Fevered Anxieties: Public Health, Urban Infrastructure, and Infectious Classes in Austen, Edgeworth, and Scott

In novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we see an integration of the seemingly disparate discourses surrounding urban infrastructure, public health, and class-based anxieties that stem from various illnesses and diseases. The massive boom in urban development and reforms perceptible in the development of London’s Regent’s Street, in Edinburgh’s New Town, and through programs such as Dublin’s Wide Streets Commission, all signal an emerging awareness of the relationship between public health and urban infrastructure—a relationship that depends upon and operates through a separation of the aristocracy from the unclean lower orders. The integration of public health and urban development provides an important framework for reading the novels of Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott. When reframed through this integrative lens, texts such as Sense and Sensibility (1811, The Absentee (1812), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), all reveal the ways in which the development of the United Kingdom’s major metropolises depended upon urban infrastructure for the policing of class-based anxieties as the upshot of the sustenance of a social body. Ultimately, these novels reveal the infrastructural mechanisms that used to demarcate the limits of citizenship and belonging during the early nineteenth century through the practice of policing urban health as a spatial phenomenon.