Inventing air pollution: The social construction of smoke in Britain, 1880--1920

Coal use expanded enormously in Britain during the nineteenth century, leading to a concomitant rise in the quantity of combustion products (often referred to simply as smoke) entering the air. This study investigates the ways in which people understood these particles and gases and asks how the meanings that they gave them shaped private and public responses to industrial and household coal consumption. In contrast to studies of industrialization or urbanization that assume that coal smoke has always been viewed negatively, I argue that beliefs about smoke changed radically during the late nineteenth century and were influenced by conflicting understandings of where smoke came from and why it occurred, as well as by ideas about the relationship between the environment, technology, and society. The study focuses on six of the largest cities in late Victorian Britain: London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield. Drawing on the archives of municipal authorities and environmental pressure groups, popular and scientific periodicals, newspapers, books, and private papers, I argue that ideas about the relationship between human beings and the natural environment underwent a fundamental change in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century, a transformation that is exemplified by the emergence of a new definition air pollution. Coal smoke, which many people had earlier considered to be benign, became blamed for a host of serious problems. Individual chapters address the role of miasma theory, conceptions of nature, regulation of smoke, environmental activism, alternatives to coal, and debates about environment and heredity in discussions of degeneration. Particular attention is given to work of Octavia Hill and Ernest Hart in the National Smoke Abatement Institution of the 1880s and to that of Sir William Blake Richmond in the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, established in the late 1890s.