The Sanitary Arts The Sanitary Arts Aesthetic Culture and the Victorian Cleanliness Campaigns a Eileen Cleere THE OHIO StatE UNIVERSITY PREss COLUMBus Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cleere, Eileen. The sanitary arts : aesthetic culture and the Victorian cleanliness campaigns / Eileen Cleere. — First edition. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1258-5 (cloth) — ISBN 0-8142-1258-1 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9362-1 (cd- rom) — ISBN 0-8142-9362-X (cd-rom) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Aestheticism (Literature) 3. Art and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Social values—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 5. Sanitation in literature. 6. Sanitation in art. 7. Sanitation—Social aspects—Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Hygiene—Social aspects—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Title: Aesthetic culture and the Victorian cleanliness campaigns. PR468.A33C54 2014 820.9'008—dc23 2013046161 Cover design by AuthorSupport.com Text desgin by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materi- als. ANSI39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For John and for Max CONTENTS a Acknowledgments ix Introduction Foul Matter: Edwin Chadwick, John Ruskin, and Mid-Victorian Aesthesis 1 Chapter 1 Dirty Pictures: John Ruskin, Modern Painters, and the Victorian Sanitation of Fine Art 19 Chapter 2 The Sanitary Narrative: Victorian Reform Fiction and the Putrescence of the Picturesque 43 Chapter 3 Victorian Dust Traps 67 Chapter 4 The Surgical Arts: Aesthesia and Anaesthesia in Late-Victorian Medical Fiction 87 Chapter 5 Aesthetic Anachronisms: Mary Ward’s The Mating of Lydia and the Persistent Plot of Sanitary Fiction 110 Chapter 6 Intensive Culture: John Ruskin, Sarah Grand, and the Aesthetics of Eugenics 138 Coda On Methods, Materials, and Meaning 165 Notes 169 Works Cited 178 Index 187 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS a his project began accidentally. A copy of Samuel Smiles’s Character T appeared in the hefty pile of Interlibrary Loan books I received one morning while working on my first book, Avuncularism, at my first job at Simmons College in Boston. I returned it after a quick read when I found it had nothing to do with uncles, but I was so haunted by Smiles’s mysteri- ous meanderings about Edwin Chadwick, John Ruskin and the filthiness of Venice that I kept a copy of Character on my desk for most of my time at Simmons and later at Southwestern University. For this reason, I first want to thank all of the fabulous librarians I have worked with over the years who sometimes know better than I do what book or which essay I should read, and who labor with limited resources to make sure I can have those materials in my possession for possibly unreasonable stretches of time. Some of these wonderful professionals are Lisa Anderson, Dana Hendrix, Carol Fonken, Lisa Hopkins and Laura Forbes Glass. At both Simmons and at Southwestern I have had supportive colleagues who, in various ways, encouraged this project, and I would like to thank in particular Pamela Bromberg, Renee Bergland, Helene Meyers, Elisabeth Piedmont Marton, David Gaines, James Kilfoyle, Carina Evans, Walt Herbert, Thom McClendon, Laura Hobgood-Oster, Elaine Craddock, Alisa Gaunder, Dirk Early, Maria Lowe, Romi Burks, and Eric Selbin. Several research fel- lowships and sabbaticals from Southwestern enabled me to travel to archives and libraries in England to conduct crucial research, and I credit Dean James • ix • x ACKNOWLEDGMENts Hunt and the Southwestern University Awards Committee for continuing to prioritize Humanities scholarship, and for making sure I had necessary resources for those trips to the British Library and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. President Edward Burger’s commitment to faculty scholarship at Southwestern has been especially encouraging during the final phases of this book, and I look forward to enjoying that commitment in future endeavors. Over the years, I also benefitted significantly from generous fellowships and travel grants from the Whiting Foundation, the Sam Taylor Founda- tion, Yale Center for British Art, the British Academy, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at University of Texas at Austin. Invitations to deliver early versions of these chapters from Roger Louis at UT, from Hel- ena Michie at Rice, and from Claudia Nelson at Texas A&M, helped enor- mously as I imagined, extended and revised this book. Letters of support from these scholars as well as Teresa Mangum, Joseph Childers, and Robyn Warhol helped me as I moved from one archive and one chapter to the next. The British Studies community at University of Texas provided a convivial intellectual home for me as I was mapping out The Sanitary Arts, and I’m especially appreciative of Sam Baker for his enthusiasm and encouragement. I must thank the editors and readers at Representations for publishing the earli- est version of my first chapter, and William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson for finding the perfect home for my third chapter “Victorian Dust Traps” in their collection of essays, Filth: Dirt Disgust and Modern Life. To my readers for Ohio State University Press, Linda Shires and Barbara Leckie, I owe an enor- mous intellectual debt. Their careful, close readings of my manuscript allowed that final set of revisions to be both joyful and exciting. My editors at The Ohio State University Press, Sandy Crooms, Malcolm Litchfield, and most recently Lindsay Martin, have made the publication process as easy as pos- sible, and I would like to thank them as well as all of my contacts at the press who helped to compile and print this project. More thanks goes to Natalie Zelt at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center for helping me obtain the cover image. My dear friends Kim Smith, Elizabeth Green Musselman, and Lisa Moses Leff have made the special challenges of the “second book” seem less impossible, less onerous, and certainly much more fun. Rebecca Stern’s ongoing perspective and humor about all things professional were also much valued. As always, Caroline Levander provided the best advice, support, and friendship at the most crucial moments of the project’s evolution. Mem- bers of my family have been uniquely supportive of my project too: my father sent me every clipping from The Wall Street Journal over the last decade that even remotely pertained to sewers or British museum culture, and my mother taught me everything I know about filth and cleanliness. ACKNOWLEDGMENts xi Finally, I thank my husband, John Pipkin, who vitally connects me with a robust contemporary literary culture and also makes me laugh, and my son Max, who is simply the best kid in the world. INTRODUCTION a Foul Matter Edwin Chadwick, John Ruskin, and Mid-Victorian Aesthesis In addressing you on the subject of the Fine Arts in relation to Sanitary Reform, I am met by two difficulties, a Scylla and Charybdis that might well appall one who had not set out with a determined purpose, or was not sure of his way. The first difficulty is that the work of the artist and of the sanitary engineer seem to stand so very far apart in our minds, that I may be challenged with the question, “What have they to do with each other? Speak about either of the two things, and we will listen. But let us have one thing at a time.” The second difficulty is that the two—Art and Sanitation—are so nearly identical, are so interwoven in their action and re-action, that it may be too hastily assumed that anything I may have to say regarding their relation to each other must necessarily be obvious and trite. —Wyke Bayliss, “Sanitary Reform in Relation to the Fine Arts” (1889) t should already be apparent that Victorian ecclesiastical painter I Wyke Bayliss and I have a few things in common. When I began my research for this project on the nineteenth-century sanitation reform move- ment and its connections with Victorian aesthetic philosophy, my hybridized topic seemed explicitly contradictory. While I have always intended to argue that Sanitation and Art were thrown into philosophical opposition, contro- versy, and resolution in a wide variety of Victorian texts and settings, the two things, as Bayliss observes, share no semantic domain, no commonplace history of mutual development, no obvious field of discursive reciprocity and collusion. On the other hand, as I quickly realized, in the wake of Foucault the singular topic of sanitation reform had been so thoroughly mapped upon Victorian culture that potentially nothing seemed beyond the reach of Edwin • 1 • 2 INTRODuctION Chadwick’s invidious sanitary apparatus. In fact, to argue that Victorian aesthetic culture had shifted to accommodate the values and discourse of sanitation reform might very well seem “obvious and trite” under the meth- odological inevitability of Foucauldian New Historicism, where Chadwick’s infamous “Sanitary Idea” had already been discovered to have widespread economic, political, social and sexual effects. Mary Poovey’s groundbreaking work on British cultural formation, for example, contested standard Whig histories of Victorian reform by recasting Chadwick as a malevolent bureau- crat who “helped normalize what Michel Foucault has called disciplinary individualism, that paradoxical configuration of agency whereby freedom is constituted as “voluntary” compliance with a rationalized order, which is (not incidentally) as capable of producing irrationality as embodying ration- a l it y.” 1 Following Poovey, scholars of Victorian culture came to recognize sanitation reform as encompassing a broad range of personal rituals and procedural regulations that allowed the modern state to gain control of both individual bodies and social bodies, disciplining through the dissemination of public health laws that discriminated, disproportionately, against the poor and against women.