Van Lieshout on Rosenthal, 'The River Pollution Dilemma in Victorian England: Nuisance Law versus Economic Efficiency'


Leslie Rosenthal. The River Pollution Dilemma in Victorian England: Nuisance Law versus Economic Efficiency. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014. 275 pp. $134.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4094-4182-3.

Reviewed by Carry Van Lieshout (University of Nottingham)
Published on H-Environment (June, 2015)
Commissioned by Dolly Jørgensen

River Pollution Dilemmas

The river pollution dilemma emerged as Victorian England’s increasing urbanization and sanitary reforms led to the disposal of urban waste and effluvia into the rivers of the surrounding countryside. Since English nuisance law protected the rights of downstream riparian landowners from nuisance caused by those upstream, the enjoyment of lands and rivers by a few private individuals was brought into conflict with the sanitation and public health of urban inhabitants. As a Northampton commissioner framed the dilemma: “is it not better that one family should suffer a nuisance [from sewage pollution] than that half Northampton should be poisoned?” (p. 39). The polluting towns’ defense that their actions were in the public interest was not an arguable defense in law, and the Court of Chancery generally held the towns liable for the environmental pollution. 

However, that is not where the story ends. In this well-researched book, Leslie Rosenthal examines ten legal conflicts over river pollution, and shows how judges balanced the formal upholding of the law with the management of the nuisance. While the polluters were held liable for causing the nuisance, in none of the case studies was a town’s sewer outlets physically stopped by the courts. Instead, the court took on a supervisory role on the process of abating the nuisance by ordering injunctions, but not actually enforcing them until a certain date, thus allowing the towns the time to adjust their sewers’ outflows. An important theme of the book is that the existing nuisance law was ill-equipped as a protector of the environment, as complainants could be paid compensation or sewage could be diverted, which solved the legal case but did not actually address the pollution itself. In addition, the technological options for treating the sewage were limited at the time. As a result, Rosenthal argues, the cases in which the court induced a town to reduce the nuisance of its pollution should be considered a success “worthy of celebration” (p. 231). 

The book is well organized, with several introductory chapters setting out the river pollution dilemma’s historical background. The first of these chapters charts the complicated institutional landscape of Victorian England’s public health administration and local governance, starting with Edwin Chadwick’s sanitary reform movement of the 1830s, which introduced a water carriage system built on the concept of circulation. The second background chapter moves to the physical landscape to address changes in the circulation of waste products, and discusses the available technological options to treat sewage. The book’s third and final background chapter focuses on nuisance law and economics. 

The case studies that follow are grouped by the various strategies employed by the towns to solve their legal struggles. Rosenthal’s aim is to study these conflicts beyond the litigation process, and this shows in the organization of each case study into a short background, the actual court case, an evaluation of the town’s efforts to adhere to the court’s decision, and then a discussion of its effects on the nuisance situation, which often necessitated another trip back to court. Each case is illustrated with a map indicating the geographical position of the key players, which is very helpful, and ends with a section on the lessons that can be drawn from the example. 

A recurring theme in the river pollution disputes discussed is the court’s delays in enforcing its own injunctions as the judges were aware of the effects that stopping the sewer outflows would have on the population. In the dispute between the Birmingham sewage authorities and downstream landowners over sewage pollution in the River Tame, which was the first of these disputes to reach Chancery, the court formally upheld riparian rights, but effectually allowed Birmingham to continue polluting the Tame while it tried to address the nuisance, a process that took almost half a century. The only recorded cases where sequestration writs—in which the court seized ownership over the administration in charge of the sewers—were actually enforced and delivered were in Leamington Spa and Tunbridge Wells, and even there they did not lead to the towns’ sewage being stopped but acted as the court’s ultimate inducement for local authorities to show they were undertaking sufficient action. 

The case studies display several other means of ending the legal disputes. These included negotiatiing, settling by paying off the complainants, diverting the sewage so it would not cause nuisance to the original complainants, and seeking a parliamentary exemption that would override the common law rights of the riparian landowners, which was employed by Wolverhampton. While these strategies addressed the legal complaints and closed the nuisance case, they did not address the physical problem of sewage pollution. 

Rosenthal draws on a wide range of official sources, including the legal cases and records created by the towns’ administrations, but also takes on the more challenging task of investigating the complainants, who were private individuals for whom less documentation is available. Dealing with such unequal archive materials, it is commendable that Rosenthal has managed to provide very balanced accounts of the case studies. The book acknowledges that the choice of cases has been guided by the availability of sufficient information representing the complaining side, and that this could lead to a potential bias in favor of the more eminent complainants. The lack of availability of source material has also led to the inclusion of two case studies that do not cover the sewage of a large town, but feature the St Helens Canal and the Brinsop Hall Coal Company as the polluters. While Rosenthal makes a case that these should be included to “further illustrate the ways that disputes under nuisance law can end” (p. 2), I felt these two case studies distracted from the key dilemma of the book, as they lacked the clear conflict of interests between the population of a large town and a few private individuals. 

However, this is my only issue with the book. The remaining case studies represent a good spread of nineteenth-century English towns, including large industrializing cities, such as Birmingham, and smaller ones, such as Tunbridge Wells. Rosenthal strikes a good balance between the anonymity of local governance bodies and legal institutions and the more personal context of the people involved. For all individuals included in the book, whether they are complainant, judge, or prominent local politician, short biographies have been provided either in the footnotes or text, which helps to understand the background, professionally or otherwise, of where these people came from. 

This book provides a good contribution to the field of urban environmental history. Scholars interested in urban metabolisms, the sanitary city, and Victorian environmental management will find it compelling reading. The River Pollution Dilemma not only focuses on the effects of the sanitary city on the land and rivers outside the urban boundaries but also shows how the consequences of these effects fed back into the towns’ management of their sewer systems. Although presented as economic and social history, this book has much to recommend it to environmental historians as well.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=43041

Citation: Carry Van Lieshout. Review of Rosenthal, Leslie, The River Pollution Dilemma in Victorian England: Nuisance Law versus Economic Efficiency. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. June, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43041

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Categories