Dangerous Exposures: Work and Waste in the Victorian Chemical Trade

• In Event: Weapons of Mass Pollution: Health, Hazards, and the British Environment, 1850-1950

Abstract

The towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world’s first chemical factories were established in the nineteenth century, are especially important places to study historical responses to industrial pollution and its associated costs. Like modern-day alchemists, chemical industrialists transformed the rural landscape, their factories churning out base elements that were transformed into textile dyes, soap, and glass: materials that seemingly defined the Victorian era. Yet while many contemporaries praised the alkali industry for providing materials that facilitated modern activities, others only saw the pollution. Not only did the process of generating salt cake from salt and sulfuric acid release hydrochloric acid into the atmosphere, it also produced an insoluble, smelly solid waste that became piled in heaps and spread on fields near the soda works. The chemical trade harmed the local air, water, and land, but it also injured people: especially chemical workers.

Drawing on newly recovered archival sources in northwest England as well as textual and visual collections at the University of Liverpool and the Wellcome Library, this paper will explore the nature and significance of the Victorian alkali industry in addressing a range of questions in environmental history, history and theory of photography, law, and public health. My research examines how photography emerged in the nineteenth-century as both a new mode of documenting chemical pollution and a technological process that was itself the product of an industry that produced chemical waste and photographic pollution. The paper offers new evidence of the importance of visual imagery (news illustrations, photographs and lantern slides) in raising public awareness about the potential dangers of alkali waste products for local environments and chemical workers, and argues that an understanding of the language of visual imagery is useful for understanding the later transformations of environmental law and policy in the region.

Author

• Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan University