For reasons that remain obscure, environmental history in Britain is still an underdeveloped discipline. A scholarly community is now belatedly establishing itself but it is still difficult to identify dominant methodologies, agreed or creatively disputed theoretical frameworks, or fruitful interactions with fellow laborers in neighboring social, cultural, urban, and economic fields. In the United States, and to a lesser extent in continental Europe, the picture is different. Not only is environmental history thriving, but disciplinary ways and means—the role of theory, the possibilities of comparativism, and relations with longer-established forms of historical enquiry—are under scrutiny in journals, at conferences, and on the Internet. One can only hope for better things to come.
There are now a handful of British overviews of the period between the 1780s and the near present but thus far these have tended, with the exception of Christopher Smout's work on the northern region, to be dominated by predominantly legislative, administrative, and scientific preoccupations. It is a further indication of the poverty of the discipline as currently practiced in Britain that there is only a single monograph on atmospheric pollution devoted exclusively to the classic industrial period, Stephen Mosely's excellent study of Manchester. In the field of the water environment, John Hassan has produced exemplary work, but there are scarcely any books or articles similar to those concerned with historical relations between rivers, communities, and pollution problems that have appeared over the last twenty years in the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries.
It is an ironic comment on the native state of the art in relation to Britain that a majority of its premier practitioners are nonnatives. William Cronon, author of the classic Nature's Metropolis, which did much to move environmental history center stage in the United States, earlier wrote a pioneering, unpublished doctoral study of energy use and policy in early twentieth-century Coventry. The preeminent historian of environmental thought between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries is the American Christopher Hamlin; and Harold Platt, a native Chicagoan, has recently published a massive comparative study of his home city and Manchester between the 1840s and the 1920s.
Peter Thorsheim, the author of the study under review, who works at the University of North Carolina, has already written a valuable article with David Stradling, America's premier authority on the history of air pollution, on different approaches to the problem of control in selected cities in Britain and the United States between the 1860s and the outbreak of the First World War. His Inventing Pollution is an ambitious book that attempts to define and explain the discovery and repeated reinvention of atmospheric pollution in Britain between 1800 and the near present within the compass of two hundred pages. Notes and bibliography show that Thorsheim has delved long and deep in his sources. He has made good use of the archives of the National Society for Clean Air and Environmental Protection, municipal records in Glasgow, Sheffield, and Birmingham, a vast pamphlet literature, and other relevant material in the national libraries of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
The capital lies at the heart of the narrative. London experienced an ever-greater frequency and intensification of fogs, smokes, and smogs in an environment that contained a larger population than that of all other major British urban centers combined. Perception of what constituted atmospheric pollution was repeatedly shaped and reshaped in the light (or semidarkness) of metropolitan debate and meteorological and epidemiological analysis. At the same time, and as Stephen Mosely has demonstrated in relation to Manchester, every community viewed its own distinctive air quality problem in a slightly different manner to that of even near neighbors. So much depended on dominant source and mode of control. As Thorsheim's study confirms, in most places the pre-mid-twentieth-century record was one of unmitigated failure. Dominant social and political groups wrote and interpreted local acts and bylaws to protect their own economic interests and, as they repeatedly stated, to sustain buoyant levels of employment in the towns over which they towered like titans.
The main weakness of this study lies in its proportions and particularly the thinness of the treatment given to the period before approximately 1880. The author engages with all the right and relevant issues—miasmatic theory, rival views of the inevitability or otherwise of having to live with the growing social costs of rampant industrialism, degeneration and eugenics. But each of these complex topics is covered in too short a compass. In addition, a certain undue flatness of tone in these chapters drains drama out of exceptionally tension-laden events. Thus the section on the great London fogs between the 1870s and the beginning of the twentieth century grants too much emphasis to rival contemporary meteorological views on the relative historical severity of these episodes than to the catastrophist anti-urban newspaper and pamphlet frenzy to which “darkness at noon” gave rise. As Thorsheim emphasizes in his introduction and conclusion, what people thought and felt about pollution levels, rather than “real,” measurable levels, must by definition lie at the heart of the environmental-historical enterprise.
By contrast, the chapters devoted to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries set a new standard for our understanding of how, in technological, legislative, and local regulatory terms, the behemoth of nineteenth-century smoke fog came gradually to be tamed, only to be replaced by new collective fears of invisible emissions from new industrial processes. The pages on the self-delusions of the “non-polluting” gas industry and the final great smog crisis of 1952 are rooted in exemplary scholarship, argument, and interpretation. So, also, is the account of the ways in which the twentieth-century bureaucratic state replaced reformist individuals and voluntary organizations as the key mover in modifying the polluting excesses of industrialism. It is to be hoped that Peter Thorsheim will one day revisit the themes that he has touched upon in the earlier sections of this ambitious work.
