Sir Edwin Chadwick
KCB (24 January 18006 July 1890) was an English social reformer who is noted for his leadership in reforming the
Poor Law
In English and British history, poor relief refers to government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty. Over the centuries, various authorities have needed to decide whose poverty deserves relief and also who should bear the cost of hel ...
s in England and instituting major reforms in urban
sanitation and
public health. A disciple of
Utilitarian philosopher
Jeremy Bentham, he was most active between 1832 and 1854; after that he held minor positions, and his views were largely ignored. Chadwick pioneered the use of scientific surveys to identify all phases of a complex social problem, and pioneered the use of systematic long-term inspection programmes to make sure the reforms operated as planned.
Early life
Edwin Chadwick was born on 24 January 1800 at
Longsight,
Manchester. His mother died when he was still a young child, yet to be named. His father, James Chadwick, tutored the scientist
John Dalton
John Dalton (; 5 or 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He is best known for introducing the atomic theory into chemistry, and for his research into colour blindness, which he had. Colour b ...
in music and botany and was considered to be an advanced liberal politician, thus exposing young Edwin to political and social ideas. His grandfather, Andrew Chadwick, had been a close friend of the Methodist theologian
John Wesley
John Wesley (; 2 March 1791) was an English people, English cleric, Christian theology, theologian, and Evangelism, evangelist who was a leader of a Christian revival, revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism. The soci ...
.
He began his education at a small school in
Lancashire and moved to a boarding school in
Stockport
Stockport is a town and borough in Greater Manchester, England, south-east of Manchester, south-west of Ashton-under-Lyne and north of Macclesfield. The River Goyt and Tame merge to create the River Mersey here.
Most of the town is within ...
, where he studied until he was 10. When his family moved to London in 1810, Chadwick continued his education with the help of private tutors, his father and a great deal of self-teaching.
His father remarried in the early 1820s; Edwin's younger half-brother was baseball icon
Henry Chadwick, born in 1824.
At 18, Chadwick decided to pursue a career in law and undertook an apprenticeship at an attorney's office. In 1823, he enrolled in law school at
The Temple in London. On 26 November 1830 he was
called to the bar
The call to the bar is a legal term of art in most common law jurisdictions where persons must be qualified to be allowed to argue in court on behalf of another party and are then said to have been "called to the bar" or to have received "call to ...
, becoming a
barrister
A barrister is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdictions. Barristers mostly specialise in courtroom advocacy and litigation. Their tasks include taking cases in superior courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, researching law and ...
.
Called to the bar without independent means, he sought to support himself by literary work such as his work on 'Applied Science and its Place in Democracy', and his essays in the ''
Westminster Review'', mainly on different methods of applying scientific knowledge to the practice of government. He became friends with two of the leading philosophers of the day,
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, Member of Parliament (MP) and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to ...
and
Jeremy Bentham. Bentham engaged him as a literary assistant and left him a large legacy. He also became acquaintanced with
Thomas Southwood Smith,
Neil Arnott and
James Kay-Shuttleworth
Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, 1st Baronet (20 July 1804 – 26 May 1877, born James Kay) of Gawthorpe Hall, Lancashire, was a British politician and educationist. He founded a further-education college that would eventually become P ...
, all doctors.
From his exposure to social reform and under the influence of his friends, he began to devote his efforts to sanitary reform. In 1832, Chadwick began on his path to make improvements with sanitary and health conditions.
Reformer
In 1832, he was employed by the
Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the operation of the
Poor Law
In English and British history, poor relief refers to government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty. Over the centuries, various authorities have needed to decide whose poverty deserves relief and also who should bear the cost of hel ...
, and in 1833, he was made a full member of that commission. Chadwick and
Nassau William Senior drafted the famous report of 1834, recommending the reform of the old law. Under the 1834 system, individual parishes were formed into
Poor Law Unions, and each Poor Law Union was to have a union
workhouse. Chadwick favoured a more centralised system of administration than the one adopted, and he felt the
Poor Law reform of 1834 should have provided for the management of poor law relief by salaried officers controlled from a central board, with the boards of guardians acting merely as inspectors.
In 1834, he was appointed secretary to the Poor Law commissioners. Unwilling to administer an act of which he was largely the author in any way other than as he thought best, he found it hard to get along with his superiors. The disagreement, among others, contributed to the dissolution of the
Poor Law Commission in 1847. His chief contribution to political controversy was his belief in entrusting certain departments of local affairs to trained and selected experts instead of to representatives, elected on the principle of local self-government.
Sanitation
Following a serious outbreak of
typhus in 1838, Chadwick convinced the Poor Law Board that an enquiry was required, and this was initially carried out by his doctor friends Arnot and Southwood Smith, assisted by another doctor from Manchester, James Kay Shuttleworth. This was the first time in British history that doctors were employed to look at the conditions which might contribute to ill health in the population. Chadwick sent questionnaires to every Poor Law Union, and talked to surveyors, builders, prison governors, police officers and factory inspectors to obtain additional data about the lives of the poor. He edited the information himself, and prepared it for publication. His ''
'',
begun in 1839 and published in 1842,
was researched and published at his own expense, and became the best-selling publication produced by
the Stationery Office to date. A supplementary report was also published in 1843.
[ Full text at Internet Archive (archive.org)]
He employed John Roe, the surveyor for the district of Holborn and Finsbury who had invented the egg-shaped sewer, to conduct experiments on the most efficient ways to construct drains, the results of which were incorporated into the report, and the summary included eight points, including the absolute necessity of better water supplies and of a drainage system to remove waste, as ways to diminish premature mortality. Evidence given by Dr Dyce Guthrie convinced Chadwick that every house should have a permanent water supply, rather than the intermittent supplies from standpipes that were often provided. The report caught the public imagination, and the government had to set up a Royal Commission on the Health of Towns to consider the issues and recommend legislation.
Its chairman was the Duke of Baccleuch, and there were thirteen members, including the engineers
Robert Stephenson and
William Cubitt. Chadwick acted as secretary in an unofficial capacity, and seems to have dominated the proceedings.
The Commission took evidence from
Robert Thom, who had designed a water supply system for
Greenock
Greenock (; sco, Greenock; gd, Grianaig, ) is a town and administrative centre in the Inverclyde council areas of Scotland, council area in Scotland, United Kingdom and a former burgh of barony, burgh within the Counties of Scotland, historic ...
,
Thomas Wicksteed
Thomas Wicksteed (26 January 1806 – 15 November 1871) was a notable English civil engineer of the 19th century. As engineer to the East London Waterworks Company he was responsible for introducing the Cornish pumping engine. He oversaw many imp ...
, who was the engineer for the
East London Waterworks Company
The East London Waterworks Company was one of eight private water companies in London absorbed by the Metropolitan Water Board in 1904.
The company was founded by Act of Parliament in 1806, and in 1845 the limits of supply were described as ''" ...
, and
Thomas Hawksley
Thomas Hawksley ( – ) was an English civil engineer of the 19th century, particularly associated with early water supply and coal gas engineering projects. Hawksley was, with John Frederick Bateman, the leading British water engineer of the ...
from the Trent Waterworks,
Nottingham. These confirmed his ideas about constant water supplies, and he developed a model which he called the "venous and arterial system." Each house would have a constant water supply, and
water-closets would ensure that soil was discharged into egg-shaped sewers, to be carried away and spread on the land as manure, preventing rivers from becoming polluted. Followed the publication of the Commission's report, the
Health of Towns Association was formed and various city-based branches were created.
Chadwick later helped to ensure that the Waterworks Clauses Act 1847 became law, to limit the profits that water supply companies could make to 10 percent, and requiring them to comply with reasonable demands for water. This included a constant supply of wholesome water for houses, and a supply for cleansing sewers and watering streets.
Chadwick wanted to see his ideas implemented over a wide area, and set about forming a company to supply water to towns, to ensure their drainage and cleansing, and to use the refuse for agricultural production. It was to have the grandiose title "The British, Colonial and Foreign Drainage, Water Supply and Towns Improvement Company", with an initial capital of £1 million, but it was the time of the
Railway Mania
Railway Mania was an instance of a stock market bubble in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1840s. It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, speculators invested more money, which further incre ...
, and he struggled to raise the finance against such competition. The company when it was eventually registered became the more modest Towns Improvement Company. Railways continued to dominate the money market, and the company was wound up after just three years. Chadwick understood that both water supply and drainage were important, since replacing
earth-closet
An outhouse is a small structure, separate from a main building, which covers a toilet. This is typically either a pit latrine or a bucket toilet, but other forms of dry (non-flushing) toilets may be encountered. The term may also be used t ...
s with water closets resulted in cesspools overflowing and making sanitary conditions worse, unless there were sewers to carry the waste away. This led to a rift forming between him and Hawksley, who had initially worked closely with him but who later took on water supply projects which did not include any requirement for drainage.
Public Health Act
Chadwick's report led to the
Public Health Act 1848, which was the first instance of the British government taking responsibility for the health of its citizens.
[ It had been introduced by Lord Morpeth in 1847, with the aim or requiring every town to supply water to every house, which they could do by building their own waterworks or by liaising with water companies, and to undertake drainage, sewerage and street paving projects. Most of its grand aims were considerably watered down by the time it became law, but it established a Central Board of Health, whose members were Lord Morpeth, Lord Shaftesbury, and Chadwick. They were later joined by Southwood Smith, who acted as a medical advisor. Districts could pay for a survey from an inspector employed by the Board, and could then proceed without the need to obtain a costly local Act to authorise the work. Chadwick chose all of the inspectors himself, ensuring that they shared his views on glazed sewer pipes, constant water supply and arterial drainage. They worked enthusiastically, ensuring that districts considered comprehensive schemes for water supply, drainage and sewerage.
Ratepayers in a district could request an inspector to attend if ten percent of them signed a petition. The Board could also hold an enquiry if the death rate of a district exceeded 23 per 1000, but gauged the level of local support, and formed a local Board if there was support, and withdrew tactfully if there was opposition. By 1853, they had received requests for inspections from 284 towns, and 13 combined water supply, sewerage and drainage schemes had been completed under the legislation. Relationships with engineers were not always easy, with J. M. Rendel calling Chadwick's ideas "sanitary humbug" and Robert Stephenson stating that he hated the ideas of pipes, rather than brick-built sewers. Even Joseph Bazalgette, who went on to design London's trunk sewer network, spoke out against glazed sewer pipes. As time went by, there was growing opposition to what was seen as central control by the Board. The rift between Chadwick and Hawksley had become open hostility, and Hawksley made serious complaints against Chadwick and one of the Board's inspectors to a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1853. Opposition from engineers increased, and a "Private Enterprise Society" was formed by Hawksley and James Simpson, with the intent of bringing down the Board. Shaftsbury, Chadwick and Southwood Smith all had to resign in 1854, and the Board did not last for long afterwards. Chadwick lived to see his position vindicated when the Local Government Board was established in 1871, which led to the formation of the Ministry of Health. Since then, it has been widely acknowledged that public health is a matter of government responsibility, working through local authorities.
In 1851, Chadwick made a recommendation that a single authority should take over the nine separate water supply companies that operated in London. Although this idea was rejected by the Government, the Metropolitan Water Supply Act 1852 forced the companies to move the intakes for their water to locations above Teddington weir, to filter water before it was used for domestic supply, to cover filtered water reservoirs, and to ensure that there was a constant water supply to all users by 1857. This was not achieved until 1899, and Chadwick's recommendation for a single authority was eventually implemented in 1902, with the formation of the Metropolitan Water Board.
In 1852, Chadwick conversed with Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn in relation to the construction of a sewerage system in Swansea.
Chadwick's efforts were acknowledged by at least one health reformer of the day: ]Erasmus Wilson
Sir William James Erasmus Wilson FRCS FRS (25 November 18097 August 1884), generally known as Sir Erasmus Wilson, was an English surgeon and dermatologist.
Biography
Wilson was born in London, studied at Dartford Grammar School before St B ...
dedicated his 1854 book ''Healthy Skin'' to Chadwick "In admiration of his strenuous and indefatigable labours in the cause of Sanitary Reform".[ Full text at Internet Archive (archive.org)]
He corresponded with Florence Nightingale on methodology. He encouraged her to write up her research into the book ''Notes on Nursing.'' He promoted it among well placed intellectuals, making her more visible.
Later life
Chadwick was a commissioner of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in London from 1848 to 1849. He was also a commissioner of the General Board of Health
Local boards or local boards of health were local authorities in urban areas of England and Wales from 1848 to 1894. They were formed in response to cholera epidemics and were given powers to control sewers, clean the streets, regulate environment ...
from its establishment in 1848 to its abolition in 1854, when he retired on a pension. He occupied the remainder of his life in voluntary contributions to sanitary, health and economic questions.
In January 1884, he was appointed as the first president of the Association of Public Sanitary Inspectors, now the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health
The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) is a professional membership body concerned with environmental health and promoting standards in the training and education of environmental health professionals.
History
The history of the ...
. Its head office, in Waterloo, London, is named Chadwick Court, in his honour.
While he is well known for his work with the Poor Law and with sanitation, he also contributed to other areas of public policy. These included tropical hygiene, criminal justice institutions, policy regarding funerals and burials in urban areas, school architecture, utilisation of sewage, military sanitation and the education of paupers. He was involved in investigations into child labour in factories, the organisation of the police force, drunkenness, the treatment of labourers on the railways, the building and maintenance of roads, organisation of the civil service, and various aspects of education. Most of these benefitted from his use of statistical methods to collect and organise data, and of the use of anecdotal evidence to support his conclusions. He was involved in a number of organisations, including the British Association for the Advancement of Science
The British Science Association (BSA) is a charity and learned society founded in 1831 to aid in the promotion and development of science. Until 2009 it was known as the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA). The current Chie ...
, the Institute of Civil Engineers
The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) is an independent professional association for civil engineers and a charitable body in the United Kingdom. Based in London, ICE has over 92,000 members, of whom three-quarters are located in the UK, wh ...
, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, the Royal Society of Arts
The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), also known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges. The RSA acronym is used m ...
, the Royal Statistical Society, the London Debating Society
Debating societies emerged in London in the early eighteenth century, and were a prominent feature of society until the end of the century. The origins of the debating societies are not certain, but by the mid-18th century, London fostered an acti ...
and the Political Economy Club
The Political Economy Club is the world's oldest economics association founded by James Mill and a circle of friends in 1821 in London, for the purpose of coming to an agreement on the fundamental principles of political economy. David Ricardo, ...
.
In recognition of his public service, he was knighted in 1889. He served in his post until his death, at 90, in 1890, at East Sheen
Chadwick is remembered at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine where his name appears among the names of 23 pioneers of public health and tropical medicine chosen to be honoured when the School was built in 1929.
He is also commemorated at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland for the engineering building.
According to Priti Joshi in 2004 the evaluation of his career has drastically changed since the 1950s:
: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.[, quoting p 353.]
Such views are not universally held. Thus Ekelund and Price in their assessment of Chadwick's economic policies in 2012 wrote:
:It is no exaggeration to note that Chadwick is an almost singular progenitor of public health in the UK and elsewhere. The one hundredth anniversary of his death (1990) and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first Public Health Act (1848) was an occasion of serious and deserved plaudits for him in the United States and abroad. His prowess in sanitation engineering has also been duly noted. These excellent works appropriately feature Chadwick's role as one of the two or three most important policy makers of nineteenth century England.
Works
*
References
Attribution:
*
Bibliography
*
*
Further reading
* Finer, S.E. ''The life and times of Sir Edwin Chadwick'' (1952
excerpt
* Hamlin, Christopher. ''Public Health & Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854'' (1998
excerpt
* Hanley, James. "Edwin Chadwick and the poverty of statistics." ''Medical history'' 46.1 (2002): 21+
online
* Joshi, Priti. "Edwin Chadwick's Self-Fashioning: Professionalism, Masculinity, and the Victorian Poor." ''Victorian Literature and Culture'' 32.2 (2004): 353-370.
* Lewis, R. A. ''Edwin Chadwick and the public health movement, 1832–1854'' (1952)
* Mandler, Peter. "Chadwick, Sir Edwin (1800–1890)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,'' Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 200
accessed 25 Oct 2017
doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5013
External links
*
*
* ttp://www.cieh.org/ Chartered Institute of Environmental Health*
*
*
1842 Sanitary Report on the UK Parliament website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chadwick, Edwin
1800 births
1890 deaths
Environmental health practitioners
Water supply and sanitation in London
People from Longsight
People in public health
British reformers
British social reformers
Environmental health
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath