Chadwick, Edwin

views updated

CHADWICK, EDWIN

CHADWICK, EDWIN (1800–1890), English reformer.

Born 24 January 1800, near Manchester, Edwin Chadwick was the son of a radical journalist. Although trained as a barrister, he never practiced law. After two years as secretary to Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), he attempted to put the utilitarian sage's principles into practice as a government reformer. Chadwick's articles on current social problems and proposed administrative solutions brought him to the attention of political economists like Nassau William Senior and reform-minded Whig leaders like Henry Brougham. Through them he was brought in as an expert investigator on two new royal commissions in 1832—on the poor laws and on child labor in the factories. Chadwick proved quite willing to suppress evidence contrary to his opinions, and crafted his reforms partly in terms of the advancement of his own career. Ignoring the call of the followers of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) to abolish the poor laws altogether, Chadwick insisted that a public relief system could be safely maintained if it was rigorously overhauled and infused with deterrent strategies.

reforms

The major recommendations of the report of the royal commission on the poor laws, written largely by Chadwick and issued in 1834, were the principle of less eligibility and the use of a workhouse test. The former embodied the concept that the condition of the pauper receiving public relief should be less eligible (less desirable) than that of the lowest paid independent laborer. The workhouse test was designed to put this into practice. The harsh regimen of the new workhouses would act as a test of destitution for the able bodied, since only the truly desperate would subject themselves to the discipline, hard work, and monotonous diet of the new workhouses. These recommendations were embodied in the New Poor Law of 1834. Chadwick had been simultaneously involved in a commission on factory children, and the resulting Factory Act of 1833 abolished all labor for children under nine and limited it to eight hours per day for those aged nine to thirteen.

Chadwick was passed over for one of the three poor law commissionerships under the 1834 act, accepting the lower position of secretary. In this post he was unable to prevent what he considered a gross maladministration of the new law, characterized by a fitful and very partial application of the workhouse test. Nonetheless, he carved out new areas of social inquiry and reform. The most important of these was a sanitary investigation, ostensibly conducted by the Poor Law Commission, but in fact carried out entirely by Chadwick. Published in 1842 as The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, it is Chad-wick's greatest work. Deploying a formidable array of statistics and expert medical testimony, he made a compelling case for the connection between illness and poverty. He also demonstrated that much, if not most, sickness was due to the appalling overcrowding and lack of sanitation in the towns. Chadwick called for dramatic government action to provide fresh water and create radically new sewer systems using smallbore earthenware pipes so that urban refuse could be efficiently removed before a deadly "miasma" (believed to be the predisposing cause of most illness) could form.

With the passage of the Public Health Act of 1848, Chadwick at last tasted real executive authority. While he considered the statute defective in its coercive powers over recalcitrant local authorities, he set to work vigorously with his colleague on the General Board of Health, Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper) to reform England's sanitary institutions. Using his limited coercive powers to the full, he compelled many reluctant municipalities to appoint local boards and begin the process of draining, sewering, and providing fresh water. He also made numerous enemies by his dictatorial and dogmatic manner. This proved to be the undoing of both Chadwick and the General Board of Health. In 1854 Chadwick was stripped of his post, and the general board was reorganized and placed under the control of one of his leading critics. It was his last paid government position.

reputation

In spite of this repudiation by Parliament, Chadwick continued to be a dynamic force in administrative reform and the public health movements for the remaining thirty-six years of his life and was at last granted a knighthood a year before his death in 1890. While he is rightly viewed as an intrepid early pioneer in the making of the British Welfare State, he has come in for less favorable treatment by historians since the late twentieth century. Two hagiographic biographies of 1952, by R. A. Lewis and S. E. Finer, hail Chadwick as an indefatigable fighter to improve society and its institutions. A less flattering picture was presented in 1988 by Anthony Brundage, who details Chadwick's personal ambition, hostility toward rival reformers, and devious political strategies. A more sweeping indictment came in 1997 with Christopher Hamlin's study, in which Chadwick is depicted as having subverted an older, more humane tradition of public health reform, substituting impersonal bureaucratic structures and dubious engineering nostrums for real engagement in the lives of the poor.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Chadwick, Edwin. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842). Reprinted with an introduction by M. W. Flinn. Edinburgh, 1965.