Dangerous Exposures: Visualizing Work and Waste in the Victorian Chemical Trades
Abstrak
AbstractCheshire, Britain, and the towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world's first chemical factories and towns were created in the nineteenth century, is an especially important place to study historical responses to industrial pollution and its social costs. This paper, based on newly recovered archival sources about the Victorian alkali industry, explores the role of visual imagery, particularly drawings and lantern slides, in materializing the connection between labor in chemical trades, the disposal of waste, and poor health outcomes for diverse communities in the late nineteenth century. The paper will focus on the writer Robert Sherard's article “White Slaves of England” (1897), a work that, more than many of its time, drew national attention to the plight of nineteenth-century chemical workers by pictorializing the ways that work in heavy chemical industries, many of them involving waste and its disposal, affected individual workers and their lives. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the current state of scholarship on images, waste, and labor, areas for more needed work, and paths forward.
Penulis (1)
Jennifer Tucker
Akses Cepat
- Tahun Terbit
- 2019
- Bahasa
- en
- Total Sitasi
- 14×
- Sumber Database
- CrossRef
- DOI
- 10.1017/s014754791900005x
- Akses
- Open Access ✓