Background
Edwin Chadwick was born at Longsight, Lancashire, on January 24, 1800.
(When our Government was pressed on the subject of a Poor-...)
When our Government was pressed on the subject of a Poor-law for Ireland, I confidently advised the adoption of a provision for the relief of the able-bodied, which, by some statesmen, was deemed to be for Ireland a wild and dangerous provision, but my confidence in it was derived from observation of the working of analogous principles of relief upon able-bodied Irish labourers in England. Besides the deep-seated evil of mendicancy, such a provision might, I considered, be brought to bear on the evils connected with the occupancy of land and upon agrarian disturbances. Economically considered, whatsoever may be the importance of the freedom of change of the ownership of land obtained by means of the great measurethe Incumbered Estates Actof which the late Sir Robert Peel said it was so good a measure that he really wondered how it had ever passedof even greater importance is freedom of change of the occupancy of the land, which should be facilitated and promoted in various ways, one of which is the assurance given to the cottier that he need not cling to the wretched mud hovel, for his children as well as himself, for that neither he nor they are now in any danger of perishing upon abandoning it, even if he fail to obtain a more productive occupancy. Under the Poor-law Amendment Act, extensive sales were made of cottages and plots of land, amounting, I believe, to a million or more in saleable value, which had fallen into the possession of the parishes, on account of the destitution of the cottier owners, but in a large proportion of cases, I believe, on their abandonment of them and the abandonment of the neighbourhoods for a higher return for labour to be obtained as wages elsewhere. The whole proceeding in this class of cases was one of benefit, in the greater return of produce to be obtained by their employment at the market rates of wages, as well as from the gain of produce to the country by superior or less expensive culture. Mr., now Sir George Nicholls, whose opinions were thought to be less extreme or more impartial than mine, was sent over to Ireland to examine and report on the measures of the nature of a legal provision which it was expedient to adopt. Upon a full and impartial examination, he reported decidedly in favour of a legal right being given to the able-bodied, and to a system of relief being instituted, in which entire and not partial relief should be given, and that relief in the workhouse should be the rule. By his exertions mainly, improved poorhouses have been constructed, and Ireland has had the advantage of an advanced system of relief, for which union chargeability in wide areas is substituted for the English law of relief under the law of parochial settlement.
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(Excerpt from A Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry...)
Excerpt from A Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry Into the Practice of Interment in Towns, 1845: Made at the Request of Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department The chapters omitted, happily, have little application in the United States. Though legislation would be salutary as far as to restrain burials within cities after prescribed periods, the establish ment of burial-places under public management, in alliance with an established church, would not be consonant to our institutions; and where a family is seldom crowded into a single room, as in Europe, the proposed regulation for the immediate removal of the dead to a common receptacle, is not felt to be a requisition of humanity. What is said, therefore, upon these and other evils scarcely known here, is comparatively unimportant and not republished. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Edwin Chadwick was born at Longsight, Lancashire, on January 24, 1800.
He began his education at a small school in Lancashire and moved to a boarding school in Stockport, where he studied until he was 10. When his family moved to London in 1810, Chadwick continued his education with the help of private tutors, his father and a great deal of self-teaching.
Largely self-educated, he entered an attorney's office and was called to the bar. He was also a journalist and was influenced by the writings of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of English utilitarianism. Bentham in turn admired Chadwick's articles (especially those on preventive police) and took him on as his assistant. When Bentham died in 1832, Chadwick carried on his work through membership on several royal commissions. Chadwick and the political economist Nassau Senior drafted the Poor Law Commission's report which led to the adoption of the New Poor Law of 1834. This legislation, however, was bureaucratic and harsh. It was popular with the propertied classes because poor rates dropped, but it was unpopular with the working classes since relief was not easily available. Chadwick was also in the forefront of the movement to improve conditions of public health. He worked closely with Southwood Smith in publishing a series of reports which pointed up unsanitary conditions. In his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) Chadwick compiled a grim record of slum housing, unclean water, and undrained streets, all of which he concluded formed the basis of crime, disease, and immorality. The Public Health Act of 1848, passed by Parliament in the wake of a threat of a cholera epidemic, fell far short of Chadwick's proposals, but a board of health was created which Chadwick headed from 1848 to 1854. Factory reform also attracted the attention of Chadwick and the Benthamite reformers. The acts of 1833 and 1847 were to a great extent a result of their work. Chadwick was the most famous British civil servant of his time and the chief proponent of government intervention in the solution of social problems. His obsession with organization, centralization, and efficiency led a critic to charge that Chadwick planned to abolish the counties and cut up the map of England into "Benthamite rectangles. " Local objections to government interference led to Chadwick's dismissal from the board of health in 1854. Although he never again held a government post, he continued to testify before royal commissions and, like Bentham before him, continued to draw up reform plans and programs until his death in 1890.
Chadwick is remembered at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine where his name appears among the names of 23 pioneers of public health and tropical medicine chosen to be honoured when the School was built in 1929. He is also commemorated at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland for the engineering building.
He was one of the founders of the modern British administrative state. He was knighted in 1889.
(When our Government was pressed on the subject of a Poor-...)
(Excerpt from A Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry...)
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
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Quotations: "The education of the intellect is a great business; but an unconsecd intellect is the saddest sight on which the sun looks down. "
Chadwick was a tactless man, but his passion for administrative efficiency brought the national state to a position of social responsibility.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Priti Joshi in 2004 the evaluation of his career has drastically changed since the 1950s:
"The Chadwick that emerges in recent accounts could not be more different from the mid-century Chadwick. The post-war critics saw him as a visionary, an often-embattled crusader for public health whose enemies were formidable but whose vision, extending the liberal and radical tradition, ultimately prevailed. Cultural critics, on the other hand, present a Chadwick who misrepresented (if not outright oppressed) the poor and who was instrumental in developing a massive bureaucracy to police their lives. Thus, while earlier accounts highlighted Chadwick’s accomplishments, the progress of public health reforms, and the details of legislative politics, more recent ones draw attention to his representations of the poor, the erasures in his text, and the growing nineteenth-century institutionalization of the poor that the Sanitary Report promotes. Chadwick, in other words, is portrayed as either a pioneer of reform or an avatar of bureaucratic oppression. "
