Sir Edwin Chadwick (1800-90)

Environmental health pioneer

As a non-smoker and semi-vegetarian, Sir Edwin Chadwick was hardly the stereotypical Victorian gentleman. He was at the forefront of the campaign in the 1840s to get environmental health – in particular, the importance of decent sanitation – onto the public agenda. Chadwick Court, our London headquarters, is named after him.

Edwin Chadwick was born in Manchester in 1800. He started his career in journalism, not a respectable profession at that time, writing court reports for The Times. As if journalism wasn’t bad enough, his image problems worsened when he became secretary of the new Poor Law Commission, set up to implement the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834.

People thought of Chadwick as the architect of Victorian workhouses, which housed up to 2,000 of society’s most impoverished people. In fact, he was against them. Nobody took much notice of his liberal views and even Charles Dickens took to criticising him in print.

But Chadwick’s report, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, published in 1842, was considered ground-breaking. Even Dickens changed his mind about Chadwick, later going with him to visit model cottages for working people. Chadwick was a pioneer in linking environmental health conditions with the prosperity and wellbeing of people, particularly those at the lower end of the social scale.

His good work continued to the end of his long life. In 1883, by then in his eighties, Chadwick became President of the fledgling Association of Public Sanitary Inspectors and took to the role with vigour.

He was not always an easy man to get on with and the establishment never really forgave his obstinacy. Chadwick was not knighted until he was 90 and in the last months of his life. His obituary in the Sanitary Record of 15 July 1890 contains his best epitaph:

“He was a large-minded man, who saw things in their just proportions, and realised how many methods contribute to the same end.”