SOURCE: Metz, Nancy Aycock. “Discovering a World of Suffering: Fiction and the Rhetoric of Sanitary Reform—1840-1860.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 15, no. 1 (1991): 65-81.

In the following essay, Metz discusses the influence of public health reports on Victorian fiction.

In the 1840's and 1850's the reports of public health physicians and the subsequent accounts of these reports in the press allowed the middle classes to discover the poor. According to H. J. Dyos, “The facts about the slums that had become merely unpalatable in the twentieth century were often shockingly fresh or simply incredible to those that gathered or digested them in the nineteenth century.”¹ “Discovery”—of slums, of preventable disease, of incest and other practices abhorrent to the reigning domestic ideal—was a literal fact of Victorian experience, re-enacted scores of times on streets whose offenses could be measured by the cubic inch of sewer poison or by the number...