by David Boyle
‘Here and there, and everywhere were Chadwick’s young crusaders, the assistant commissioners, scouring the country in stage-coaches and post-chaises, or beating up against the storm on ponies in the Weald, returning to London, their wallets stuffed with Tabular data so dear to philosophic Radicals,’ wrote the great historian of the Victorian age, G. M. Young, describing the period. Everywhere also were the new inspectors. There were factory inspectors from 1834. Soon there were also prison inspectors, then school inspectors, railway inspectors and mines inspectors. The great architecture of official calculation, still in place to day, was taking shape – each inspector armed with definitions against which they tested the schools or factories, counting, tabulating and assessing.
II
Edwin Chadwick was the son of an unsuccessful businessman from Longsight, Manchester. He was born in 1800, just 24 days into the new century, into a household so obsessed with cleanliness that all the children were washed all over every day. ‘The mainspring of Chadwick’s career seems to have been the desire to wash the people of England all over, every day, in administrative order,’ wrote G. M. Young. Cleanliness became Edwin’s obsession right up to his death at the age of 90. It was the source of his success, but also the key to his unpopularity. ‘There is nothing’, said The Times, ‘worse than being cleaned against your will.’
At the age of 23, Chadwick decided to become a barrister, and moved into his new home in the disreputable Lyon’s Inn, now in the courtyard of Bush House on the Aldwych. He lived there for seven years, learning about criminals, prisons, slums and fever and supporting himself by writing about them – living in abject fear that his fellow students might find out what he was doing. His career as a barrister, like Bentham’s, lasted as long as his first case. He was employed to defend a man charged with bigamy, but the more he investigated the case, the more convinced he was that the client was actually guilty. ‘What’s it to you?’ asked the client. ‘You only have to shake the wife’s evidence.’ Chadwick abandoned the case and never practised law again.
Instead he expanded his journalism. Almost the first friends he made were two of Bentham’s acolytes, Southwood Smith and Dr Neill Arnott, with whom he wandered round the fever dens of London’s East End. Soon he was consorting with the Utilitarians, as one of the select group of young men who used to read to Bentham and tuck him into bed at night. His new friends soon persuaded him that he should write about the lives of the poor. In true Utilitarian style, he hit on the snappy title The Means of Insurance against Accidents, etc.
In 1831, Bentham persuaded him to leave Lyon’s Inn and move in with him. He described his relationship with the old philosopher as ‘active friendship’. Although modern readers will construe all kinds of homosexual undertones, this was a period of passionate friendship between men, but there was no doubt that Chadwick was absolutely devoted to Bentham, nursing him through his last illness with intricate care. To the end of his life, Bentham was Chadwick’s idol. He never allowed anyone near him even to make a joke at the expense of the philosopher’s memory. ‘Bentham was his ideal, his guiding star, and had called forth all the tenderness of his nature,’ wrote Chadwick’s daughter. History doesn’t relate whether he ever made the trip to University College to look at his old friend in the glass case.
The two were alike in many ways. If he had a sense of humour at all, Chadwick’s was ironic and cynical. He was a big man, unlike Bentham, with piercing eyes and a mane of brown hair over his shoulders, but he shared the same apocalyptic passion and hatred for anyone he saw as getting in the way of progress – in effect, anyone who disagreed with him. He despised literature and people who read books for amusement. He was an obsessive, a bore in the century of really serious bores, and possibly at any other time apart from the 1830s, he would have been sidelined as a crank. But in the atmosphere of the day, with the new railways streaking into the distance, the Reform Bill discussed in Parliament, the agitation over the employment of children in factories, and a sense that science and figures could change the world, Chadwick’s moral energy and determination could take him to the top.
There are two kinds of economists, he told the Political Economy Club – one who hypothesizes and the other who reasons from facts. To change the conditions in which people lived, you had to have the facts and Chadwick was determined to get them. He borrowed the example of the prison reformer John Howard, who had famously gone round the gaols of Britain armed with a measuring tape, weighing scales and notebook. Chadwick was going to do the same – and the notebook was important. Because, as he so rightly saw, the figures alone were not enough. You have to be able to talk to people to interpret them. He would write it all down. Not just facts, but moral statistics.
In February 1832, he got his chance. Earl Grey’s government announced a Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, and one of the commissioners – his friend Nassau Senior, a kind of economic adviser to the government – commissioned him to look at how the existing law worked in London. He was given £100 as a retainer.
With all the twentieth-century rhetoric about the Welfare State, we tend to imagine that being poor two centuries ago was unremittingly hopeless. It probably was, but the situation wasn’t completely different from today. About one fifth of national expenditure went on welfare payments to the poor, and this was rising fast, which is not completely different from now. By 1833, one sixth of the population was dependent on some kind of public charity. The Poor Laws were administered by local agents who included among them the enlightened, the patronizing and the petty tyrants, just as they do today. The difference was that in those days there was no objective, no system and no central control. The Poor Law was run by 15,000 separate parishes, administered mainly by farmers and publicans, and none of them had to submit accounts.
Most intelligent political commentators believed, like Malthus, that the time had come to abolish welfare altogether. The two bishops on the royal commission certainly thought so, and – if it hadn’t been for Chadwick – they probably would have recommended it. But under the influence of Bentham, Chadwick had other ideas. He conceived of a new system that would demand that paupers would have to live in a new network of workhouses in order to get relief. These would sustain them, but not be so comfortable as to actually attract poor people off the streets. They should be what he called ‘uninviting places of wholesome restraint’. If the system worked, the first effect would be to increase employment and raise wages – or so he believed.
Writers like Dickens have painted an appalling picture of the workhouses as cruel and degrading places which most of them in fact became, but this wasn’t quite the plan that Chadwick envisaged. He wanted separate institutions for different categories of people: hospitals for the sick, almshouses for the elderly, schools for the young, where the problems of each could be dealt with properly. That never happened. The inhumanity of the system, which so brought Bentham’s ideals into disrepute, happened because all the inmates were lumped in together to save money. There was no thought of categorizing them, still less of helping them.
Even so, Chadwick remained more proud of the Poor Law Report than anything else he did. The figures collected by him and his fellow investigators filled 15 volumes. As soon as he had finished investigating London, he set off to look at Buckinghamshire, Sussex and Hampshire. That filled another volume, with a note at the end which said ‘the remainder of Mr Chadwick’s evidence will follow shortly’. But it grew and grew and ended up in a tin trunk, where it remained. Even without it, the summary report was a great success, selling 15,000 copies. The resulting new law was, said Chadwick later, ‘the first great piece of legislation based upon scientific and economical principles’.
But before he had the chance to relax, the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, had sent him as one of three royal commissioners to the strike-torn cities of the north, to investigate the plight of children in factories, together with the indefatigable Southwood Smith. Their task was to put forward an alternative scheme for th
e government, to help them head off the popular head of steam behind Lord Ashley’s Ten Hours Bill.
Chadwick set about interviewing his new assistants. He was not impressed. Most of them seemed to have been sent his way by politicians pulling strings for their friends and relatives. ‘Why, I know Lord Althorp from having attended some of his family in Leamington,’ said one assistant commissioner, when Chadwick asked him why he wanted the job. ‘I was passing down the street accidentally the other day, when who should accost me but Lord Althorp, with “Hallo, Loudon, would you like to be on a commission?”’
Despite these frustrations, the assistant commissioners were sent on their way with a mass of questions for the factory owners, the children and their mothers. Was your first child born within a year of your marriage? How many children have you had stillborn? How many miscarriages? The Times was furious: ‘Such a mass of impotent and stupid verbiage it has seldom been our fortune to face,’ wrote their leader writer. The campaigners liked them even less. Workers were instructed not to give evidence to the assistant commissioners. When they arrived in town, Chadwick’s calculators were handed a written protest and faced a siege of children and parents around their hotel every night, singing the ‘Ten Hours song:’ ‘We will have the Ten Hours Bill/That we will, that we will’.
Leaflets condemned ‘heartless calculations’. ‘If, instead of making us pay these men for the printing of these books, they had appointed a committee of old washerwomen and promised them a tea-drinking, and left them to decide whether children should work more than ten hours a day,’ said the Ten Hours Committee, ‘there should have been some credit due to them.’
But Chadwick outbid them. He proposed that no child under the age of nine should be employed. From the ages of 9 to 14, they should work no more than eight hours, and over 14 there should be no limit. And with this historic compromise under his belt, Chadwick hoped to be appointed as one of the three commissioners charged with the task of putting the new Poor Law into practice. It was to be a major disappointment.
III
The first meeting of the Poor Law Commission at Somerset House in London must have been a fascinating encounter. There they were, three completely unsuitable placemen and Chadwick. A crotchety Tory MP, Frankland Lewis, Shaw-Lefevre, a charmingly insipid former Cambridge blue, who had been so useless as an under-secretary that his clerks had laughed at him. And the banker George Nicholls who had so little sense of humour that – after watching Mozart’s Don Giovanni – all he could exclaim was: ‘What a shocking state of society!’
The minister had put Chadwick’s name to the cabinet, but there was complete silence. His ‘station in society’ was not considered fit to be a commissioner. But Chadwick was taken aside by his patron, and offered the secretaryship; and promised that the role would have the status of a kind of ‘fourth commissioner’. The trouble was that this special status was never written down or communicated to the others.
So the scene was set for a gigantic misunderstanding. The commissioners couldn’t understand why their secretary was insisting on things and eventually sent him outside. Chadwick went but sent a message back in explaining that any meetings without him would be illegal. ‘Mr Chadwick,’ said an exasperated Lewis in the chair, waving a copy of the Act above his head, ‘we have the authority to dismiss you.’ And so Chadwick explained his special status to the meeting, and the Lewis mouth dropped further and further open. This was the high point of their relationship. It carried on downhill from there.
Chadwick’s calculations led him to believe that the active head of the family needed to eat 2,252 calories a day. In theory it was impossible to stick to his limit and make workhouse meals less appetizing than ordinary meals labourers were used to outside, but in practice they rarely came close. Most of the new institutions – the ‘bastilles’, according to the populist opponents – insisted on ugly uniforms, short haircuts, ordered bells and religious services, rising at seven in summer and five in winter. If the inmates refused to work they were put on a diet of bread and water. The whole idea of the workhouse was soon a terrible stigma, and many paupers preferred to starve outside than subject themselves to it. Of the 149 paupers who applied for relief in the new workhouse in Cuckfield, Sussex on the first day of the snow, only six were prepared to face working the crank. Three more gave up after three days. There were rumours that workhouse gruel was “nattomy soup’, made up of poor children’s body parts’.
Labourers in Suffolk burned down their local workhouse, but the real opposition came from the North of England. There were torchlight processions on the Yorkshire moors and a newspaper called the Northern Liberator suggested that Chadwick should be gibbeted. He began to get death threats. One of his assistant commissioners survived no less than three assassination attempts. In Todmorden, the poor rates couldn’t be collected, and the special constables sent to collect them were driven out of town. In Huddersfield, factory workers broke down the doors of the workhouse and extracted the Poor Law ‘guardians’. There were minor revolutions in Oldham and Rochdale and, in Bradford, an assistant commissioner was seized by the crowd who proceeded to drive out the troop of cavalry sent to rescue him. They controlled the whole town for a month.
Completely oblivious of the fact that he was now the most hated man in the country, Chadwick dashed to Manchester for a holiday – ignoring his host’s requests that he come incognito. But he noticed nothing. Every smile and handshake convinced him he was on the right track and he came back to Somerset House reinvigorated – only to find himself increasingly marginalized by Lewis. But it was the local tyrants that finally ended Chadwick’s term of office, when The Times investigated goings-on at the workhouse in Andover, under a particularly brutal individual called McDougal. They found the inmates were so starved that they fought over the bones they were supposed to be crushing for manure, some of which were said to be from the local churchyard.
But by then, Chadwick had discovered another interest. When Lewis had earlier handed his position over to his far more competent but equally hostile son, Chadwick had found himself completely sidelined. He had convinced himself that the main reason people became paupers was disease, and as he looked around for something to do, he came up with the idea of researching this phenomenon more fully. It was the most important decision of his life.
Among the various professions he had come to hate the most, engineers and doctors ranked near the top. He simply didn’t believe doctors were able to cure disease. The only thing to do was to prevent it entirely – and that meant more counting. His faithful bloodhounds Southwood Smith and Arnott, together with Dr James Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth), set off to get them. Southwood Smith’s calculations astonished Chadwick: out of 77,000 paupers studied, 14,000 had been made poor by catching fever.
It was 1839, and Chadwick had just got married (unlike the other Utilitarians, he made rather a success of it) and he was spoiling for the challenge. He printed 7,000 copies of the report out of his own pocket and got a friendly bishop to ask the House of Lords to set up a bigger inquiry. Two days later, Lord John Russell commanded the poor law commissioners to do so. The result was the Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population, one of the most important documents of the Victorian age.
The report shocked the public. One Tory minister, Lord Normanby, refused to believe it until he had been taken round Bethnal Green and Whitechapel personally by Southwood Smith. It was followed by Chadwick’s voluminous research into burials and by the Royal Commission on the Health of Towns. As his years of powerlessness as poor laws secretary went by, he studied everything, from the medical police in Germany to the drains of Paris. His office in Somerset House, from which he refused to resign, was filled with bits of new designs for drains or American street-cleaning equipment. The figures poured in from his assistant commissioners on the ground, and from the 553 new district registrars.
It was a particularly dirty moment for Britain’s cities. London had doubled in population in C
hadwick’s own lifetime so far. In the 1830s alone, the death rate in Birmingham had risen from 14.6 per thousand people to 27.2. Most buildings had no drains, and anyway it was illegal to link them up to the sewers. Cityscapes were pockmarked with great stinking pools of sewage and other filth. And the recent privatization of London’s water companies had led to much road-digging as they connected and disconnected pipes to rival companies, but could still only provide water for three hours a day. Most houses in the big industrial towns had no privy and nowhere to wash clothes. Some houses were surrounded by six inches of excrement that you could only cross by balancing on a network of bricks.
Then there was the problem of burials. In places like Rotherhithe, there were now so many graves that each new one would expose more half-decomposed bodies, which would have to be chopped up with spades and burned. ‘He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the Globe,’ said the witty canon of St Paul’s, Sydney Smith.
In Manchester – where the newly formed Statistical Society’s house-to-house surveys had counted 15,000 people living in airless lightless cellars, Friedrich Engels had been finding something even worse: ‘Masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among the standing pools in all directions … A horde of ragged women and children swarm around here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles.’ In the whole area, he wrote, there was one ‘usually inaccessible privy’ for 120 people.
The Royal Commission provided even more resources for research. Under Chadwick’s direction, a letter was sent to the 50 towns with the highest death rates, together with an appendix of 62 questions. The assistant commissioners followed shortly afterwards to get some answers. Chadwick was in his element. ‘My vacation has been absorbed in visiting with Mr Smith and Dr Playfair the worst parts of some of the worst towns,’ he wrote happily to the Registrar-General. ‘Dr Playfair has been knocked up by it and has been seriously ill. Mr Smith has had a little dysentery; Sir Henry de la Beche was obliged at Bristol to stand up the end of alleys and vomit while Dr Playfair was investigating overflowing privies.’
