The rapid and widespread acceptance of germ theories of disease among domestic sanitarians during the 1870s—1980s was one of the roots of Progressivism. Their work as so-called house doctors helped shift reform from a moral to a social environmentalism. Germ theories of invisible microbes dissolved the boundaries between inside and outside the body, home, and city. Reformers gave less attention to changing destructive personal behavior and more to ameliorating harmful environmental conditions. In Manchester, a son of its worst slum of Ancoats, Charles Rowley, led a successful grassroots campaign for “healthy lives, healthy homes, and healthy surroundings.” Town hall became involved in removing substandard dwellings, redesigning neighborhoods, and building housing estates in the suburbs. Yet the limits of reform were soon reached when these projects challenged the private housing market. Environmental conditions improved and mortality rates went down, but the slums remained in place at the outbreak of the Great War.
Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Development, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 478; James H. Cassedy, “Hygeia: A Mid-Victorian Dream of a City of Health,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences17 (1962): 217—28; Christopher C. Sellers, “Thoreau's Body: Toward an Embodied Environmental History,” Environmental History4 (October 1999): 486—514; Nancy Tomes, “ The Private Side of Public Health: Sanitary Science, Domestic Hygiene, and the Germ Theory, 1870—1900,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine64 (Winter 1990): 509—39; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1998); Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870—1900 ( Montreal, QC, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press , 1996); and Graeme Davison, “The City as a Natural System: Theories of Urban Society in Early Nineteenth Century Britain,” in Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 349—70. Delores Hayden discusses “material feminists.” See Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). On links between urban reform in North America and Europe, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Following Rodgers, I use the term Progressivism interchangeably between American and European efforts to reform the city between 1880 and 1920.
2.
Howard Ebenezer, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898), as cited in Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), fig 5.
3.
Fishman, Urban Utopias.
4.
Adams, Architecture in the Family Way, 5.
5.
John Sanders, as quoted in the Manchester Guardian, October 1889. See Tomes, “ Private Side,” n. 4, 536. Also see Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840—1890 ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865—1900 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000 ). On the timing of the new wave of housing reform, see Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (Montreal, QC, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1977), and Anthony S. Wohl, “Introduction,” in Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883; repr., New York: Leicester University Press , 1970).
6.
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820—1920 ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
7.
Margaret Marsh , “From Separation to Togetherness: The Social Construction of Domestic Space in American Suburbs, 1840—1915 ,” Journal of American History76 (September 1989): 507, for the quotation; ibid., 506—27; Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 145—54; and Philip J. Ethington, “Recasting Urban Political History: Gender, the Public, the Household, and Political Participation in Boston and San Francisco during the Progressive Era,” Social Science History18 (Summer 1992): 301—33. Also see Ann Hughes and Karen Hunt, “ A Culture Transformed? Women's Lives in Wythenshawe in the 1930s,” in Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding, eds., Workers' Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880—1939 (Manchester , UK: University of Manchester Press, 1992), 74—101.
8.
Wohl, The Eternal Slum, 73, for the quotation.
9.
See I. Harford, Manchester and Its Ship Canal Movement: Class, Work, and Politics in Late Victorian England (Halifax, NS, Canada: Ryburn, 1994), for the city's local political history; Mike Williams and D. A. Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester (Preston, UK: Carnegie, 1992), 90—119, for its economy; and Alan J. Kidd, Manchester (Keele, UK: Ryburn, 1993 ), 103—19, for its population statistics.
10.
John I. Rushton , “Charles Rowley and the Ancoats Recreation Movement” (master's thesis, University of Manchester , 1959), 1—32, and Charles Rowley, Fifty Years of Work without Wages, 2nd ed. (London : Hodder and Stoughton, n.d., ca. 1911). On Manchester's political culture, see V.A.C. Gatrell, “Incorporation and the Pursuit of Liberal Hegemony in Manchester, 1790—1839,” in Derek Fraser, ed., Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1982), 15—60.
11.
Rowley, Fifty Years of Work, 49—50, for the quotation.
12.
Ibid., 55.
13.
Rowley, as quoted in Rushton, “Charles Rowley,” 31.
14.
Rowley, Fifty Years of Work, 214.
15.
Ibid., 196—214. For an introduction to the social settlement house, on the British side, see Asa Briggs, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1984), and Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880— 1914: The Search for Community (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). On the American side, see Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890—1914 (New York : Oxford University Press, 1967).
16.
John Sanders , as quoted in the National Advance, May 3, 1890 , in Healthy Homes Society, “Scrapbooks ” (Local History Section, Manchester Central Library ), 1:9—24; ibid. On the formation of the HHS, also see Manchester Evening News, July 11, 1889. On the political mobilization of reform candidates, also see Manchester Guardian, September 20, 1890, and April 29, 1891. The large turnouts continued for several years . In 1894, for example, 21,560 people attended thirty-one meetings. The HHS-sponsored lectures continued for another decade. See Manchester City News, September 15, 1894; HHS, “Scrapbooks,” 1:9—24.
17.
J.H. Crosfield , The “Bitter Cry” of Ancoats and of Impoverished Manchester: Being a Series of Letters on Municipal Topics (Manchester, UK: Ireland, 1887), 14, for the quotation. The title was a play on another successful piece of muckraking. See above, n. 4.
18.
Crosfield, “Bitter Cry,” 15, for the quotations.
19.
On Dr. Leigh, see Alan Wilson, “Technology and Municipal Decision-Making: Sanitary Systems in Manchester 1868—1910” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1990); A. Redford and I.S. Russell, The History of Local Government in Manchester (London: Longmans, 1939), 2:402—29; and the reminiscences of his successor MOH, Dr. James Niven, Observations on the History of Public Health Effort in Manchester ( Manchester, UK: Heywood, 1923), 2—24.
20.
John C. Thresh , An Inquiry into the Causes of Excessive Mortality in No. 1 District, Ancoats (Manchester, UK: Heywood, 1889), 38, for the quotation.
21.
Ibid., 40—41.
22.
S. Norbury Williams, “The Health Inquiry and Its Results . . .,” letter to the editor, Manchester City News, November 17, 1888, for the quotation. Williams was the chairman of the Manchester Ratepayers Association. Also see ibid., December 1, 1888, and December 15, 1888 .
23.
“Memorial,” as reported in City of Manchester , Proceedings of the City Council, April 3, 1889, 158, for the quotation, and Fred Scott, “The High Death Rate—Meeting in Ancoats” Manchester City News, December 1, 1888, for a story on a meeting on the death rate in Ancoats, which was led by several workingmen and trade union officers as well as Rowley and members of the medical profession.
24.
Dr. Thresh, as quoted in Manchester Guardian, February 12, 1889. This meeting was sponsored by the Sanitary Reform Association of St. Mark's Church.
25.
Ibid., January 1, 1894; Manchester City News, March 3, 1894.
26.
City of Manchester, “Report of the Unhealthy Dwellings Committee,” Proceedings of the Common Council, May 1, 1889, 278—88. Wohl shows that in the wake of the publication of Mearns's “Bitter Cry” in 1883, the Tories became identified with housing reform in London and in Parliament. See Wohl, “ Introduction.” Also see Kidd , Manchester, 158—59.
27.
On housing, see City of Manchester, Proceedings of the Common Council, September 22, 1896, 1321—33; ibid., February 17, 1897, 345—56; ibid., March 17, 1897, 409—12; T.R. Marr, Housing Conditions in Manchester and Salford (Manchester, UK: Sherratt and Hughes , 1904); and Ernest Darwin Simon and J. Inman, Rebuilding Manchester (London: Longmans, Green, 1935). In 1890, the Conservative majority abolished the Unhealthy Dwellings Committee, placing its jurisdiction in the Sanitary Committee.
28.
On sanitation, see Shenna Simon, A Century of City Government, Manchester, 1838—1938 ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), 178—90; Wilson, “Technology and Municipal Decision-Making ,” 134—94; Niven, Observations.
29.
Simon, Century of City Government, 399, for the quotation; Wilson, “ Technology and Municipal Decision-Making,” 134—94.
30.
On tram statistics, see Roy Frost, Electricity in Manchester ( Manchester, UK: Richardson, 1993 ), 27—30. The average commuter paid six tenths of penny, meaning that most paid a half-pence fare. On health statistics, see City of Manchester , “Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health ,” Proceedings of the Common Council, 1890—1920. On the complexity of the “condition of England” question, see Graham Mooney and Simon Szreter, “Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities,” Economic History Review51 (1998): 84—112.
31.
Manchester City News, June 9, 1894. Also see Simon and Inman, Rebuilding Manchester, 1—25. Between 1900 and 1903, the trams were electrified; see Frost, Electricity, 27—30.
32.
Manchester City News, June 9, 1894; City of Manchester, Proceedings of the Common Council, May 6, 1908, 367—434.
33.
On tram statistics, see Frost, Electricity, 27—30. On health statistics, see City of Manchester, “Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health,” Proceedings of the Common Council, 1890—1920. On the “condition of England” question, see Mooney and Szreter, “Urbanization.”
34.
Ancoats: A Study of a Clearance Area; Report of a Survey in 1937—1938 (Manchester , UK: Manchester University Settlement, 1945), 11—14.
35.
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York : W. W. Norton, 1994).
