Edwin Chadwick, 1800-1890.

English utilitarian, journalist, activist and social reformer. 

Originally from Longsight, a village near Manchester. Chadwick's father, James Chadwick, was a friend of Thomas Paine.  The young Chadwick was given his initial education at the local village school until the age of ten, when the family moved to London, where he finished off his education with private tutors.  At the age of fifteen, Chadwick was apprenticed to a law office in London, and in 1823 was admitted as a law student at the Inner Temple..  To make a living while studying, Chadwick turned to journalism, serving for a while on the Morning Herald and the Examiner.  He was finally admitted to the bar in 1830.

It was primarily through his work as a journalist that Edwin Chadwick came into contact with Benthamite utilitarian circles in London.   Chadwick joined the Utilitarian Society, and was an active participant in meetings and debates with young utilitarians like John Stuart Mill and George Grote.  Chadwick wrote his first scholarly article in 1828 for the utilitarian Westminster Review on insurance, a vigorous defense of the Friendly Societies. This brought him to the attention of the Oxford economists Richard Whately and Nassau William Senior, who proceeded to invite Chadwick to contribute a couple of articles to their own fledgling publication, the London Review.  The first  issue of the London Review included Chadwick's famous 1829 article on the police, an excoriating exposition of the antiquated Parochial Watch of London, which had a considerable role in helping the passage of Peel's police reform act.

Chadwick's early articles, all of them touching on a variety of policy propositions for social reform with utilitarian enthusiasm, brought him to the attention of  Jeremy Bentham himself. Bentham hired Chadwick as his literary secretary in 1831.  Chadwick would live in Bentham's home, and go on to receive a generous legacy from Bentham upon his death twelve months later.  As the "last disciple" of Bentham, Chadwick enthusiastically absorbed the deeper and more mature ideas of Bentham's later years, which tended to baffle Bentham's older disciples.  Chadwick felt a personal obligation to carry them on after Bentham's death in 1832.  In particular, Chadwick embraced Bentham's views on the administration of social reform, especially Bentham's belief in the establishment of centralized national (rather than local) systems of control and the use of paid bureaucratic officials ("contract management") rather than unpaid amateur local gentry ("trusteeship"), as administrators.

When the Poor Laws Commission was assembled in 1832 under Nassau William Senior, Chadwick was brought in to assist.  Chadwick was appointed assistant commissioner responsible for collecting information on London and Berkshire, one of the most important districts - London for its mass of urban poor, Berkshire as the home of the Speenhamland system for the agricultural poor. Chadwick was the only assistant commissioner paid a retainer, to allow him to focus on his task.   Chadwick delivered his results in January, 1833. It was considered the best of the assistant reports and promptly published in its entirety in the 1833 Extracts.  Chadwick's analysis impressed Henry Brougham (then the Lord Chancellor), who pushed to have Chadwick upgraded to full commissioner in April 1833. Chadwick analyzed the problems of the existing Poor Laws not in terms of Malthusian population doctrines (Chadwick eschewed the Malthusian doctrine) but rather on the basis of disincentives to work and the eating away of the wages fund.  Although the analysis echoed with with Senior's own, their remedies differed somewhat.   Chadwick's report contained very specific recommendations (1833, p.338):  an end to outdoor relief, a return to the workhouse system, the abolition of the law of settlement, but also the adoption of a centralized system run by salaried officials (a reiteration of Bentham's own favored pauper-management system).  The more centralized aspects of Chadwick's system were diluted in Senior's summary of the report and sidelined in the final Poor Law Reform Act of 1834 (4 & 5 William 4 c.17).  Somewhat disappointed, Chadwick publicized his views on the Poor Laws in an 1836 Edinburgh Review article. 

Chadwick remained on as a secretary with the Poor Law Commission.  Already before the final act, Chadwick's  interests were gravitating elsewhere - notably towards public health and sanitation, which would become the central obsession of the remainder of his career.  Chadwick's 1842 report was a pioneering work in that area, connecting public ill-health and diseases to poverty and working conditions, that eventually led to the Public Health Act of 1848. After the dissolution of the Poor Law Commission in 1847, Chadwick continued the avenue he had begun, working as a commissioner at the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers and the General Board of Health, until his retirement in 1854.

Chadwick was elected to the Political Economy Club in 1834 and president of Section F of the BAAS in 1862.  In 1884, he was made the first president of Association of Public Sanitary Inspectors.

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