The Victorian Middle Class

IN THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS (1963), E. P. Thompson wrote that class is not a thing or category but the relations that emerge through a group's consciousness of its interests and differences from other classes (9–11). Following his study, the English working class received considerable scholarly attention, but his insight was not extended to the middle class. As recently as 1988 Simon Gunn bemoaned the scarcity of accounts of the English middle class (17). Since then historians have gone a considerable way towards remedying this deficiency, and we now have fine studies of the middle class such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes, R. J. Morris's Class, Sect and Party, Dror Wahrman's Imagining the Middle Class, and Alan Kidd and David Nicholls's The Making of the British Middle Class?, to name only a few.

What is notable about the plethora of recent accounts, however, is their remarkable lack of consensus. As the English middle class comes under greater scrutiny, everything about it–its very existence, identity, boundaries, social and moral characteristics, political power, status, and influence–is up for grabs. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the Thompsonian equivalent of the middle class will ever be written largely because these days the very concept “middle class” is contested. Earlier debates about how the category should be determined–by wealth, income, occupation, status, social standing, political influence, or access–were roughly settled by including those in trade, retail, commerce, manufacture, the professions, and salaried workers, but today some scholars question the utility of speaking of these vastly different groups under the same rubric. Did manufacturers who owned significant resources and small shopkeepers share anything? Do we place them in the same category merely for the sake of heuristic convenience? Others have wondered if the distinctions between, say, industrial elites and educators (both typically included in the middle class) were not greater than the commonalities between industrialists and landed elites (typically part of the upper class). Yet others, while acknowledging this fragmentation and differentiation, have nonetheless highlighted the cultural and ideological cohesiveness of the “middle class.”⁴

Increasingly scholars have resolved these debates by eschewing the very term “middle class.” Almost thirty years ago, R. S. Neale rejected the designation “middle class” as too broad, replacing it instead with “Middle Class” and the “Middling Class.” He further divided the Middling Class into two groups: retailers/tradesmen and “underemployed literates” (152–64). In a similar vein, today historians prefer to examine and make generalizations about smaller clusters within the larger designation–for instance, professionals, merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, urban or regional elites, commercial men–and to consider the relationships between different factions and within them.

Any attempt to fix Chadwick's own class position encounters and reiterates the dilemma facing historians. He was not, of course, of the upper class as the account of his rejection because of his “station” amply demonstrates. Neither did he belong to any of the clearly identified sub categories of the middle class: industrialist, tradesman, schoolteacher, or banker. Chadwick was, instead, a salaried civil servant with no powerful kin, patrons, or money.⁶

As an educated professional who provided a knowledge-based service, Chadwick's capital was invested in himself.⁷

Masculinity

VICTORIAN MANHOOD, LIKE THE MIDDLE CLASS, has recently received considerable attention. Scholars of masculinity do not, as has sometimes been charged, deny masculine hegemony, power, or “patriarchy.” Rather, they seek to highlight the variety, complexity, and instability of masculine identities as well as the sometimes precarious position of men. In Family Fortunes, their path-breaking history of the English middle-class, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall write: “Far from carrying the blustering certainty of the late Victorian paterfamilias, early nineteenth-century masculine identity was fragile, still in the process of being forged and always measured against the background of condescension from the gentry as well as the long tradition of artisan pride” (229). To point to this fragility in relation to other masculinities is not to deny middle-class men's social power over women or the lower classes. Rather, as James Eli Adams suggests: “The articulation of social power works through as well as against the fragility of masculine identities. Not only may that fragility reflect objective social and economic stresses, but it may powerfully inform both the domination of women and exclusionary logics directed against men” (3). Given this complexity, then, no account of masculinity can neglect the specific social location of the agent or his relation to other masculinities.

This is not to say, however, that the familiar “paterfamilias” we recognize as “Victorian,” firmly ensconced in the large chair by the hearth, emanating both financial and familial stability, never existed. He had to be “forged,” and the 1830s and 40s are rich in examples of masculine uncertainty and tentative assertion. As always Carlyle captured the mood best: in 1831 he wrote, “The old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness, one clutching this phantom, another that” (qtd. in Adams 1).

One of the mechanisms that anchored the new masculine identity, according to Davidoff and Hall, was work that allowed men the “ability to operate as economic agents” (229). Indeed, the story they recount is of a historical shift whereby the “[middle-class] masculine self would be more deeply implicated in what they did rather than in who they were in terms of kinship or religious loyalties” (230). But as John Tosh points out, “It wasn't enough that the work be dependable or even lucrative–it had to be dignified…. For middle-class work to be dignified it had to be absolutely free from any suggestion of servility or dependence on patronage” (185–86). For Chadwick, secretary to the Poor Law Commission and dependent upon the favor of peers, his work had to be detached from the taint of servility and emasculation. Managing the poor and masses provided him the necessary distance from this crippling dependence.

The Victorian Poor

CHADWICK WAS NOT ALONE IN studying and analyzing the poor and working classes. The early-Victorian period saw an explosion of investigations and inquiries into the work and living conditions of the poor, an astronomical increase in philanthropic contributions and activities, dozens of essays and treaties published on the “Condition of England,” and a proliferation of social-problem novels. This discourse was produced by middle-class men and women from Thomas Carlyle to Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell to Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau to Peter Gaskell. Cultural theorists have long pondered why so many middle-class men and women participated in projects of examining, enumerating, scrutinizing, managing, ameliorating, and otherwise contemplating questions of poverty and poor lives.

Brian Harrison and R. J. Morris offer a partial explanation in their discussion of Victorian voluntary societies. They argue that the middle class organized such societies because they helped “erode aristocratic values” (Harrison 229) and were “the basis for the formation of a middle-class identity across the wide status ranges, and the fragmented political and religious structure of the potential members of that class” (Morris, “Voluntary” 96). In other words, charities helped forge a middle-class identity in opposition to the upper class and allowed disparate men and women to affiliate with one another and thereby form a coherent identity. Although Harrison and Morris discuss philanthropy, their insight about the work such societies performed in consolidating middle-class identity pertains to numerous other nineteenth-century efforts to address and ameliorate the conditions of the poor, including legislative reforms, essays, and novels.¹¹

But while Harrison and Morris provide an explanation for the centrality of philanthropy to middle-class identity, they do not address the target of that philanthropy–the poor themselves –nor the larger question: why was managing the poor the consolidating factor that shaped middle-class identity? The period under review was inaugurated by the 1832 Reform Bill which, by extending the franchise only to those who owned or rented property over £10, preserved the notion that it was property not persons that Parliament represented. Rejecting the Radical demand for universal male suffrage, the Reform Bill ensured that class difference would frame the language of political representation and alliances for the remainder of the century. In the immediate aftermath of the Reform Bill, the resentments of those betrayed by Reform generated enormous anxiety in the polity. For the newly enfranchised, themselves operating within a political landscape that was not always hospitable, representing the interests of those left out became, then, one way to serve the state and to make their way in a politically and socially entrenched political landscape.

Thus, in the period following the first Reform Bill, differences between the recently ascended and the old political powers were frequently adjudicated by invoking the “interests of the working classes.” “Representing” the poor in this way–whether politically or aesthetically, in investigations or fictions–many literate but politically marginal men and women, caught between an institutionally entrenched aristocracy and a disenfranchised working class, deployed “the poor” to fashion their own authority and stabilize their place in a charged social and political landscape. In so doing, they distinguished themselves from both the upper- and working-classes. Thus, the poor were the conduit through which middle-class aspirations were expressed.

E. P. Thompson wrote that the English middle class “was itself much divided, and in fact only gained in cohesion over the same years because certain antagonisms were resolved (or faded into relative insignificance) in the face of an insurgent working class” (11). Thompson speaks of the middle class relationally, but he does so only vis-à-vis the working class. By carefully examining the Sanitary Report, the circumstances under which it was written, and its methods, I will demonstrate that the working class represented but one coordinate in a middle-class professional man's emerging identity. Chadwick fashioned his identity by defining and distinguishing himself from the upper classes precisely through his interest in and ways of treating the poor. In other words, his middle-class identity emerged in a triangulated relationality: in opposition to the upper classes through deploying expertise on the poor. For Chadwick, the work of managing and supervising the poor of course distinguished him from those he managed but also from the men who denied him his expertise. As the result the identity he “forged” – of a professional civil servant who used his expertise for the improvement of Society–was distinctively different from the existing masculinities of the gentry or working class.

THE PROJECT CHADWICK UNDERTOOK to secure his position was phenomenally large. He contacted over two thousand poor law guardians, medical officers, factory inspectors, clerks, clergymen, and local luminaries from all over England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and asked them detailed questions on the conditions of poor homes, streets, drains, morals, and manners. Chadwick then sorted, labeled, selected, excerpted, and framed their voluminous responses into a coherent report published under his name. The resulting text–the Sanitary Report–is a pastiche in more than one sense. It dexterously weaves the responses–sometimes in interview form, sometimes in report-style descriptions–of scores of professional, middle-class men into its argument.¹²

The Sanitary Report cited each of its contacts by name and title (each was a member of some standing in his local community), included lengthy quotations from each report, and provided wide geographic coverage. Such specificity obeyed the Benthamite injunction toward “sensation and experience” over “prejudice and instinct” (Lewis 13–14). It also served to silence critics. For our purposes, moreover, Chadwick's contacts and copious quotations of others allow us to trace the views not just of one albeit highly influential individual but also of an entire lateral stratum of individuals: a class of bureaucratic, middle-level men striving to establish their expertise and authority.

A final remark about the Sanitary Report's history is relevant. Technically it was a Poor Law Commission report and was originally presented to Parliament bearing that agency's name. But because George Lewis, for political reasons, objected to its adoption, he withdrew the Commission's imprimatur.¹⁴

Although J. S. Mill faulted its style (Flinn 54), the Sanitary Report reverberated through Victorian consciousness for many years and generated an influence greater than that ordinarily expected of an official report. After surveying of the diaries, letters, memoirs, and autobiographies of scores of literate Victorians, the literary historian F. S. Schwartzbach concluded that Chadwick's report was one of three texts repeatedly cited by middle-class Victorians as having changed the way they thought about their domestic Other (77; the other two were Oliver Twist and Henry Mayhew's articles on the London poor published in the Morning Chronicle).

Analyzing the Sanitary Report, I will consider three questions: (1) what rhetorical strategies do Chadwick and his informants use to produce their authority vis-à-vis other classes, particularly the politically powerful upper classes?; (2) how does this new authority attempt to replace hereditary status and kinship networks with merit and expertise instead?; and (3) how does the Sanitary Report deploy the poor in this project?

In the socio-political climate of the day, Chadwick and his informants needed to demonstrate their authority. They did this by emphasizing their “knowledge” of and access to the poor. As large numbers of middle-class families moved to the new suburbs in order to avoid contact with the working poor who flocked to city centers for jobs, Victorian cities became increasingly segregated by class. Judith Walkowitz and Deborah Epstein Nord have demonstrated that the early nineteenth-century urban landscape provided middle-class men with a rich backdrop for personal adventure and self-creation (Walkowitz 10–11; Nord 19–48). Walkowitz writes: “Throughout the Victorian period, it had been the prerogative of privileged men to move speedily as urban explorers across the divided social spaces of the nineteenth-century, to see the city whole, and thereby to construct their own identity in relation to that diversity” (11). Dickens's Boz, the detached observer wandering about town, exemplifies this aesthetic (Nord 49–80). Chadwick and his colleagues drew upon the tradition of the flanêur who crossed the barriers of the city, reworking it not to emphasize a dilettante “sensibility” but to present themselves as men of expertise performing a public service in traversing these divided cities and producing knowledge about the poor.

Central to this expertise were personal visits and first-hand accounts of spaces that were horrifying to but seldom visited by most middle-class men and women. Here are the opening lines of the Sanitary Report:

These rhetorical tactics of immediacy, scope, and detail authorized Chadwick because they allowed him to describe phenomena about which most of his readers were ignorant and anxious. Moreover, these tactics, along with the many tables, line drawings, and maps of neighborhoods included in the Sanitary Report, lent a “scientific” air to the text. In 1838, a contemporary of Chadwick's, B. Duppa, described the methodology that reformers of the 1830s and 40s pursued in their investigations thus: “heaping fact upon fact, and argument upon argument, classifying and opposing, and, in the instances in which it can be done with safety, drawing a conclusion; and thus attempting to give to the theory…a more scientific character than it has yet assumed” (qtd. in Corrigan and Sayer 136). Although Duppa was writing of educational reform, he could just as well have been describing the Sanitary Report's method.

Chadwick located his “scientific” authority not only in his methods of collection and style of argument but also in the content of his arguments. He and his informants prided themselves on their grasp of scientific principles, and in many ways the Sanitary Report reads as one long lament for ignorance about science. Chadwick charged that “All these local defects [in drain construction] again are referred back to the defective construction of the Acts of Parliament,–which generally either presume that no science, no skill is requisite for the attainment of the objects, or presume both to be universal” (110). The slippage between drains and Parliament–defective drains come from defective Parliaments – is suggestive and surely deliberate in its metonymic tarring of Parliament. But more, it suggests that Parliament, like the square-cornered sewage pipe Chadwick was seeking to replace because it constantly backed up with wastes, was choked–in this case with “wast[r]e[l]s”–simply because the wrong “connections” are continually effected.¹⁶

Making a career of building drains on scientific principles–or proposing a theory of the propagation of diseases, as Chadwick does elsewhere in the Sanitary Report–may seem peculiar for a lawyer untrained in medicine or engineering. While “science” in the early Victorian years was less narrowly defined and disciplinary than it is today, Chadwick's extra-disciplinary excursions were noteworthy even in his day. They reveal that his interest in the science of sewage, ventilation, and the spread of diseases was only a means to the more “lawyerly” goal of a “science of government.” For Chadwick, scientific drainage was secondary to the technology of government he strove to invent. He envisioned an approach to legislation that was concerned with gathering information on individuals in order to produce an aggregate portrait, discerning patterns in the aggregate that would not otherwise be visible, and formulating policy to intervene in individual lives on the bases of patterns observed only in the aggregate.¹⁷

Indeed, Chadwick's entire career, from the draft of the 1833 Factory Act to the Poor Law report to the 1848 Public Health Act, was marked by the establishment of a bureaucratic infrastructure for the regulation and systematization of governmental intervention in social affairs. For instance, he conceived of an inspectorate to ensure compliance with the regulation of children's work hours in the Factory Act, replaced the sprawling and chaotic parish system of relief with a smaller number of Unions that were centralized in the 1834 New Poor Law, and created a central Board of Health that could intervene to enforce regulations for cleanliness. Each of these mechanisms called for the development of an institutional framework that, through its officers and inspectors, administered the lives of its citizens and enforced the laws. Such an institutionalization is visible in the rising numbers of civil servants as noted earlier.

Of course Chadwick was not alone in spawning this liberal-state apparatus, only one of its more energetic proponents. For him this bureaucratic machinery was the true “Science” and more important than the “science” it drew on and borrowed from. Nowhere is the distinction between Science (of government) and science (of bodies) clearer than in the following: “A medical man who is restricted to the observation of only one establishment may be said to be excluded from an efficient knowledge even of that one…. [E]xamples abound in every district of the errors incidental to narrow ranges of observation…. [T]he extent of observation or opportunities of medical knowledge are influenced or governed by administrative arrangements” (Sanitary Report 409; emphasis added). Thus, according to this judgment, even the first-hand accounts of medical authorities were suspect because they lacked an organizational framework capable of discerning patterns. Tellingly, this passage moves from challenging a medical man's very ability to observe, pointing to the limited context of his observation, to insisting on government by administrative oversight. The last is what Chadwick's new “science of government” offered, of course.

In clearing the way for this new science of government and his own role in it, Chadwick presented as his chief adversaries either upper-class men who held appointed positions in the government or local authorities who administered municipalities (landowners who were justices of the peace or magistrates and successful traders who administered relief, for example). Pointedly challenging the former, Chadwick wrote: “A body of gentlemen sitting in a room will soon find themselves with few means of action if there be no agency to bring the subject matters before them…[lacking] an inquiring agency to seek out the evils from house to house” (397; emphasis added). Here again we see Chadwick use his ability and willingness to move through the streets and into the “unknown” to authorize himself. Moreover, the grammar and syntax of the sentence align passivity with class–specifically the upper class (“gentlemen”)–whereas action, emerging from a neutral “agency,” transcends class, thereby giving Chadwick's position the weight of “objectivity” and the seeming authority of numbers.

Chadwick's greatest rage, however, was reserved for the local authorities who come in for relentless attack in the Sanitary Report. He cites instance after instance of local neglect, ignorance, and politics obstructing the course of sanitary improvements. He faults town authorities who “contented themselves with the most barbarous expedients, or sit still amidst the pollution, with the resignation of Turkish fatalists, under the supposed destiny of the prevalent ignorance, sloth, and filth” (117). Unlike the attack on gentlemanly passivity, this one is expressed in the coded language of racial superiority and its implications are clear: left in the hands of local authorities the race/nation will degenerate. But worse than the “familiarity [by which authorities] become insensible to the means of preventing the evils which fall with the greatest weight on the least protected classes” (386) were instances of local corruption. One informant reported that although a municipal law existed in Manchester against factory furnaces, it was never enforced because “the chief members of the Board were the persons whose furnace-chimneys were most in fault,” and the officer appointed to enforce the law could not be “expected to prosecute his patrons” (357).

Chadwick acknowledged that some towns, to prevent precisely such abuses, appointed juries to rule on sanitary cases, but these too he denounced because they

Chadwick's solution to the problems of both local corruption and ignorance and upper-class passivity is reiterated in the Sanitary Report, early and often, in many different permutations, such that it appears inevitable and logical. He concluded that “it is only when the public health is made a matter of public care by a responsible public agency that what is understood can be expected to be generally and effectually applied for the public protection” [174]. The dull force of the repetition effectively establishes “the public” as an arena of concern, but it also leaves the contours of this “public” undefined. (Although the Sanitary Report gathered data on the “labouring classes,” its conclusions are all offered for the “protection of the public health” [424].) Elsewhere Chadwick remarked that “[w]itnesses of the most extensive practical experience lay the greatest stress on the necessity of lifting [drainage and sewage] out of the influence of petty and sinister interests,…and [of doing so by securing] the appointment of officers of superior scientific attainments” (379–80). In his conclusion he proposed a mode of governance that relied not on voluntary service to the municipality nor a continuation of vested interests but on the creation of a body of overseers who were imbued with “scientific attainments” and public concern, not “petty and sinister interests.”

Chadwick characterized this class of devoted civil servant as “qualified to understand the whole subject intuitively, and having no other interest or views than to perform the services zealously for the common weal” (379; emphasis added). The disinterested bureaucrat who devotes himself selflessly to the state was central to Chadwick's science of government. His selection of adjectives–qualified, intuitive, disinterested, zealous–to describe this civil servant allowed Chadwick to obscure the class dimensions of this persona, both in its deeply fraught relation to upper and lower-middle-class men and to the poor who are erased in the language of “service” to the commonwealth.

Many scholars have regarded Chadwick as the exemplary bureaucrat of government growth. (The most recent biography of Chadwick, by Anthony Brundage, is entitled England's “Prussian” Minister.) According to this view, Chadwick was obsessed with centralizing a dispersed and locally administered England, and his enemies were those who opposed government growth. While the central government certainly grew in the early Victorian period, focusing on Chadwick and the opposition to centralization his schemes prompted portrays Victorian politics as a story of locals on the periphery fighting the capital's centralizing tendencies. Emphasizing the institutions of the liberal state, this reading flattens out questions of class and expertise. It obscures the fact that Chadwick and other Parliamentary reformers relied almost entirely on local informants who drew on their familiarity with local conditions to inform him of crises or abuses. Some of these men were Assistants to the Poor Law Commission, but most were local doctors, poor law guardians, clergymen, or even ordinary citizens.¹⁸

Thus, observation and detailed documentation, scientific understanding, access, and experience were the coordinates that positioned the civil servant as beyond local and regional or class interests and thus best positioned to serve the interests of the state. As I have argued, however, this professional persona was not itself above class politics and was indeed participating in a larger sociological drama of shifting power relations. Existing liminally between the aristocracy and shopocracy, Chadwick used his specialization, access, knowledge, and grasp of scientific (both natural and social) principles to anchor his position. His effort to create work and status for himself occurred through his ability to present himself as representing the poor. It is critical to the narrative I am sketching that this representation occurred on both political and documentary terms, that is, that Chadwick claimed to represent the poor's interests (speak on their behalf) as well as represent them for his readers in his text.

If upper-class and establishment men were Chadwick's competitors and adversaries, he considered poor men and women accomplices in his quest for expertise. Rather than being displaced, they provided him with an arena in which to demonstrate his zeal as a reformer. Chadwick offered to simultaneously protect and police the poor. By proposing to protect the poor from municipal authorities, he demonstrated how closely he had studied the lessons of the New Poor Law, which had drawn its most vocal opposition from local authorities who chafed at losing authority. The Sanitary Report prepared for such a response by going on the offensive and presenting these authorities as inept. And by offering to police the poor, Chadwick attempted to placate a nation skittish about the revolutionary upheavals on the Continent.

Chadwick argued that the evils perpetuated by local authorities “fall with the greatest weight on the least protected classes” (386). To ensure that “the labouring man, who has no power to protect himself, and who stands in need of protection” is not at the mercy of powerful interests (377), he recommended the appointment of “officers of competent skill.” It was not only the local authorities the poor required protection from, however, but themselves too. Chadwick explained that the working poor “are children in intellect” (320) and that “until a degree of education of the lower classes is attained, which is hopeless for the present generation at least” (335), legislation should mandate change. Indeed, each of Chadwick's proposals to improve the living conditions of the working poor pertain to shedding the light of official reason on their lives. Thus, he was a proponent of building and opening windows, of inspecting lodging-houses, of regulating interactions between sexes, and of taking down spatial barriers in workplaces–all of which made the poor more readily accessible to agents of the state.

One example will suffice. He wrote of a young servant girl who married and moved into a small, dirty cottage where she was no longer able to maintain her ex-mistress's standards of “neatness, order, and cleanliness.” “She was afterwards, however,” Chadwick relates, “removed to a new cottage, which was water-tight, and had some conveniences, and was built close to the road, which her former mistress and all her friends must constantly pass along. She soon resumed, in a great degree, her former good habits” (196). Chadwick concludes, “The wife and family generally gain, by proximity to the employer or the employer's family, in motives to neatness and cleanliness by their being known and being under observation; as a general rule, the whole economy of the cottages in bye-lanes and out-of-the-way places appears to be below those exposed to observation” (299; emphasis added).

Chadwick's conclusion that “observation” leads to the woman's improved conditions (“former good habits”) is an unusual one for a reformer who is best-known as the proponent of physical improvements (notably in water supplies, housing, and sewage facilities). In this and myriad other examples in the Sanitary Report, there is ample evidence for Chadwick's ostensible argument that improved conditions (the water-tight cottage) lead to improved manners. Yet, this is precisely not what he concludes: rather than point to the “water-tight” cottage with its “conveniences,” he ascribes the woman's improvement to a house close to the road that allowed for surveillance. Such “slippages” between material and moral arguments abound in Chadwick's text and are the locus of critical dispute: contemporary scholars read them as indicative of Chadwick's repressive regime, while older scholars ignore them or treat them as “residual” of an estate-based paternalism. I would suggest that the moments when Chadwick deliberately neglects environmental (what he calls “atmospheric”) solutions in favor of explicitly “social control” ones are indicative of the extent to which in the nineteenth century these two responses did not carry mutually exclusive explanatory powers. Michael Cullen has argued that the relationship between explanations of moral responsibility (the poor's) and environmental influences was far more fluid and less differentiated than it is today; reformers would, often in the same sentence, make both a moral and an environmental argument (62–63). The distinction between them as two conflicting sets of explanations only occurred later in the century, and any attempt on our part to designate one solution as more indicative of “Chadwick” only serves to produce a distortion.

Furthermore, in the above passage, Chadwick hints at but brushes past the role of women or the “employer's wife.” Women's philanthropic work, initially tied to estate-giving and the role of the Lady Bountiful, but increasingly pursued by middle-class women in urban centers, posed a threat to Chadwick's claim to represent the poor. As middle-class women ventured into poor neighborhoods and started sewing and cooking classes or visited poorhouses and prisons, they produced a sometimes alternative body of knowledge on the poor and critiqued impersonal, state-sponsored responses to the problems of poverty. Chadwick viewed voluntary societies with hostility and disdained a close relation between legislative action and philanthropy. In 1835, he mocked the Prison Act for being “rude and defective” and the only thing to be expected from a measure that arose from “the impulse and sentiment of a voluntary society” (Roberts 48). Chadwick's brief mention of employers' wives in the Sanitary Report serves to acknowledge and simultaneously demarcate middle-class women's growing role: by acknowledging their influence, he hoped to demarcate their role within “his” domain.

But whereas middle-class women were a source of some competition, poor women were not. Indeed, Chadwick's plan to survey and police the poor falls squarely upon poor women. Yet, working women posed a dilemma for middle-class reformers: they were simultaneously seen as accomplices in the project of “civilizing” the poor (as the previous quote suggests) and were held responsible for the perceived moral laxity of the poor, as the following quote insists:

For middle-class reformers, the working woman presented an enigma that could not be solved given their definition of “woman.” As a woman, she was supposed to be morally superior, and yet as a working woman she was considered neither moral nor a true woman; as a woman she required the protection of a man, yet as a working woman she relinquished her claim on protection; as a woman she was their only hope of socializing and ordering the men of her class, yet as a working woman she seemed to eschew this role. The relatively stable term “woman” fell apart when combined with “working.” The text of the Sanitary Report displays a frustration and anxiety over this instability as working women's independence and refusal to fit in the category of “woman” simultaneously threatened a middle-class masculinity built around protecting women and revealed the class basis of this masculinity.

IN THE SANITARY REPORT CHADWICK NAMED AND MANUFACTURED the poor in the best entrepreneurial spirit of the times. Through his access to the poor and grasp of scientific methods of observation, he was able to gather previously unimaginable information on them, which he then sorted and classified in order to create a scientific form of government. Moreover, by producing knowledge on the poor, he claimed to represent them–both politically and epistemically. Chadwick embarked on this project in order to secure his own unstable masculinity and professional position. The identity he manufactured was derived in opposition to upper-class men and through his active management of the poor.

The gambit was successful. The Sanitary Report was published to great acclaim and was so influential that vested interests could no longer obstruct public health legislation. In 1848, as the Continent faced its worst social and political upheavals, England created its first General Board of Health and Chadwick was appointed Commissioner. Although his “station” had not changed since his 1834 rejection to the Poor Law Commission, his status had, and this time he could not be denied the appointment by an in-house wink and nod. Chadwick's Commissionership, however, was short-lived: he was dismissed in 1854 and the Board dismantled in 1858. Yet the idea of sanitation took hold of the nineteenth-century imaginary, and the revised Public Health Act of 1875 contained many of Chadwick's recommendations for cleaning towns, building sewage systems, and creating a mandatory inspectorate.

Dismissal did not dampen his energy and zeal: Chadwick continued as a civil servant and bureaucrat, writing a formidable number of articles and pamphlets and addressing associations on topics such as competitive exams for civil service, public elementary education, post office savings banks, railway and telegraph reform, military organization and sanitation in India, purchase of the Suez Canal, “Cheap and Improved Means of Personal Ablution,” and even “On the Practical Method of Meeting the Spelling Difficulty in School and in Life.”²⁰

In 1889, only a year before his death, Chadwick was knighted and became Sir Edwin Chadwick. The title came in recognition of his position as the “father of public health.” As “Father” Chadwick's masculinity was now fully acknowledged, and as “Sir” his social status established. The middle-class man had become the paterfamilias, this one presiding not just over his own home but over the nation's Homes. Although Chadwick came to inhabit the all too familiar icon, we should not forget that his identity and masculinity had to be produced, and produced in a landscape where middle-class men–even elite, professional ones–lacked political power. The masculine identity he fashioned for himself, in contradistinction to existing masculinities, was of a civil servant–disinterested, expert, scientific, working to manage the poor for the commonweal. In the process of his self-fashioning, Chadwick created a new technology of government and a new man.