Birth of Sir Edwin Chadwick

Edwin Chadwick was a civil servant, not a Member of Parliament, but he may have had more influence on more people’s lives for good and for ill than all Britain’s Victorian parliamentarians put together. Described by his friend J.S. Mill as ‘one of the organising and contriving minds of the age’, he had a hand in many of the major Victorian social and administrative reforms . He was the principal author of the 1842 report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population that spurred on the improvement of sanitation, drainage, water supply and refuse disposal in the principal towns, which were in a thoroughly squalid state as a consequence of huge population growth. He took a leading part in this initiative as one of the four commissioners of the Board of Health apointed in 1848.