62 Morley: City chaos, contagion, Chadwick, and social justice Figure 1. George Cruikshank’s 1829 cartoon London Going Out of Town or The March of Bricks and Mortar! depicted the city’s outward expansion. and complexity of urban places. These ob- served changes included the appearance of sometimes monumental factories, the con- struction of grand town halls, and hitherto open areas at the urban fringe being replaced by multitudes of high density back-to-back terraces [2]. Although this phenomenon was nationally observable, the tendency to eat away fields was most pronounced at London (see Figure 1), along with provincial places like Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liver- pool, Manchester, and Bradford, a settle- ment described as being “one of those towns which have practically grown up during the modern manufacturing era” [3]. While numerous people were in awe of the transformations instigated by the Indus- trial Revolution, some members of society, particularly writers and medical practition- ers, questioned what effects the industrial age was having upon the public. Not only were “diseases of civilization” such as tu- berculosis noted as having a much more widespread incidence than in previous times, the growth of “localities of pauperi- sation” [4], that is, quarters deficient in hy- giene yet filled with slums and manifestations of poverty, drew aghast de- pictions of contemporary working class life and produced disquiet among medical pro- fessionals like James Kay-Shuttleworth, a Manchester physician, and Robert Baker, a surgeon in Leeds, about the well-being of urban citizens. Likewise, other grave uncer- tainties had arisen. Crime, for example, was perceived to have increased, as had prosti- tution, levels of drinking, destitution, and overcrowding. Accordingly, a new depth of concern was manufactured about the nature of British cities, the direction society was heading, and the potential volatility of the industrial age. As Robert Vaughan asserted in The Age of Great Cities: “If any nation is to be lost or saved by the character of its great cities, our own is that nation” [5]. As previously noted, early 1800s Britain contained contrasting illustrations of urban life. On the one hand, communities emerged, containing impressive architec- tural creations that articulated civic pride and entrepreneurial confidence; yet concur- rently within the very same environments, a hellish situation characterized by grime and hardship was produced. Indeed, the dissim- ilarity of this modern existence, the best and worst of Britain’s unfolding urban civiliza- tion, was arguably best eulogized by an overseas visitor to “The Workshop of the World”: Manchester. The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, a sightseer in