Cleansing the city: Geographies of filth and purity in Victorian London

This study examines the literature and spaces of nineteenth-century London under the pressures of modernization. It approaches the complex subject of urban formation by way of the Victorian movement for sanitary reform. The rapid development of London in the period brought new challenges to the material condition and social order of the metropolis: epidemic diseases, such as cholera and typhus, swept through the city; growing numbers of the poor were forced to crowd into filthy tenements; and the rift between respectable citizens and the debased lower classes grew ever wider. Between 1840 and 1880, sanitary reform gained cultural currency because it promised both to improve the health of the urban population and to impose a culture of physical and moral conformity upon a threatening underclass. Not only did the imagery and imperatives of sanitary reform penetrate Victorian literature, journalism, and public policy; but sanitary initiatives, including waste disposal and river purification, also dramatically altered the built environment and social space of London.; Although the sanitary movement received wide support, this study brings together literature and archival research in order to recover the surprisingly ambivalent responses to urban purification. The desire to improve the public health contended, for instance, with anxiety about the impact the sewer might have on domestic life, or with nostalgia for a picturesque urban landscape threatened by progress. The novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing receive extended interpretive treatment because they are uniquely attentive both to sites of urban filth and purity, and to the emotional and aesthetic resonance of urban space. The imagined geographies produced in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Gissing's The Nether World afford visions of spatial and social life that resist the idealistic conceptions of reformers and privilege instead the individual experience of the city. By considering the conflicted status of waste and space in Victorian London, this dissertation highlights the multiple challenges and aspirations associated with the developing city, including not only filth and purification, but also the consolidation of the cultural identity of the metropolis.