Michelle Allen's modest but concise and intelligent book about the conceptual, ideological, and spatial understanding of sanitary engineering in Victorian London seeks to bring the insights of social geography and literary criticism to a discussion of social changes that were, and generally still are, celebrated as unequivocally progressive. The book has a simple structure, with an extended introduction that lays out the argument “that sanitary reform generated a surprising resistance” (2) and suggests the available range of critical approaches, followed by five chapters that examine the argument in detail. While there was a general recognition by the reformist and concerned middle classes in Victorian London that urban filth posed a combination of physical threat (disease), moral dilemma, and psychological demoralization, Allen's central interest is in the way these factors combined with spatial concerns. Such spatial anxiety constructed a perception of the working classes as “insufficiently contained” (9) and hence likely to become more connected in potentially dangerous ways to their neighbors through the network of pipes, engineering, and rebuilding on which urban sanitation depended. Allen's description of “resistance” to sanitary reform, revisionist in its recognition of the extent of hostility to a dominant Victorian obsession with purity, posits an increasingly pessimistic element in the continuing opposition to “improvements,” which shifts through the century, in her phrase, from “resistance to disillusion” (21).

Her first three chapters on the mid-Victorian period center consecutively on sewers, the river Thames, and Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend. Allen argues that, while sewerage “did redraw the boundaries of urban life in the nineteenth century” and thus create the “networked city” (40), “alternative associations” were available, allowing the sewer to be conceptualized through “simultaneous primitivism and modernity” (42). Her account of the mid-Victorian redevelopment of the Thames Embankment, a recurring site for the construction of emblematic versions of British nationhood, suggests that for some commentators development on a such a massive scale only succeeded in sweeping away a picturesque (if largely imagined) cityscape without fully establishing the spatial and social order, let alone the “purification” of the river that the planners and engineers had envisioned. More challenging is Allen's argument about Our Mutual Friend, a novel that she reads as acknowledging the river, and indeed London more generally, as “degraded” (95) and a “source of danger and disease” (95) but that also depends on “Dickens's aesthetic appreciation of filth” and his willingness to draw on “the imaginative vitality of urban pollution” (95). To sustain this argument Allen analyzes the emotional and moral contours of Lizzie Hexam's flight from the tainted urban Thames to its clear flowing sources alongside what she sees as Bella Wilfer's similarly redemptive purification by water. Lizzie's “sanitary salvation” (112), Allen argues, is figured by her final destination, the paper mill, where rags are redeemed into blank white paper. Further, she sees the flux of the river's meanings as a mechanism for reconciling the threatened population that live along its banks to the city and rendering London “livable.”

The final two chapters of the book focus more particularly on accounts of the impact of sanitary reform on the working classes, again aligning relatively well-known literary, polemical, and documentary sources with less well-known journalism, graphic images, and reformist writing. Further contradictory attitudes and strategies emerge—demolition did not always result in productive rebuilding, the poor were understood as both victims of their social deprivation and to some extent its authors, political protest was both threatening to middle class sensibilities but also evidence that the underprivileged were taking some control of their own destiny. But none of these contradictions conceal an increasing pessimism in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century about the chances of any useful improvement in the social conditions of the urban poor, a pessimism that Allen traces through Gissing's The Nether World in her final chapter.

Few of Allen's conclusions, beyond her carefully detailed account of the breadth and variety of the opposition to sanitary reform, will be unexpected. That Our Mutual Friend offers figurative complexity to the idea of the river Thames or that Gissing's The Nether World is deeply pessimistic about any form of social reform that might ameliorate the conditions of the urban poor are evident enough. But Allen's conclusion in her reading of Our Mutual Friend, that Dickens, in reading the Thames through its “topographic range and diversity” (114) gathers together complexities of meaning not available elsewhere, raises one important issue for the kinds of cultural studies approach that her work represents—that of the comparative status of her sources. Allen states in her introduction that “critical to this textual and experiential study of London sanitary life is the joining together of a rich variety of documentary materials” (20). In this she is following the model increasingly used by literary scholars in developing detailed readings of chosen texts within, and against, an assembly of documentary, journalistic, and visual material brought together by common thematic interest. The claim of many such projects to originality and insight depends on just this grasp of available but often overlooked and obscure nonliterary sources through which the nuances, uncertainties, and contradictions of the “lived” Victorian experience might be reconstructed. But for Allen “the Victorian novel plays a central role … literature is capable of critiquing [processes of social and spatial formation] by creating new visions of space and society … these imagined geographies can be important sites of resistance” (20). The suggestion here is that literary sources should be privileged both because of their potentially oppositional stance and their imaginative complexity. While not doubting at all that “literature is not exempt from the processes of social and spatial formation” (20), it is harder to argue, however complex their figuring of events and issues, that novels are central to that process. The tensions between the novel as social commentary and texts as a form of social process are difficult to separate here, but there is a sense in which the elaborate superstructure of sources drawn from sanitary history in Allen's book are largely tools for her revisionist readings of Our Mutual Friend and The Nether World rather than the means of constructing a sustained historiographically informed argument about sanitary reform and its opponents. The illustrations, too, which are interesting and drawn from a wide variety of graphic discourses, are given captions that never recognize the complexity of the modes, tropes, and reprographic techniques through which they are constructed. They merely “illustrate” arguments within the text. In its wish to reconstruct the subjective experience of Victorian London, this book inevitably regresses to the novel as the central mode of understanding.

To say this is not to diminish the many valuable aspects of Cleansing the City. Allen brings together an interesting and well-researched range of material to support her central discussion of how the sanitary rebuilding of London in the Victorian period impinged on, and rendered complex, issues to do with space, class, morality, and purification. Her analysis of the nature of dissent and opposition to sanitary change offers a necessary challenge to clichés about the triumphs of Victorian engineering and social reform. Her use of social geography as a conceptual framework for that analysis is a thoughtful and generally productive one. Cleansing the City is a well-informed and capable response to well-established scholarly and historiographical orthodoxies in this field.