Edwin Chadwick

person · earth · London, England

Barrister, Benthamite and civil servant (1800–1890), secretary to the Poor Law Commission, and author of the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain of 1842 — the document that turned urban squalor from a moral observation into a statistical argument. Chadwick collected parish-level mortality data and set them out by occupational class and by place, producing comparisons in which the average age at death of labourers in an industrial town was less than half that of gentry in a rural county. The statistic is easy to misread and worth reading carefully: average age at death in a population with very high infant mortality is dominated by dead infants and is not life expectancy for an adult. Chadwick's own explanation was wrong in mechanism — he held to miasma, that disease came from foul air — but right in prescription, since drainage, water supply and refuse removal were exactly what cholera and typhoid required. He was also an authoritarian administrator, disliked by almost everyone he worked with, and the 1834 New Poor Law he helped design was among the most hated statutes of the century.