Edwin Chadwick

English physician and social reformer

• Born: January 24, 1800
• Birthplace: Longsight (now Manchester), England
• Died: July 6, 1890
• Place of death: East Sheen, Surrey, England

The most active and determined of Jeremy Bentham’s disciples, Chadwick sought to reform British government with utilitarian rigor and efficiency, hoping to make it more responsive to the massive social problems created by industrialization and urbanization.

Early Life

Edwin Chadwick was the grandson of Andrew Chadwick, a friend of John Wesley, and a major figure in the establishment of the first Methodist Sunday schools in Lancashire. Edwin’s father, James Chadwick, was an unsuccessful businessperson who, inspired by the French Revolution and the ideas of Thomas Paine, became a radical journalist. Edwin’s childhood was rendered difficult through his father’s financial straits and his mother’s early death. Nevertheless, he received a sound education at local schools and from private tutors. He moved to London in 1810 when his father assumed an editorial post there. In 1818, he embarked upon his legal education by entering an attorney’s office as an apprentice. In 1823, having raised his sights to the more prestigious profession of barrister, he entered the Middle Temple to begin seven years of residence and study.

There was little formal structure to legal education in this period, leaving Chadwick with ample opportunity to explore the exciting and turbulent life of the capital. His residence, Lyon’s Inn, was in the midst of London, close not only to the law courts and lawyers’ offices but also to the medical schools, hospitals, and the very center of government itself—the Houses of Parliament. Eager, curious, and resolute, Chadwick explored every corner of his new world, from the corridors of power in Westminster to the most appalling and wretched slums of east London. He was also quick to strike up acquaintances, many of whom became lifelong friends and colleagues. The intersecting spheres in which he moved and studied during the late 1820’s—law, medicine, politics, and administration—were to shape the course and define the content of his career as a reformer.

Among Chadwick’s first and most enduring contacts from these years were medical men such as Thomas Southwood Smith and Neill Arnott, who belonged to the group of intellectuals and reformers known as the Philosophical Radicals. Followers of Jeremy Bentham, they shared his disdain for existing institutions and longed to reform political and legal structures along Utilitarian lines. Finding the tone and style of this iconoclastic set exactly to his taste, Chadwick quickly became a fixture of the Benthamite circle.

Chadwick began to attract the notice of the more eminent Philosophical Radicals such as Francis Place, Joseph Hume, and John Stuart Mill. In 1830, he was introduced to Bentham himself and was invited by the eccentric and reclusive old sage to become his private secretary. This was a signal honor and opened the prospect of Chadwick becoming Bentham’s intellectual heir. Indeed, when Bentham died in 1832, he left his library to Chadwick, along with a promise of a comfortable annuity in return for Chadwick devoting his life to carrying out Bentham’s literary projects. Chadwick declined this bequest, for he had already embarked on a more ambitious public career.

Life’s Work

Although he was called to the bar in 1830, Chadwick never practiced law. Possessed of energy, wide-ranging interests, and considerable writing ability, he was at first inclined to pursue a career in journalism. His first article, on life insurance, appeared in 1828 in the major organ of the Philosophical Radicals, The Westminster Review. It was followed in 1829 and 1830 by articles on medical charities in France and on preventive police in the short-lived radical journal The London Review. These latter articles brought Chadwick to the attention not only of Bentham but also of certain influential political economists such as Nassau William Senior and reform-minded Whigs such as Henry Brougham. It was through them that Chadwick was soon to be propelled into government service as an investigator and analyst of social problems and as a designer of new administrative structures to solve them.

The victory of the Whigs in the turbulent election of 1830 provided Chadwick with his opportunity. Beyond their commitment to parliamentary reform, many members of the aristocratic Whig cabinet believed that it was necessary to devise solutions to social and economic problems such as child labor in factories and the abuses of the poor law system. Because some cabinet ministers had been exposed to the principles of political economy as well as to Benthamism, they naturally turned to economists and Philosophical Radicals to undertake the inquiries and write the official reports that would serve as the basis for remedial legislation.

In 1832, Chadwick was brought in as an expert investigator on two new royal commissions—on the poor laws and on child labor in the factories. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned his journalistic career by resigning as subeditor of the radical newspaper The Examiner. For the next twenty-two years, with one brief but important foray into private enterprise, he was to be a hard-driving, innovative, and controversial civil servant.

With Chadwick taking a dominant part on both royal commissions, the Benthamite character of the inquiries was enhanced. However, Bentham’s insistence that the superiority of expert investigation derived in part from its impartiality was not borne out. Far from being impartial, Chadwick commenced his inquiries with his mind largely made up as to the nature and extent of the abuses as well as the necessary remedial measures. He was quite willing to ignore or even suppress evidence contrary to his opinions. Furthermore, he crafted his reforms in terms of both political expediency and the advancement of his own career.

The clamor to reform the poor law system proceeded from a widespread perception that poor relief policies were overly indulgent, resulting in higher rates (local taxes), population growth, the breakdown of labor discipline, and the loss of social cohesion. Some followers of the gloomy doctrines of Thomas Malthus claimed that catastrophe could be averted only by the total abolition of the poor laws. Chadwick, however, followed Bentham in his insistence that a public relief system could be safely maintained if it was rigorously overhauled and infused with deterrent strategies.

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 the 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 concept into practice. The harsh regimen of the new workhouses would act as a test of destitution for the able-bodied and would ensure that any laborer who did subject himself to the discipline, hard work, and monotonous diet of the new workhouses would seize the first opportunity to take even the lowest-paid job on the outside. The spirit, if not the complete letter, of these recommendations was enacted by Parliament in 1834 as the Poor Law Amendment Act, or New Poor Law .

For his prominent part in forging the workhouse system, Chadwick provoked the wrath of the poor and their defenders. Simultaneously, he was incurring unpopularity for his part in the royal commission on child labor in the factories. The government had appointed this royal commission after a humanitarian-dominated parliamentary investigation (the Sadler Committee) had recommended abolition of all factory labor for children. Chadwick’s commission was widely viewed in the factory districts as a device to negate the Sadler Committee, and its proceedings were picketed and disrupted. Nevertheless, the commission took much evidence, including medical testimony about the effects of factory labor on children. Chadwick’s Factory Report of 1833 and the ensuing Factory Act abolished all labor for children under the age of nine and limited it to eight hours per day for those aged nine to thirteen.

Chadwick deeply resented the public abuse that was loaded on him because of his key role in these two measures. He also suspected, with some reason, that the government found it convenient to have him as the scapegoat for unpopular policies. Furthermore, he believed both the New Poor Law and the Factory Act to be in the best interest of the poor. The Poor Law restored the dividing line between honest, respectable labor and the condition of pauperism, a line that had become blurred before 1834, with consequent demoralization of the poor. The Factory Act, even if the protection afforded did not go as far as the misguided Sadler bill, had an all-important enforcement mechanism in the form of the factory inspectors. This Benthamite device of an inspectorate would ensure that protection of the young was real and enforceable, not a set of pious wishes.

Although Chadwick believed that the government had mangled both pieces of legislation, he looked forward eagerly to implementing the New Poor Law. Anticipating an appointment to the new Poor Law Commission, he was bitterly disappointed when the three positions were filled by time-honored methods of aristocratic patronage. He reluctantly accepted the post of secretary to the Commission, with the promise that he would be a virtual “fourth commissioner.” His thirteen-year tenure in this post would be deeply frustrating. Resented by his superiors, whom he considered incompetent, 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.

In spite of these frustrations, Chadwick persuaded the cabinet to let him undertake investigations into other areas of needed reform such as police and public health. Both inquiries were in part an outgrowth of his poor law work. Attacks by angry laborers on the new workhouses had convinced him of the need for a rural constabulary, while the evidence of a close correlation between sickness and poverty pointed him toward sanitary reform. Named to a royal commission on rural police in 1836, he conducted lengthy investigations and published his report in 1839. The ensuing Rural Constabulary Act was a keen disappointment, however, because it did not embody his recommendation of a centralized police system along Benthamite lines. Instead, control of the new county forces was entrusted to the unpaid rural magistracy, dominated by peers, squires, and clergy—the same elements that controlled many of the local poor law boards of guardians.

The sanitary investigation was ostensibly conducted by the Poor Law Commission, but in fact it was done entirely by Chadwick. Published under his name in 1842 as The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population , it is Chadwick’s greatest work. Deploying a formidable array of statistics and expert medical testimony, he made a compelling case for the connection between sickness and poverty. He also demonstrated that much if not most sickness was a result of 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 small-bore 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.

The 1840’s witnessed a major public health movement throughout England, and Chadwick was one of its most determined proponents. Believing himself to be the virtual inventor of the “sanitary idea,” he was increasingly impatient with those reformers who refused to accept him as the movement’s leader. Some of them in turn found Chadwick arrogant, irascible, and wedded to unproven engineering solutions to the public health crisis. He was further irritated by the unwillingness of the government (controlled by the Conservative party since the 1841 general election) to act. Cabinet ministers fobbed him off with vague promises and kept him occupied with further inquiries. The most notable of these was the investigation into the appalling state of the cemeteries of London, which resulted in Chadwick’s notable Interment Report of 1843. However, once again the government refused to adopt the necessary remedial legislation.

Despairing of government action, Chadwick sought sanitary reform as well as riches by launching the Towns Improvement Company in 1844. The company was a joint stock enterprise designed to provide a range of urban services, including water supply, drainage, and sewers, on contract to municipalities at home and abroad. With typical Chadwickian thoroughness, it also included a plan to sell the “sewer manure” to nearby farms. Ingenious though it doubtless was and reflective of his peculiar passion for efficiency, it failed to attract sufficient investment and expired in 1846. During these two years Chadwick was obsessed by the scheme and bent every effort, including the manipulation of related official inquiries, to push enabling legislation through Parliament that would have conferred signal advantages on his own company.

Driven by the failure of his company back to a career of official service, he was heartened by the return of the Whigs to office in 1846. Because they were disposed to accept some kind of sanitary legislation, his prospect of securing a post in the new executive board seemed bright. He first had to contend with a crisis in the Poor Law Commission when a local case of abuse of paupers in a workhouse became a national scandal. The ensuing inquiry into the abuses at Andover (where the workhouse was located) pitted Chadwick against his superiors in a barrage of lurid charges and countercharges. Drawing fully upon his powerful combative instincts and skillfully mobilizing public opinion, he gained the upper hand. The case ended with the commissioners as well as Chadwick deprived of their posts in a major poor law reorganization. Chadwick, however, managed to force the government into promising him a public health post in return for his refraining from any further embarrassing disclosures on poor law administration.

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, to reform England’s sanitary institutions. Between 1848 and 1854, Chadwick made the board as well as the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers powerful instruments of sanitary reform.

Using his limited coercive powers to the full, Chadwick 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, especially in London, where the powerful entrenched metropolitan vestries joined leading civil engineers in opposing Chadwick’s nostrums. This proved to be the undoing of both Chadwick and the General Board of Health. The hue and cry against his overbearing manner and the flaws in some of his engineering nostrums finally reached Parliament. 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 to be his last paid government position.

In spite of this repudiation by Parliament, Chadwick continued to be a dynamic force in the public health movement for the remaining thirty-six years of his life. Indeed, his many publications as well as his active participation in groups such as the Social Science Association made him a revered elder statesman of the sanitary movement. He also continued his interest in other reforms, including his pet scheme of “half-time education” (half the school day to academic subjects, the other half to military drill and physical exercise). He failed repeatedly to win a seat in Parliament, but another lifelong ambition was at last realized in 1889, when he received a knighthood. Sir Edwin Chadwick died a year later at his home in East Sheen, Surrey, leaving the considerable sum of forty-seven thousand pounds, most of it in trust to provide an annual prize to the local sanitary authority showing the greatest reduction of the death rate.

Significance

Edwin Chadwick’s influence on British government and society was considerable. He possessed, as John Stuart Mill put it, one of the great organizing and contriving minds of the time. His passion for efficiency and comprehensiveness knew no bounds. Building on the legacy of Jeremy Bentham’s Constitutional Code (1830), he labored to create a rationally structured government providing an array of social services while it simultaneously deterred crime and pauperism through an efficient national police and a deterrent workhouse system. He hated waste in all of its forms and believed that all members of society could be rendered efficient and productive by a vigorous, enlightened government. He drove himself incredibly hard throughout his life, taking few holidays and little time off.

Chadwick considered the legislation that resulted from his inquiries to be a series of half measures, the result of the laziness and ignorance of government ministers and the opposition of vested interests. He seemed not to appreciate that part of the opposition was to his abrasive personality. His dictatorial manner and humorlessness, coupled with a tendency to deviousness, made him many enemies. Furthermore, the rigid ideology he embraced was hostile both to the aristocratic laxness of the established order and to the emerging democratic system. As The Economist put it after his fall from power in 1854: “He is essentially a despot and a bureaucrat. He thinks people ought to be well governed, but does not believe in the possibility of their governing themselves well.” Clearly, what were sometimes described as his “Prussian” tendencies were out of step with the values of most Victorians, but this makes his many achievements all the more remarkable. His dogged persistence led to a number of key reforms, and he is rightly viewed as an intrepid early pioneer in the making of the British welfare state.

Bibliography

Brundage, Anthony. England’s “Prussian Minister:” Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832-1854. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Examines Chadwick’s reform policies and their impact on the role of English government.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment, and Implementation, 1832-1839. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978. Detailed account of the politics of one of Chadwick’s key reforms, showing how the act was shaped more by the aristocracy and gentry than by Benthamite principles, in spite of Chadwick’s determination and sometimes devious methods.

Chadwick, Edwin. Edwin Chadwick: Nineteenth Century Social Reform. Edited by David Gladstone. 5 vols. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997. Reprints of a wide range of Chadwick’s writings, from his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, to rare pamphlets and addresses to learned societies. Vol. 1 reprints Finer’s The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (see below). Each volume includes a specially prepared introduction.

Finer, S. E. The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick. London: Methuen, 1952. A full and very readable biography with a tendency to ignore some of Chadwick’s more questionable tactics. While noting Chadwick’s personality quirks and his punitive ideas on the poor laws, the book treats him as the embattled hero of an attempt to overcome vested interests and indifferent political leaders.

Hamlin, Christopher. Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A thorough, well-researched account of Victorian Britain’s efforts to improve public health through the construction of public works. Hamlin explains how Chadwick’s advocacy of sanitation fit the political needs of the Poor Law Commission and the Whig and Tory governments.

Henriques, Ursula. Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain. London: Longmans, Green, 1979. A judicious, well-balanced treatment of all aspects of governmental reform during Chadwick’s ascendancy, noting his contributions but also stressing the complexities of each reform.

Lewis, R. A. Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement, 1832-1854. London: Longmans, Green, 1952. Skillful analysis of Chadwick’s active involvement in the public health movement and his emergence as one of the principal leaders of the sanitary movement. However, like Finer (see above), Lewis is inclined to turn a blind eye to some of Chadwick’s less admirable methods.

MacDonagh, Oliver. Early Victorian Government, 1830-1870. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977. A useful survey of the major areas of government growth and reform. Similar to the book by Henriques (see above) in its sense of balance and avoidance of ascribing too much influence to Chadwick or to Benthamism generally.

Roberts, David. Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960. An important study of nineteenth century reforms in the poor laws, factory acts, public health, police, education, and other areas, noting the influence of paternalism on the reforms as well as the powerful opposition to centralization. Good biographical detail on Chadwick and the other key officials of the period.