Proust: the body and literary form

Florence Nightingale, William Farr and John Simon. All of these have received a good measure of historical attention, but the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, architect of London's main drainage system, and arguably originator of the blueprint for modem city sanitation, has been neglected by historians. This is a pity, because the conception of Bazalgette's grand plan for London's drainage, the techniques he used in its construction, and the scientific and technical debates which surrounded the project are surely worthy of the type of critical analysis which Christopher Hamlin has devoted to the science of water analysis and the work of Edwin Chadwick. Stephen Halliday's history is not of this calibre. Welcome though it is as the first study to focus specifically on the great engineer, this is a general narrative account. which skates across the surface of history without pausing for reflection on the depths below the waterline, or on the wider contexts within which the basic story could be placed. Lavishly illustrated, and with distracting biographical insets of such relevant personages as Sir Francis Bond Head, Sir Goldsworthy Gurney and W H Smith, this is spiritually a coffee table book. As a general narrative introduction to Bazalgette's life and achievements, The great stink is satisfactory. It covers not only Bazalgette's work on the main drainage system, but also on London's Embankment, gas-lighting provision and street clearances. It does, however, leave the academic reader hungry for a fuller, more historically perceptive account. Little of Bazalgette's real personality, and less of his thought processes, come across here. There is no attempt to place the main drainage system in its wider context-to explain, for example, the enormous local authority effort which abolished cesspools, ensured the connection of house drains with the main drainage system, and made the latter effective. Halliday persistently suggests (e.g., pp. 143, 187) that Bazalgette "banished epidemics" from London, notably cholera in 1892, but he fails to give due attention to the water purification systems and the extension of constant water supplies (let alone of the port sanitary surveillance system) which were an essential complement of effective drainage in the struggle against waterborne disease. The chapter on cholera is innocent of any deeper appreciation of the existing historiography, recording the disease as "one of the main impulses" towards drainage reform while ignoring the greater scourge of endemic typhoid, and noting, with naive surprise that "despite compelling evidence, the connection between good sanitation, clean drinking water and good health was long overlooked or denied by many of the most important reformers of the Victorian era" (p. 124). Neither of the important Hamlin studies, What becomes ofpollution (1987) and A science ofimpurity (1990) feature in the bibliography, and although they might be considered tough going for the general reader, it would have been nice if Halliday's work had been informed by the perspectives which they throw on the processes of Victorian public health reform. A book like this once again raises questions about the nature of the link between popular history and historical scholarship, and the failures of the former to absorb and transmit, even in the most general way, the more novel and exciting interpretations of the latter.