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Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (review)

Regular readers of the Bulletin will probably find Gilbert’s last section on Victorian fiction most illuminating. Surprisingly, cholera figures very little in Victorian fiction, at least explicitly, but Gilbert convincingly illustrates the way in which authors such as George Eliot “used medicine and disease as . . . metaphors for bad political practice” (p. 144). The last chapter, based mainly on Charles Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago (1857), is the book’s best, and Gilbert persuasively presents Kinsley’s cholera as a marker of a particular racialized male body. In sum, Gilbert’s study is stimulating and important, although some of the arguments could be strengthened. In fairness to Gilbert, this volume is one of several projected from a larger cholera project, and two others, it seems, have already appeared. There is undoubtedly much additional empirical and argumentative material found in the other volumes. Nonetheless, this is a valuable study in its own right and well worth consideration by medical historians.