tradesmen, and the laboring classes in a number of cities. For example, the age of death for these three groups was as follows for the indicated British cities: Bolton: 34, 23, 18; Manchester: 38, 20, 17; Leeds: 44, 27, 19; Derby: 49, 38, 21; and Liverpool: 35, 22, 15. In addition to these alarming statistics, Chadwick discovered that on the average for every one person who died of old age or violence in 1839 eight perished due to disease. Finally, he calculated that one child in three born in England in the 1820s and 1830s did not live to reach the age of five.
In many respects, the report confirmed the suspicions of many politicians, medical officials, and even the public at large regarding the relationship between conditions in which people lived and the outbreak of disease. It was apparent that working class neighborhoods had stagnant piles of filth and garbage and overflowing drains in the streets, polluted water, cellars filled with human and animal excrement, overcrowded dwellings with little or no ventilation, and noxious odors fouling the air. Indeed, Chadwick’s emphasis on the conditions of residences was so pointed that he generally downplayed any role that factories and mills contributed to the problem. Thus, his report stands in stark contrast to other contemporary critics of British industrial society such as the socialist Friedrich Engels and William P. Alison, Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University, who argued that higher wages and less poverty, rather than improved living conditions, would help alleviate the bleak situation of the working classes. These critics raised Chadwick’s ire. He went so far as to state that the mortality rate of children under five years of age was higher than that of children aged five to ten years who worked in the factories, proving that the workplace was safer than the residence for the lower classes. He even argued that some factory owners allowed employees to use the hot water discarded from their steam engines for baths. Eventually some 7,000 copies of the report became public as Chadwick sold or gave copies to newspapers and other publications. Its impact led to parliamentary investigations, additional newspaper reports, and the growth of lobby groups such as the Health of Towns Association. Even Charles Dickens, who initially had opposed Chadwick over the latter’s efforts to eliminate public poor relief and workhouses, changed his opinion of the reformer after reading the report.
Chadwick’s intended his efforts to pressure political authorities to recognize their special role in improving working peoples’ lives in order to develop a healthier population that could be more productive and less costly to support. The initial government response was negative. Prime Minister Robert Peel and his Conservative Party did not embrace Chadwick’s report. The status quo remained unchanged until the elections of 1847, which swept the Liberal Party and Prime Minister Lord John Russell into power. Growing public sentiment and the memory of the epidemics of the previous decade led to the passage of the Public Health Act in 1848. This measure instituted a Central Board of Health at the national and local levels, albeit with limited powers. The boards had oversight responsibility for street cleaning, trash collection, sewage systems, water supplies, and the construction of burial grounds. Chadwick’s report had noted that some graveyards had fifteen times the number of bodies that could be neutralized per acre of ground. However, the boards lacked any enforcement powers and had minimal impact. Chadwick was appointed as Sanitation Commissioner and lobbied Parliament for policies to bring fresh water supplies to cities and towns, install water closets in all dwellings, and develop a method to carry urban sewage to outlying areas as a means of producing cheap fertilizer.
The momentum for reform halted temporarily in 1854. Lord Palmerston became the Home Secretary and, although he saw the apparent need for health reform, he faced several obstacles. First, individuals and groups with vested interests such as landlords and water companies had used their political influence to erode the impact Of the already weak 1848 legislation. Chadwick’s service as Sanitation Commissioner also became a liability because of his difficult personality and unpopularity. Therefore, Chadwick agreed with Palmerston that he should resign, and he accepted an annual pension of 1,000 pounds. Chadwick’s official public career thus came to an inglorious end. Even so, the House of Commons failed to renew the Public Health Act, leaving final reform still years in the future.
Despite the loss of his official platform, Chadwick remained a powerful private voice advocating reform. Between the mid-1850s and the 1870s, he championed a variety of causes such as the adoption of civil service examinations, improved military sanitation because of the high rate of disease amongst the British troops in the Crimean War, a far-ranging agricultural drainage policy to improve soil fertility, and the introduction of sanitation techniques in the tropical territories of the British Empire. Indeed, at Prime Minister Gladstone’s request, Chadwick studied the possibility of a postal telegraph and the problem of storm and sewage drainage for which he proposed separate systems for storm drains and the carrying of sewage from individual residences. Chadwick’s final bid to regain a public posture for his reform ideas failed as he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1867.
Chadwick eventually received the acclaim that he had certainly earned. Societies of Medicine and Hygiene in France, Belgium, and Italy recognized his contributions in the areas of public health and sanitation. Great Britain also honored him with a knighthood in 1889 during the last months of his life, a late recognition that some observers attribute to his difficult nature in dealing with parliamentary and government officials over the years. His obituary in the Sanitary Record of July 15, 1890 perhaps best sums up the man: ‘‘He was a large-minded man, who saw things in their just proportions, and realized how many methods contribute to the same end.’’1
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