Chapter 5 “Not What It Was Made Out” : Hygiene, Health, and Moral Welfare in the Old Nichol, 1880– 1900

Abstract

Unsanitary conditions in the Old Nichol were frequently invoked as a threat to public health and a justification for the clearance scheme that the area was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth century. A Child of the Jago follows these contemporary discourses by bracketing together the neighborhood’s insalubrious state with the moral character of its residents. Yet many social investigators made a point of countering these common depictions of the Old Nichol’s inhabitants. This chapter explores how journalism and social investigation in the 1880s and 1890s attempted to influence the neighborhood’s reputation as physically and morally corrupt and infectious.