<div><i>Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London</i> explores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove to clean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.<br> Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitary<br> improvement, plunged into London&rsquo;s dark and dirty spaces and returned with<br> the material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificent<br> projects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not always<br> met with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slum<br> clearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames,<br> may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyed<br> and reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings and<br> experiences of the city.<br> From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazine<br> articles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgic<br> appreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomy<br> in an era of networked sanitary services. <i>Cleansing the City </i>emphasizes<br> the disruptions and disorientation occasioned by purification&mdash;a process we are<br> generally inclined to see as positive. By recovering these sometimes oppositional,<br> sometimes ambivalent responses, Michelle Allen elevates a significant undercurrent<br> of Victorian thought into the mainstream and thus provides insight into the<br> contested nature of sanitary modernization.</div>