‘It might not be a nuisance in a country cottage’: Sanitary Conditions and Images of Health in Victorian Rural Wales

Abstract

Although historians have become increasingly sensitive to the contested nature of public health and the limitations of sanitary reform, studies have concentrated on the urban. In focusing on rural Wales in the period from the creation of rural sanitary authorities in 1872 to the end of the nineteenth century, the essay shifts the focus to ask questions about what the rural means in the context of public health. By making connections between ideas about the Welsh landscape, nationhood and health, and the nature of sanitary problems facing rural communities and how rural sanitary practices came to be viewed, the essay shows how enduring representations of rural healthiness masked a ‘long tale of filth, neglect, carelessness and disease’ in rural Wales. The essay demonstrates how a bifurcated view of rural Wales as healthy and unhealthy reflected ideas about nationhood and the nature of rural conditions that rendered sanitary problems less visible when they occurred in a rural environment.

‘In constant fear of some dire epidemic breaking out’: Rural responses to infectious and epidemic disease, 1870–1920

“…23 In addition, while rural districts encountered the same barriers to sanitary reform that Hennock, Wohl, and Hamlin identify for municipal boroughs they experienced them more acutely. 24 For instance, where all local authorities struggled for proper resourcing, in rural Wales low population densities, the structural problems associated with rural depopulation, along with the decline of small rural industries, saw high levels of outmigration, leading to a smaller ratepayer base and increased levels of rural poverty. Under these conditions, rural authorities not only faced health problems associated with poverty but also had more limited resources to tackle poor sanitation or housing.…”

Vitriol in the Taff: River Pollution, Industrial Waste, and the Politics of Control in late Nineteenth-Century Rural Wales

“…For many urban commentators, it was precisely because of the primitive nature of many villages and market towns in Wales that environmental and sanitary reform ran into difficulties. 4 These assessments are echoed in the limited historiography on rural health, in which studies have broadly presented rural communities as insanitary places, resistant to reform. 5 Rural and provincial areas did lag behind metropolitan districts, but when the historical focus is shifted from the assessments of metropolitan commentators to the work of rural authorities, a less pessimistic picture emerges.…”

‘I should have thought that Wales was a wet part of the world’: Drought, Rural Communities and Public Health, 1870–1914

“…Low population densities and high outmigration ensured that rural communities lacked many of the preconditions-population growth, civic pride, party-political activity, commercial demand-favourable to sanitary reform. 116 Rural poverty meant they had fewer financial resources to draw upon, while large parishes and scattered settlements could mean that other villages in the parish could resist improvements in one village. 117 Rural officials were equally acutely aware that sanitary legislation was designed to deal with urban problems and that they lacked the same powers as their urban counterparts, but many rural communities in Wales were also isolated, hard to reach places, which For example, according to the LGB this happened in Mardy in Abergavenny Rural District Council which made improving the water supply to the hamlet difficult: Lithiby to Abergavenny RDC, 8 December 1908, MH 97/118, TNA.…”