Speeches: Literary and Social

SANITARY REFORM. LONDON, MAY 10, 1851

[The members and friends of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association
dined together on the above evening at Gore House, Kensington. The
Earl of Carlisle occupied the chair. Mr. Charles Dickens was
present, and in proposing "The Board of Health," made the following
speech:-]

There are very few words for me to say upon the needfulness of
sanitary reform, or the consequent usefulness of the Board of
Health. That no man can estimate the amount of mischief grown in
dirt,--that no man can say the evil stops here or stops there,
either in its moral or physical effects, or can deny that it begins
in the cradle and is not at rest in the miserable grave, is as
certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane will be carried by an
easterly wind into Mayfair, or that the furious pestilence raging
in St. Giles's no mortal list of lady patronesses can keep out of
Almack's. Fifteen years ago some of the valuable reports of Mr.
Chadwick and Dr. Southwood Smith, strengthening and much enlarging
my knowledge, made me earnest in this cause in my own sphere; and I
can honestly declare that the use I have since that time made of my
eyes and nose have only strengthened the conviction that certain
sanitary reforms must precede all other social remedies, and that
neither education nor religion can do anything useful until the way
has been paved for their ministrations by cleanliness and decency.

I do not want authority for this opinion: you have heard the
speech of the right reverend prelate {27} this evening--a speech
which no sanitary reformer can have heard without emotion. Of what
avail is it to send missionaries to the miserable man condemned to
work in a foetid court, with every sense bestowed upon him for his
health and happiness turned into a torment, with every month of his
life adding to the heap of evils under which he is condemned to
exist? What human sympathy within him is that instructor to
address? what natural old chord within him is he to touch? Is it
the remembrance of his children?--a memory of destitution, of
sickness, of fever, and of scrofula? Is it his hopes, his latent
hopes of immortality? He is so surrounded by and embedded in
material filth, that his soul cannot rise to the contemplation of
the great truths of religion. Or if the case is that of a
miserable child bred and nurtured in some noisome, loathsome place,
and tempted, in these better days, into the ragged school, what can
a few hours' teaching effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a
whole existence? But give them a glimpse of heaven through a
little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be
clean; lighten that heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag
and in which they become the callous things they are; take the body
of the dead relative from the close room in which the living live
with it, and where death, being familiar, loses its awe; and then
they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were
so much with the poor, and who had compassion for all human
suffering.

The toast which I have to propose, The Board of Health, is entitled
to all the honour which can be conferred upon it. We have very
near us, in Kensington, a transparent illustration that no very
great thing can ever be accomplished without an immense amount of
abuse being heaped upon it. In connexion with the Board of Health
we are always hearing a very large word which is always pronounced
with a very great relish--the word centralization. Now I submit
that in the time of the cholera we had a pretty good opportunity of
judging between this so called centralization and what I may, I
think, call "vestrylisation." I dare say the company present have
read the reports of the Cholera Board of Health, and I daresay they
have also read reports of certain vestries. I have the honour of
belonging to a constituency which elected that amazing body, the
Marylebone vestry, and I think that if the company present will
look to what was done by the Board of Health at Glasgow, and then
contrast those proceedings with the wonderful cleverness with which
affairs were managed at the same period by my vestry, there will be
very little difficulty in judging between them. My vestry even
took upon itself to deny the existence of cholera as a weak
invention of the enemy, and that denial had little or no effect in
staying the progress of the disease. We can now contrast what
centralization is as represented by a few noisy and interested
gentlemen, and what centralization is when worked out by a body
combining business habits, sound medical and social knowledge, and
an earnest sympathy with the sufferings of the working classes.

Another objection to the Board of Health is conveyed in a word not
so large as the other,--"Delay." I would suggest, in respect to
this, that it would be very unreasonable to complain that a first-
rate chronometer didn't go when its master had not wound it up.
The Board of Health may be excellently adapted for going and very
willing and anxious to go, and yet may not be permitted to go by
reason of its lawful master having fallen into a gentle slumber and
forgotten to set it a going. One of the speakers this evening has
referred to Lord Castlereagh's caution "not to halloo until they
were out of the wood." As regards the Board of Trade I would
suggest that they ought not to halloo until they are out of the
Woods and Forests. In that leafy region the Board of Health
suffers all sorts of delays, and this should always be borne in
mind. With the toast of the Board of Health I will couple the name
of a noble lord (Ashley), of whose earnestness in works of
benevolence, no man can doubt, and who has the courage on all
occasions to face the cant which is the worst and commonest of all-
-the cant about the cant of philanthropy.