<em>Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875-77</em>, by Nigel Richardson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–77 Michael Worboys (bio) Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–77, by Nigel Richardson; pp. xix + 268. London and Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto, 2008, £60.00, $99.00. In the early months of 2010, British newspapers reported that the independent schools’ Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), sensing dissatisfaction with university standards, were thinking of establishing an elite private university on the American liberal arts model. They proposed to name the university after Edward Thring, the nineteenth-century educationalist who founded the HMC and was the headmaster of Uppingham School from 1853 to 1887. He is known today for transforming Uppingham from a local school to an important national institution and for his widely emulated curriculum and pedagogic innovations. Indeed, it is now accepted that he had greater influence on independent school education than the more famous Thomas Arnold of Rugby, who was immortalised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). In his lifetime, however, Thring was best known for an extraordinary episode in 1876, when he relocated boys, staff, and equipment some two hundred miles from Uppingham in Rutland in the east Midlands to Borth on the west Wales coast, to escape persistent outbreaks of typhoid fever in the school and town. Nigel Richardson’s new book is an exemplary history of this episode, meticulously researched and carefully analysed from the exceptionally rich records of the school, personal papers (including Thring’s diaries), and the files of local and central government. His narrative certainly throws new light on Thring and independent schools in the Victorian era, but its great novelty is that it provides the first history of English public health reform that is about rural rather than urban sanitation. Although his book is focused on a single small town over three years, Richardson’s great achievement is that he manages to illuminate the wider picture of medicine and public health in rural England in the mid-Victorian period. In the 1870s Uppingham was a small town of some two and a half thousand people in Rutland, England’s smallest county. It was unusual in being dominated by Thring’s school, which by the 1870s contributed significantly to the local economy. This was welcomed by the community, yet there was also resentment that local children no longer had access and that Thring often acted as though he was head of the town as well as the school. Matters came to a head in 1875 in disputes around two outbreaks of [End Page 642] typhoid fever. Richardson sets the scene for this in the first three chapters, which detail the economic and social history of the town, the structure and operation of its local government, and the character of its medical community. The book is worth reading for these alone, for what they reveal about the complexities of small town governance and its crowded medical market place. Typhoid fever was a major challenge to doctors and public health officials at this time; its outbreaks were sporadic, mortality could be high, and though there was a consensus that the best preventive was to improve water supplies and waste removal, its spread was capricious. Once the disease developed, isolation of sufferers was recommended, for while direct person-to-person contagion was infrequent, medical officials thought it prudent to be inclusive in their approach. Outbreaks of epidemic diseases had occurred regularly in the town and school, but in 1875 typhoid fever was concentrated in the school, and its spread in the autumn caused alarm amongst staff and parents. Medically the questions concerned the cause of the outbreak and the proper actions to take, but in Uppingham they became focused on who was to blame and whose responsibility it was to take action. Thring pointed to the poor condition of the town’s sewers, water supply, and streets, and to the inaction over many years of the Poor Law Guardians. The town’s officials pointed to the school, its rapid expansion without adequate infrastructure, and the laxity of its medical officer, Thomas Bell. Outbreaks continued over the winter of 1875 to 1876, and the dispute...