2. Local Improvements And Centralization In Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

By the middle years of the nineteenth century, Englishmen were in full revolt against the principle of centralization. Parliament's experiments in centralized administration had almost all ended in failure. A powerful and independent Poor Law Commission had given way, in 1847, to a more timid Poor Law Board under ministerial and parliamentary control. A strong Board of Health, ruled by that uncompromising centralizer and bureaucrat, Edwin Chadwick, was sheared of a large part of its influence when, in 1854, the government decided to release Chadwick from their employment. The Times responded to this event with a jubilant leader article which announced that, ‘If there is such a thing as a political certainty among us, it is that nothing autocratic can exist in this country.... Mr Chadwick and Dr Southwood Smith, have been deposed, and we prefer to take our chance of cholera and the rest than be bullied into health’.