My research will investigate the social, cultural, and environmental histories of the River Thames during the anxious transitional period of the fin de siècle, specifically its relationship to the lives and deaths of the women of London’s urban poor, c. 1880-1910.

Both Victorian and environmental scholars have traditionally depicted the Thames as a major public health problem of the mid-19th Century, highlighting the Great Stink of 1858 and the re-engineering of water and sewage schemes. This has left the late-Victorian Thames, and the hidden histories of women who lived and died there, comparatively understudied. Employing a gendered, spatial analysis, my research will explore the ways in which the Thames, as a key urban actor, facilitated male violence, rationalised class-based prejudice, and vindicated reductive assumptions about the morality of urban women. I will situate the Thames as a gendered space, a site of violence, and an arena of power and powerlessness, exploring the river’s relationship to working-class women’s experiences of marginalisation, subjugation, and victimisation in the urban sphere. 

Through the analysis of various socio-cultural sources – including print and visual culture, urban cartography, medico-legal discourse, and police, coroner, and court records – my research will contribute to historical conceptualisations of landscape and environment, gender and space, and gender-based violence. It will demonstrate the complex ways in which these issues interacted with each other: how gender and class discourse became imported into the simultaneously urban and natural landscape of the Thames; how the river, as both a cultural image and physical space, staged the lifecycles and gendered experiences of urban women; and how concepts of morality, mortality, and environment converged along London’s riverine system.