Local politics and public health in mid-nineteenth-century Plymouth.

INTRODUCTION IN the mid-nineteenth century, Plymouth ranked as one of Britain's most unhealthy towns.' Overcrowding was as bad as that encountered in all but the most pernicious blackspots of London, Liverpool, or Manchester.2 Between 1841 and 1850, the rate of mortality had averaged twenty-five per thousand, a figure as high as the worst of the nation's industrial cities3 (Table I). Rapid population growth was an experience that Plymouth shared with a great many other English towns in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign.4 So too was the failure of the outmoded urban administrative bodies to cope with the new kinds of problems created by this unprecedented growth. Public health issues and agitation for local political reform inevitably became interlinked in provincial towns.' Plymouth was no exception. As the old ruling elite tried to protect their threatened monopoly of local civic institutions, a tide of criticism about their handling of public health matters provided an ideal outlet for the increased political awareness of Plymouth's new breed of activists.6 Derek Fraser has argued that the mid-nineteenth-century political activist "pitched his tent in whatever battlefield was open to him".7 For six momentous years, public health was Plymouth's