1812, Feb 19 -- St Peter's, Sheffield: baptized
about 1836 -- married Ann Hallatt
1836, Dec 26 -- St Philip's, Sheffield: son Edwin baptized
1837 -- 1848 -- 40 Queen St, Sheffield: Surveyor of Highways, Sheffield
1838, Mar 22 -- St Philips Terrace, Watery St: son James born
1840, Jan 22 -- son Frederick born
1841, Dec 13 -- Siddall St, Sheffield: son William born
1848 -- 1854 -- Westminster, London: Inspector, General Board of Health
about 1848 -- Clapham: married Sarah Clay
1849, Dec 5 -- London: elected Fellow of the Geologicial Society
1851, Mar 24 -- Wandsworth Road, Clapham: son Charles baptized
1855, Apr 53 -- Lavender Terrace, Battersea: daughter Gertrude born
1861, Apr 77 -- Westbourne Grove, Paddington: living at census
1863, Jun 6 -- Shirland, Derbyshire: married Ellen Wilson (neé Bansall)
1865, Jun 12 -- 14 Westbourne Grove Terrace: son William born
1866, Dec 7 -- son Hector born
1869 -- son Alfred born
1869, Apr -- published Daniel Defoe: His Life
1891, Dec 29 -- Bedford Hill Road, Balham: died, aged 79
William Lee - Pioneering Civil Engineer in Public Health
Early Life
William Lee was baptized on 19 February 1812 at St Peter's Cathedral church in Sheffield. He was the first of the six children of Elizabeth Green and James Lee. They had been married in Sheffield just a year earlier on 27 February 1811.
James Lee was a silver plater and jeweller, almost certainly working with the famous Sheffield Plate (copper plated with silver).
James' father, another William Lee, had been a silversmith working in Sheffield at the end of the eighteenth century.
Little is known of William Lee's childhood in Sheffield. Although since he clearly received a good education and start in life, the family must have been quite prosperous.
Some time around 1836 William married Ann Hallatt. They had five children: Edwin in 1836 (who died shortly afterwards), James in 1838, Frederick in 1840, William in 1841 and a few years later, Emma in 1847.
The family lived initially in St Philip's Terrace at 5 Watery Street, near to St Philip's Church and the Sheffield Royal Infirmary. After 1840 they lived at 13 Siddal Street, in the parish of St George's.
The Surveyor of Sheffield
In 1837, at the age of 25, William Lee was appointed to the new post of Surveyor of Highways for Sheffield. His office was at 40 Queen Street, where he was assisted by two collectors, John Southern and Edward Hallam, and a clerk, first Edward Jackson and then John Wheatley. Lee was to hold the job throughout the 1840s.
The highways in Sheffield were superintended by a Board of twenty people, elected yearly under an 1835 Act of Parliament. This board authorized annual expenditure for the repair of over 31 miles of roads and sewers, for a city whose population at that time was some 110,000 people. Between 1834 and 1842 the highways budget averaged £8350. By 1849, general opinion was that the highways of Sheffield had been greatly improved during the last fifteen years.
The Surveyor himself was known for his energy and public spirit. One description of Lee records him as being: "a gentleman of considerable scientific attainments, who has for years been carrying out a well-digested plan that will ultimately render this town, in all probability, inferior to none in the kingdom, in regard to the drainage and superficial condition of the streets".
Lee's friend, John Holland, curator of the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, claimed that as a result of Lee's superintendence, "Sheffield might fairly claim to be regarded as one of the best paved, as well as the best drained, towns in the kingdom".
Holland also relates how the poet James Montgomery once came into Holland's room choking with laughter at a witticism that had just crossed his mind. Upon seeing an immense pile of square stones which Lee had laid up for paving the streets, Montgomery realized that, when Lee died, the epitaph made for John Vanbrugh, the architect, could easily be adapted to suit the surveyor:
"Lie heavy on him, earth, for Lee
Laid many a heavy load on thee!"
(Montgomery was later asked which of his rhymes would survive him; to which he replied: "None sir, nothing except perhaps a few of my hymns". His hymns, such as "Angels from the Realms of Glory", are indeed still sung, while his poetry is largely forgotten.)
Lee appears to have had many other interests, including geology and phrenology. He was also a keen antiquarian book collector; he relates in a letter how he often returned from London carrying a large parcel of old books - sometimes half a cabful!
In 1841, he was elected to the Literary and Philosophical Society, which had been founded some twenty years earlier to provide the inhabitants of Sheffield with "opportunities for intellectual improvement which they would not individually command" and to contribute to the "diffusion of liberal knowledge among all classes". It acted as a forum for the prominent and educated men of the town, who regularly met at the Society's Rooms at the Music Hall in Surrey Street. In 1841, Lee was elected a "proprietor" of the Society and from 1845 to 1849 was its honorary secretary.
By 1843, Lee's interests and involvement with the Society caused the Board of Highways to dock £100 from his salary. In great indignation, he wrote to Holland: "There is a charge against me. I have studied and improved myself while in the service of the town and the town ought to have the benefit of it without extra charge. I have read papers before the Lit. & Phil. Soc. ergo I could find time to write those papers!"
As a consequence, Lee warned Holland that a paper he was writing on roads for the Society might be delayed. But later that year, on 3 November, Lee did read his paper, titled "On Modern Carriage-Ways", before a meeting of the Society. In the paper, Lee critiqued MacAdam's methods of construction and paid tribute to Edwin Chadwick's recently issued Sanitary Report, before giving a most detailed explanation of the benefits of various techniques of road construction, drawn from his experience as Surveyor of Highways. He prefaced this rather technical paper with a lyrical introduction on the value of roads to society:
"Roads are the vein along which flow the life-blood of the body politic. They are evidence of the civilization of the country, at the same time that they influence largely the extension and advance of that civilization.
Without the means of safe and easy communication, between places at a distance, a nation cannot attain to commercial greatness, or enjoy the pleasure which results from an interchange of the arts and the elegancies of life."
Two years later, Lee was invited by Edwin Chadwick to write the section on Sheffield for the Second Report of the Health of Towns Commission, in which he earnestly endorsed the Chadwickian doctrines of reform and rationalization. In 1847, together with the chemist, James Haywood, a fellow member of the Literary & Philosophical Society, Lee wrote a report on sanitary conditions in Sheffield for the town's own Health Committee.
Lee and Haywood found that the dreadful state of the town was due to badly built, poorly sited, and rarely emptied privies, many of which served up to 20 houses each. Most of the yards were unpaved and could therefore not be cleaned, leading to a surface that was little more than compacted excrement. The stench of these yards made many of the houses tenantless; windows had to be kept permanently closed, and malignant fevers ran riot amongst those still lived there. The sewers - still made out of rubble - were cited as the chief cause of the spread of cholera. For example, they found one yard in the Bridgehouses district that had:
"A privy midden accommodating eight or ten families, the cess-pool of which is placed close to the walls of a house situated on the lower level; the drainage through the walls and into the cellar is most offensive; the occupant of this house has recently lost her husband from consumption and three children from fever; she has two young children still living, but in a very unhealthy state."
The report recommended better dwellings, more water, replacing the privies with many more water closets, the paving of yards, the construction of wash-houses and baths, and the provision of earthenware drainpipes. Sheffield's Health Committee took little notice of the report at the time, but it was later acknowledged to be "far in advance of the times, containing suggestions of the utmost value and importance, anticipating many sanitary measures which have only been carried out in recent times".
Lee continued correspondence with Edwin Chadwick. In July 1848 he wrote to give his opinion that a General Board of Health - proposed in the Public Health Bill that was then under consideration in Parliament - unless put into the hands of inspectors of "great administrative wisdom and experience", could give rise to more evil than good. The letter may not have been intended as a job application; however, it would prove to have that effect.
The General Board of Health
The Health of Towns in the 1840s
By the 1840s, the speed of industrialization and growth of towns had far outstripped the capacities of old sanitary provisions and administrations. Between 1801 and 1831, the population of Leeds leapt from 53,000 to 123,000, and that of London more than doubled to 1,948,000. As the towns grew, so did the death rate. Between 1831 and 1841, the death rate in Liverpool shot up from 21 to 35 per thousand.
Speculative builders threw up back-to-back housing without drains, and built roads without road-drains. It was not uncommon for a privy to be shared by thirty buildings. In parts of Manchester, 33 privies had to meet the needs of over 7000 people. In Sunderland as a whole, the ratio of privies to people was 1 to 76. Water was supplied to public standpipes and only available for an hour or so each day.
The lack of sanitation was compounded by the density of settlement. In 1844, in one parish of Bethnal Green, no more than 400 yards square, 1400 houses were inhabited by 2,795 families - a total of 12,000 people. Here, a man, his wife, four or five children, and grandparents could be found living, sleeping, and working in one room just 10-12 feet square.
It was not uncommon for a single room might be occupied by a dozen families. In such areas, for every person who died of old age or violence, eight died of specific diseases. One child in every two died before reaching the age of five.
As newcomers streamed into towns, refuse piled up, the air became foul, the water supply polluted, and industrial wastes accumulated. There were houses:
"whose yards were completely covered in human ordure six inches deep, across which the inhabitants stepped on bricks".
The usual mode for waste disposal from privies was to drain them into a cesspool in the yard. This might be emptied perhaps once a year:
"On those rare occasions, men with two-horse carts would shovel the sickening mess into buckets, until the carts were full, and then drive away with it to fling in the river."
Bethnal Green, which had 33 miles of streets, had less than 6 miles of sewers - and most of those were in one recently-constructed suburb. Bethnal Green Road, the main street of the parish, had no sewer for its entire length (1,600 yards).
It was illegal to connect house drains to sewers - originally nothing more than channels to drain storm-water from the streets. Even in richer parts of towns, where sewers did exist, they were ill-supplied with water, and were often built uphill, so that sewage oozed back into the lowest levels, and accumulated as a "vast, underground and stinking pond".
A Good Sewer is a Noble and Holy Thing
As epidemics of cholera swept through England in the 1840s, debate raged over whether they were caused by contagion from disease or by overcrowded and unsanitary housing. Edwin Chadwick's landmark 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain clearly asserted a direct link between living conditions and health over the opposing "germ theory".
Chadwick was a protégé of the utilitarian social reformer Jeremy Bentham and, though a lawyer by training rather than an engineer or doctor, he was the chief proponent of the "sanitary idea". A clever publicist, as well as a man of strong principles, fiercely resistant to criticism, Chadwick was the archetypal bureaucrat. John Stuart Mill described him as "one of the contriving and organizing minds of the age; a class of mind of which there are few, and still fewer who apply those qualities to the practical business of government."
Chadwick found that the "defects that are most important are those chiefly external to the dwellings of the population and principally arise from the neglect of drainage... The great preventives: drainage, street and house cleansing by means of supplies of water and improved sewerage, and especially the introduction of cheaper and more efficient modes of removing all noxious refuse from the towns, are operations for which aid must be sought from the science of the civil engineer, not from the physician, who has done his work when he has pointed out the disease that results from the neglect of proper administrative measures".
The Report's solution was to conceive of the whole town as one arterial system, with water supply connecting each sanitary service. From rivers, it would flow constantly to taps and water-closets in each house. From these it would flow to new sewers, join the flow from street-drains, and flow rapidly to the edge of towns for treatment or use as manure.
Today, this system is an unquestioned part of the infrastructure of our towns and cities. The provision of clean water and sewerage has probably had a greater impact on reducing death and disease than all the medical advances of the period. Even John Ruskin was forced to admit: "a good sewer is a far nobler and a far holier thing...than the most admired Madonna ever painted".
But such a system would require administration as a whole. The existing civic institutions - hardly changed since Elizabethan times save for the addition of many individual and often competing commissions, for street-lighting, paving, policing, etc - would clearly be inadequate. The publication of Chadwick's report eventually led to the 1848 Public Health Act, which created the General Board of Health to oversee the provision of public health.
The Establishment of the General Board of Health
When the General Board of Health was established, its members were Chadwick, Lord Morpeth, who had championed the legislation, and the social reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, MP (later Earl of Shaftesbury). The Board sat daily to transact business and receive deputations.
The Medical Assistant was Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, a Unitarian minister and physician at the London Fever Hospital, who had dissected Jeremy Bentham's corpse at his "funeral" at the Webb St School of Anatomy in 1832. Dr John Sutherland and Dr Richard Grainger, a surgeon at St Thomas's Hospital, were Medical Observers. The Secretary was Henry Austin, a water engineer and brother-in-law of Charles Dickens, who had been secretary of the Health of Towns Association. Professor Alexander Bain was Assistant Secretary. The Board was headquartered at Gwydyr House, Whitehall.
To perform its work, the Board recruited five Superintending Inspectors; all civil engineers. Chadwick wanted inspectors in strong sympathy with his views, and he required applicants to submit a paper on how they would remedy the defective drainage of an imaginary town.
He informed them that the principles upon which the Board was to operate would "render inapplicable much of the experience that has been formed in the execution of existing works of house, street, and land drainage, water supply, and general cleansing".
Chadwick chose William Lee, Thomas Webster Rammell, Edward Cresy (author of the standard Encyclopedia of Civil Engineering), William Ranger (lecturer at Putney College of Civil Engineering), and Robert Rawlinson (assistant surveyor of Liverpool). Other engineers who worked under their direction at various times, were: Charles Knight, Lyndsey Blyth, Arthur Farre, Alfred L Dickens, George Thomas Clark (railway engineer), James Smith (an authority on agricultural drainage), and Benjamin Herschel Babbage.
A town could summon an Inspector, with a view to establishing a local Board of Health, by submitting to the Board a petition signed by at least one tenth of the ratepayers. Alternatively, anywhere the death rate exceeded 23 per thousand, the Board could initiate an enquiry into sanitary conditions without the consent of the inhabitants, although this power was not used unless there was significant local support. Once summoned, Chadwick required the inspector's report to consider:
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How water, pure and wholesome, from springs or rivers or uplands could be brought to the population
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How it could be carried away again after use bearing human wastes with it
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How the products of the sewers could be utilized to manure the neighboring farmland
This last item was in initial enthusiasm of Chadwick, but was effectively ignored as the work of the Board progressed. Once established, the local Boards had to appoint an Officer of Health (a medical doctor), a Surveyor, an Inspector of Nuisances, treasurer, and clerk. Surveyors were civil engineers and their main task was to lay out water supplies and sewage systems. Indeed, Chadwick believed that the needed environmental changes were an engineering and not a medical problem. The duties of the local Boards involved organizing paving, sewerage, cleansing, water-supply schemes, maintaining building codes, the control of offensive trades, and the regulation of cemeteries.
Over the next 6 years, Lee and the other inspectors visited and reported on the sanitary conditions of 243 English towns. They brought 182 of them - with a combined population of 2.1 million - under the Public Health Act. They implemented new sewerage/water supply/drainage schemes in 70 towns, and approved over £1 million in loans to finance such improvements. The Board benefited these towns by enabling them to enact improvements without having to incur the expense of obtaining their own Act of Parliament; a route still taken by many big cities, such as Liverpool and Leeds. In this way, the Board improved the lives and health of literally millions of people.
Lee's Work as a Superintending Inspector
Lee moved to London to take up his position at the General Board of Health late in 1848. He settled in the Clapham area, where his son James attended Clapham Grammar School. Either shortly before or shortly after Lee moved to London, his wife Ann died. Lee remarried to Sarah Clay, of Shirland, Derbyshire. In 1851 his new wife, gave birth to a son, Charles, followed by a daughter, Gertrude, in 1857, born at Lavender Terrace, Battersea. By this time, Lee was was the main survivor of his family: his father had died in 1842, his mother in 1850, and three of his brothers and a sister had all died by the year 1848.
In June 1849, Lee applied to join the Geological Society of London. His suitability was certified "from personal knowledge" by a distinguished group of men: Henry De la Beche, first Director-General of the Geological Survey and president of the society; the Rev. William Buckland, professor of mineralogy at Oxford, and president of the society in 1841; James Yates, Unitarian minister, colleague of Thomas Southwood Smith, and antiquary; Nathaniel Wetherell, surgeon and paleantologist, whose collection is now in London's Natural History Museum; William Carpenter, professor of forensic medicine at University College, London; and Thomas Bell, Newcastle land-surveyor and antiquary.
In December 1849, Lee was elected to be a Fellow of the Society, and he remained a member throughout his career at the General Board of Health, finally resigning from the Society in November 1861.
Between 1849 and 1855, Lee produced 69 reports for the General Board of Health. These consisted of 46 Preliminary Inquiries into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary conditions of the inhabitants of different towns across England, each of which he was required to visit. There were 10 Further Inquiries, 3 Memorials, 4 reports on Burial-Grounds, and 6 miscellaneous other Reports.
Typical of the unsanitary conditions Lee found almost everywhere he went were at Arnold in Nottinghamshire. At Mr Bramley's property in Cross Lane there were:
"Most horrible privies behind the houses and within nine feet of the water well. I was informed that grubs of great length had been drawn from the well. Ann Morley, who lives in the house, says persons who come in the summer cannot live in the house. She is a washerwoman but the water is so bad she has to fetch all she requires from a considerable distance."
An inspection gave ordinary people the opportunity to cry out their complaints as the Inspector walked through the town, often accompanied by the local clergy, doctors, and existing officials. At Dudley, Lee records how "all the neighbours were calling my attention to the ills connected with drainage, privies, want of good water, and stench, to such as extent that I was compelled to refuse to take them down in my minutes because I should have had to mention almost every house." Amongst the houses whose condition he did describe, was Patchett's Buildings:
"A court about eight feet wide with only surface drainage. No ventilation. A foul well, used for cleaning the yard; most filthy privies are placed at the top, and as fast as the pots are emptied into the open receptacle, the fluid runs down the yard; the seats and passage covered with ordure, and the privies cannot be used. One case of cholera. The medical evidence shows these yards to be among the worst localities of disease in the town."
Lee dreaded visiting common lodging-houses. He would make his inspection at night and the squalor, gambling, and sexual promiscuity horrified him.
At Rotherham he talked with men and women in a crowded and fetid tramps' lodging-house, and learned that they actually enjoyed the tramping life - had lived it for thirty years and could face no other existence. With a shudder he had to admit: "there is a kind of fascination about this mode of life". He was usually ill for a day or two after such visits.
Reporting on such a situation at the town of March, in the Isle of Ely, Lee wrote:
"I forbear to quote further from these revolting humiliating details of my inspection. Only a sense of duty (and a very painful duty it is) could induce me to witness the physical and moral contamination of the public lodging-houses in this, and other, towns I am called upon to visit."
After visiting Gainsborough in 1850, Lee calculated the human cost of the deaths arising from unsanitary conditions that he found in strikingly Benthamite and utilitarian terms:
"Every individual who has died from preventible causes has lost several years of life, which, at a low rate of wages, would show the value of lost labour to the community. Each funeral in excess costs a certain sum of money, which has been estimated at £5 on the average. Every death represents more than 20 cases of preventible sickness at an average of not less than 20s each. These three items alone in Gainsborough would amount in one year to about as much as the total cost of draining the town and giving its inhabitants an abundant supply of water."
The economy of the Public Health Act was well illustrated at Reading in 1850, which had spent £900 on previous inquiries and £8000 on an unsuccessful attempt to pass its own Act of Parliament to authorize sanitary improvements. Inspector Lee conducted an inquiry for £140 19s 3d, and the sanitary improvements, costed at £60,000 by the proponents of the unsuccessful Act, were performed for £25,000.
However, opposition from local land and property owners - the ratepayers who would have to bare the cost of improvements - persisted. Often there was evidence of threats and misrepresentations being made in order to obtain signatures for petitions opposing the Board's work. At Alfreton, whose largest ratepayers claimed in a petition, that the town had "to the knowledge of the oldest inhabitant, been remarkable for the health and longevity of the inhabitants", a clergyman admitted to Inspector Lee that he had been asked to "direct" his tenants to sign the petition against the application of the Public Health Act.
In March 1849 Lee visited Bacup, a boom town of the Lancashire cotton trade. One house he visited contained 13 beds and 28 people: one room contained five people in one bed; in another six women and eight men shared four beds. He visited lodging houses where the inmates retired to bed "in a state of absolute nudity", where the stench was "so obnoxious that on the following day I was scarcely able to perform my duties".
In addition to overcrowding, Bacup lacked sewers: the river Irwell was the depository for waste which, on the occasion of a flood, just overflowed into the town, leaving shopkeepers trying to barricade their doors and stand on their counters as the fetid water rose. At one tenement, owned by local mill magnate Robert Munn, the night soil overflowing from a privy went over Lee's shoe tops.
The Bacup mill-owners, such as Munn, objected to the application of the Public Health Act, and questioned the legality of Lee's visit, on the grounds that less than one tenth of the ratepayers had signed the petition to the General Board requesting an inspection.
Munn was the owner of three cotton mills in Bacup - "the master of 2,000 working people and yet I started in the world with nothing". He also fought proposals to reduce his employees' working day to ten hours on the grounds that the final "golden" hour produced the most profit.
When Lee made a further visit in April the following year, he found many witnesses gave testimonies at variance with their earlier submissions, and in favor of the mill-owners position. Lee recommended the construction of three reservoirs, the provision of a main sewer with sluices and tanks, and a new site for the cemetery. But rather than come under the Public Health Act, the mill-owners led by Munn, feigned to seek their own Act, which never materialized.
Years later, the death rate was still 30 per thousand - double that of healthy parts of England. It was 1862 before the new cemetery was opened; 1863 before elections were held for a local Board of Health and all the improvements made.
In 1849, Lee's report on Great Yarmouth provoked a fifty-eight page indignant Memorial from a group of ratepayers. This accused him of coming to Yarmouth already prejudiced and in secret correspondence with a Yarmouth doctor; distorting the evidence of witnesses at his public enquiry; wrongfully accusing the municipality of hushing up various recent epidemics; and making proposals that would "contribute towards the decay of a town once among the most flourishing seaports in the empire of Great Britain". Their complaint was taken up by Joseph Hume MP, a radical but consistent opponent of public expenditure.
The case rumbled on until 1851, when a Select Committee of the House of Lords concluded that the death rate, being 24 in a thousand, was so excessive that Board was quite correct to apply the Public Health Act, despite any local objection. Lee wrote to Chadwick that local improvements had been in the hands of as 40-year old body of 113 Commissioners, the majority of whom were "self-elected for life" and who "for a great number of years, until the last few months, they had never published accounts ... a flagrant instance of taxation without representation".
The Increasing Opposition to Chadwick's Inspectors
In 1852, Lee's most acrimonious dispute arose, when he challenged the estimates of Thomas Hawksley, a consulting engineer engaged to undertake sanitary works in Durham. A furious pamphlet war broke out, with Hawsley accusing Lee of stealing away his clerk, with an offer of higher pay, in order to learn Hawskley's professional secrets. The dispute exemplified some of the issues that would bring about the demise of the General Board of Health; namely Chadwick's alienation of powerful figures in the engineering profession, and his policy of encouraging his inspectors to also take on private consultations.
Hawksley was a distinguished consulting engineer, and inventor of the "constant supply" system of water that we use today. Chadwick had been a champion Hawksley's work from the 1830s, when he was engineer of the Nottingham waterworks. But in 1850, Chadwick irreparably alienated Hawksley by decrying his work, and from then on Hawksley became a committed adversary of the Board and all of its operations.
The origins of the dispute at Durham lay in the way the Board operated. It did not make loans, which were often required for the completion of works, until plans had been certified in great detail by a Superintending Inspector, who had the power to reject or revise plans that were submitted by consulting engineers acting on behalf of towns. The Board paid its inspectors, such as Lee, by the day, and once an engagement was completed, they were free to undertake any private commissions that might come their way.
For example, by 1852 Lee was in private practice with George Wilson Stevenson, operating from offices at 9 Duke Street, Westminster. Business must have been good, for in September of that year, the firm of Lee and Stevenson leased the adjoining property, 7 Duke Street, for the sum of £63 per year.
This potential conflict of interest was quite intentional - Chadwick considered the competition with private engineers essential to establishing working examples of his arterial drainage concept. Not surprisingly, many towns decided the best way to get their plans approved was to hire an inspector to draw them up.
At Durham, Lee, acting as inspector, refused to sanction the proposals submitted by the firm of May and Hawsley at a cost of £6000, on the basis that he believed the work could be completed for £4300. Hawksley's firm responded, in letters to the local Board of Health, by making a number of accusations against Lee. Mainly these were that Lee had not spent sufficient time or been sufficiently responsive in reviewing the firm's proposals. But they also complained that Lee's junior partner, George Stevenson, had lured away Hawksley's confidential clerk, a Mr Moore, with promise of increase in salary from £120 to £200, at short notice and without consultation.
These letters were read at the Durham Board's meeting, and reported in the Durham Chronicle, which was brought to Lee's attention. He wrote, in his defense, to the Durham Board, reminding them that it was rare for the General Board to object to proposed works. He pointed out the value of having plans and estimates inspected by a professional engineer such as himself, namely, potential saving to the ratepayers of Durham of $1500.
May replied to the Durham Board, complaining against the practice of engineers having to submit their complete plans to Inspectors, who might not only be their junior but also their competitor, but also broadening the argument by attacking the General Board itself as "composed of Noble Lords, a Barrister, and a Physician which undertakes to dictate to Engineers the theory and practice of their profession". Later, Chadwick, writing to the Dean of Durham, complained that the affair was "utterly frivolous" as it seems "Mr Hawksley objects to any examination of his plans or to such examinations only as he likes or by whom he likes ... I do not understand how professional engineers could get on if they are never to act, except when they are clear of rivalry."
Early in 1853, Hawksley raised his firm's grievances before a House of Commons Select Committee. He was asked to put them in writing, which he did, in a letter to the Marquis of Chandos. Among numerous personal grievances, Hawksley made two main criticisms. The first, focused on the competition of the inspectors for work: "inspectors are permitted by Mr Chadwick to obtain from local boards, as private engineers and for their own emolument, the execution of as many as possible of the works proposed by local authorities." The second centered on the inspectors' enforcement of Chadwick's ideas on water engineering - "one system of construction ... of a most erroneous and even pernicious character."
Hawksley claimed there were 44 cases in which an inspector had become the private engineer employed. In fact there were 34 instances, out of a total of 114 projects approved by the Board. Lee himself appears to have become the private engineer at only 9 out of the 46 towns he inspected; namely Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Burslem, Diss, Epsom, Gainsborough, Knighton, Maidenhead, Nantwich and Rotherham.
Hawksley further highlighted occasions on which Chadwick had personally objected to the employment of himself or another leading engineer, Thomas Wicksteed, upon projects. He claimed that Inspector Ranger had rejected submitted plans and gone on to be appointed to execute similar work, and further claimed that Ranger had copied specifications of waterworks for his own use. Hawksley made no specific accusations against Lee, instead declaring his pique that at Durham "I had prepared plans so perfect a character that they received the approval and commendation of most-eminent engineers", which were then rejected by an inspector, Lee, who had previously hired away his clerk.
The Demise of the General Board of Health
One result of these conflicts was that by mid-1853, Chadwick, agreeing that sufficient examples of arterial water-supply were now in operation, moved the inspectors onto a full-time annual salary, so removing the appearance and any opportunity for conflict of interest.
Charles Dickens satirized frequent ratepayer opposition to improvement schemes of the Board in his magazine Household Words in 1853:
"Ratepayers, Cess-cum-Poolton! Rally round your vested interests. Health is enormously expensive. Introduce the Public Health Act and you will be pauperized! Be filthy and be fat. Cess-pools and Constitutional Government! Gases and Glory! No insipid water!!! ... When people say that a small payment for health and strength brings in even a large money profit, and invite us to reason with them on the subject, we say "Reason with you? No, we don't do that. We are not talking about reason but about rates. We see no reason in them and we object to them."
By 1854, Lord Morpeth had retired from politics, and the continuous attacks of water engineers like Hawksley had taken affect. Now the Board, which had been authorized by the 1848 Act for six years, needed re-authorizing before Parliament. Despite the efforts of Lord Palmerston, opposition forced a new arrangement more directly under ministerial control, and with it, required the resignations of the existing board: Edwin Chadwick, Dr Southwood Smith, and Lord Shaftesbury.
In his diary, Shaftesbury listed the huge range of vested interests that the Board had dared to cross: "parliamentary agents, civil engineers, the College of Physicians, all Boards of Guardians, the Treasury, the water companies, the Commissioners of Sewers."
Perhaps because he was such an ardent Chadwick loyalist, Lee was the only inspector not to receive an offer of further employment with its successor body. Writing to Chadwick in January 1855, he clearly expressed his soreness at the pass of events that had overcome them both:
"When I am engrossed in business I pass all off very well, but at leisure often feel deeply the grievous injustice with which I have been treated since your retirement. You know the bite of the same keen tooth. I feel no desire for any appointment under your Successor. I should have declined it, if offered on such terms as Sir Benjamin Hall has now laid before the world; but I feel that I was the only one passed by, because I was simply faithful, and declined to truckle and plot against my superiors in office."
Lee married for a third time in June of 1863; this time to Ellen Bansall of Shirland, near Alfreton, Derbyshire. He was 51 and she was 32. Ellen was herself a recent widow with a son of her own (Walter). With William Lee, Ellen had three further sons: William born in 1865, Hector in 1866, and Alfred in 1869. At the time they were living in Westbourne Grove Terrace, Paddington, where they stayed for the next ten years.
William Lee was by now quite prosperous. His sons attended the Merchant Taylors' School in Charterhouse Square, for which the annual stipend was 15 guineas each. Alfred went on to study at Clare College, Cambridge, while William and Hector both went up to St John's College, Oxford. Lee's step-son, Walter Bansall, also attended St John's College, Cambridge. Later Walter, after his first wife died, was to marry his step-sister, Gertrude Lee, the second child of William Lee's marriage with Sarah Clay.
Another indicator of the family's prosperity was the staff of servants. In 1841, the Lee household had just one young female servant: Harriet Clark. By 1851, there were two domestic servants - a cook and a housemaid - and this establishment was maintained for the rest of Lee's life. The servants were not long-term employees, as each decade different women were recorded in these jobs; with the cook on average being a little older (at 25 years) than the housemaid (at 18 years).
In 1854, according to Lee's youngest son, Alfred, "my father was appointed head of the Health Dept at Balaclava but refused; his friend and colleague Dr Gavin went there". Hector Gavin, FRCSE, was lecturer in forensic medicine at Charing Cross Hospital, and a pioneering sanitarian. Gavin became a member of the Crimea Sanitary Commission, along with Lee's colleague, Robert Rawlinson, which was sent in 1854 to help Florence Nightingale improve the health of the British Army. Gavin was tragically killed by his brother accidentally letting off a pistol shortly after his arrival at Scutari. Alfred Lee recounts that his father named Alfred's older brother, Hector, in memory of Dr Gavin.
Lee continued in private practise as a civil engineer for some years. In 1864, he was one of nine engineers, includng John Rennie and Charles Vignoles, who were retained by Sheffield Corporation to report on the collapse of the Dale Dyke Dam.
The Sheffield Flood - the worst civil disaster in England to that point - occurred when the dam, on Bradfield Moor above Sheffield, gave way, releasing a torrent of 700 million gallons of water, which wiped out the village of Malin Bridge, swept through Hillsborough and Owlerton, inundated the center of Sheffield over six miles away to a depth of four feet. 270 people drowned; 800 houses were completely destroyed and over 4000 damaged by flood-waters.
The government sent Robert Rawlinson and Nathaniel Beardmore to conduct an inquest into the disaster. The Sheffield Waterworks Company, which operated the reservoir, retained five engineers in its defence, including Thomas Hawksley, Lee's old adversary. The company did not dispute liability and, having paid compensation to the victims, it was bought out by the city of Sheffield.
By the time of the 1871 census, Lee was describing himself as retired.
The Biographer of Defoe
"Every Fragment Became Interesting"
Lee's second career was to be as the leading scholar of Daniel Defoe of the nineteenth century. Lee's attributions of Defoe's authorship - while they have been frequently questioned - still form the basis of Defoe scholarship to this day, and modern biographers continue to acknowledge their debt to his life of Defoe. In the course of his research, Lee was also to amass one of the greatest private collections of Defoe's works.
Lee had had a long-standing interest in Defoe dating from the 1830s, but it was not until 1857, once his employment at the General Board of Health had ended, that he obtained a reader's ticket at the British Museum and began to concentrate his energies on the subject.
In 1860, he relates how he made a trip out to Tilbury to view the excavations for the Tilbury and Southend Railway, in the hope of discovering the remains of Defoe's tile-works there. He found, in a trench cut by the railway, the whole works laid open to view: claypits, drying-floors, foundations of kilns, and heaps of bricks and tiles.
"I asked several laborers how they thought these things came there, and was answered by an ignorant shake of the head, but when I said 'these bricks and tiles were made 160 years ago by the same man that made Robinson Crusoe I touched a chord that connected these railway navvies with the shipwrecked mariner, and that bounded over the intervening period in a single moment. Every eye brightened, every tongue was ready to ask or give information, and every fragment became interesting."
By 1864, Lee was actively engaged on studies of the writings of Defoe, researching, and collecting early eighteenth century pamphlets and newspapers.
Over the next four years, he wrote numerous commentaries on these tracts and other aspects of his Defoe research for the literary review Notes and Queries, whose editor, W J Thoms, was his friend. Through this succession of articles - though many relate to specialized questions of history and attribution - we can see Lee building up both his knowledge of Georgian journalism and his views on the Defoe canon.
Notes and Queries
Lee also contributed correspondence to Notes and Queries on other topics of literary interest, as well as some interesting recollections from his earlier life. For example, in 1865, Lee responded to an invitation to submit satirical rhymes on Dickens and Thackeray. He wrote that three months after the satire first appeared in N&Q, he saw the earthly remains of Thackeray consigned to their grave at Kensal Green, amidst the tears of a thousand representatives of unnumbered myriads of absent mourners; and, on his way home, composed the following reply:
"Intensely human is thy soul, Charles Dickens;
Moral and social good to life it quickens!
The bond of common blood and nature thickens
In lordly halls - and where the poor man sickens.
Who does not mourn departed Thackeray?
And feel - though hid by clouds in black array-
His 'silver-lined' genius ne'er lack a ray?"
One of Lee's earliest contributions is a letter, adding his recollection to an earlier discussion of horses being frightened at the sight of strange animals, such as camels. He recalls an incident in the company of his wife, Ellen, who had lived for many years at Alfreton in Derbyshire:
"A few years ago, with my wife, I was driving down a steep hill in Derbyshire, a horse belonging to her father, when we met a long train of Wombwell's Menagerie. The third or fourth caravan was being tugged up the hill by a huge dromedary; which put our steed into so great trepidation that I became fearful of a serious accident. Happily I got down to his assistance; for the eighth carriage was drawn by the great elephant, who so completed "Jack's" consternation, that every limb quivered; and I believe he would have fallen, if I had not stood in front and clasped his head in my arms. When the cavalcade had passed, my poor horse was steaming with a fearful perspiration.
About a fortnight afterward, we again met the same "collection of wild beasts" on another road in the neighbourhood. It was spring, and I had observed "Jack" the day before, nibbling the young buds of the hedgerow in his pasture: so now, before he had time to discover the approaching horror, I quietly turned him to the roadside hedge; upon which he regaled himself, to the absorption of all other faculties, until we could again proceed without fear."
Bostock and Wombwell's Circus and Menagerie was the largest and most popular traveling show in England. Its animals included camels, elephants, lions, tigers, zebras, pumas, polar bears, apes of every description, and "the real unicorn of scripture" - a rhinoceros. Other attractions included lion tamers, Zulu warriors and a bearded lady. It performed before Queen Victoria at Windsor in 1847 and was in business until 1931.
In a letter entitled "A Passion for Witnessing Executions", written in corroboration of a morbid tendency noted by a previous correspondent, Lee recalled a tale told him while he was conducting research for his report at Wisbech for the General Board of Health back in 1850:
"In Walsoken, adjoining Wisbech, an aged man, apparently of the middle class, was pointed out to me about fourteen years ago; and it was stated that, for a considerable portion of his life, there had not been a public execution within a hundred miles (including London) without his traveling expressly to witness it. In early life he had been in business but had long retired and was possessed of considerable property."
In "Long Grass", Lee responded to a query asking what was the tallest grass in England. He listed some of the irrigated meadows he had visited in 1851 while investigating the Practical Application of Sewer Water and Town Manures to Agricultural Production for the General Board of Health:
"At Myer Mill Farm, near Maypole in Ayrshire, I found Italian rye-grass growing two inches in twenty-four hours. At Liscard Farm in Cheshire, I found 80 acres of Italian rye-grass from which there had been cut four crops, each 2 1/2 to 3 feet thick during the same year. At Canning Park near Ayr, the same kind of grass grown and cut the same summer: first crop, 18 inches; second 18 to 20 inches; third and fourth, each 3 feet to 4 1/2 feet; fifth, 2 feet; and sixth, 18 inches - total cut in seven months, 14 feet 3 inches. I have a small sample of the grass last-mentioned, gathered by my own hands, although I regret to say they have lost their fragrance."
There were a number of observations and recollections on his native town of Sheffield. In "Evidences of Distant Light and Smoke", he wrote on the effects of prevailing winds upon the dispersal of industrial pollution from Dudley, and then spoke of the situation around his home town:
"Sheffield has long been called the 'city of soot'; and since the epidemic of 'rifled cannon' and 'armour plates' set in, I think it may fairly vie in obscure atmosphere with any town in the Black Country. Yet the hills west of the town, within three miles, are dotted with pleasant residences, where smoke and soot are almost unknown. At Rotherham, five miles northeast, vegetation is slightly affected by Sheffield smoke. The distances, therefore, to which these disagreeable and deleterious influences extend, from any great center, must depend upon the directions of the prevalent winds."
And in "Customs at Christmas", he responded to a correspondent from Leeds, who had written an account of festive traditions in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Lee drew attention to the local variations in customs, even within a small area, with reference to his boyhood memories of Sheffield:
"In Sheffield, a male must be the first to enter a house on the morning of both Christmas Day and New Year's Day; but there is no distinction as to complexion or color of hair. In the houses of the more opulent manufacturers, these first admissions are often accorded to choirs of workpeople; who sing as 'waits', proceed at an early hour, and sing before the houses of their employers and friends, Christmas carols and hymns; always commencing with that beautiful composition:
Christians awake! Salute the happy morn,
Whereon the Saviour of mankind was born.
On expressing their good wishes to the inmates, they are generally rewarded with 'something warm', and occasionally with a pecuniary present. Among the class called 'respectable', but not manufacturers, a previous arrangement is often made; a boy, the son of a friend, shall come and be first admitted, receiving for his good wishes a Christmas-box of sixpence or a shilling.
The houses of the artisans and poor are successively besieged by a host of gamins; who, soon after midnight, spread themselves over the town, shouting at the doors and through the key-holes, as follows:
Au wish ya a murry Christmas,
A appy new year,
A pocket full of munny,
An' a cellar full a'beer.
God bless the mester of this ouse,
The mistress all-so,
An' all the little childrun,
That round the table go.
A apple, a pare, a plom, an' a cherry;
A sup a' good ale al mak' a man murry."
And so on. The same house will not admit a second boy. One is sufficient to protect it from any ill-luck that might otherwise happen. A penny is the usual gratuity for this service. In the forenoon of Christmas day and New Year's day these boys may be seen in knots at street corners, and in the suburbs, counting respectively acquired 'coppers', and recounting their respective adventures during the night and early morning; after which, they generally resolve themselves into sub-committees for the purpose of 'pitch and toss'. Later in the day, many of them may be seen a little 'excited'; while others are depressed by manly, but unsuccessful efforts, to consume 'penny cheroots'.
Daniel Defoe: His Life
The publication in the London Review in 1864 of six newly-discovered pamphlets attributed to Daniel Defoe, together with a commentary that was very hostile to Defoe, seems to have decided Lee to bring his research together and publish his opposing view. Lee saw Defoe as a man of goodwill, public spirit, and practicality, whose reputation had been unfairly maligned - an assessment which could, of course, be just as well applied to Edwin Chadwick and Lee himself. Lee also wanted to correct the "distorted and discolored caricature" produced by Defoe's previous biographer, Walter Wilson, forty years earlier, whom Lee felt had wrongly portrayed Defoe as a "bigoted, anti-church, radical Dissenter".
By the spring of 1865, Lee was hard at work. On 3 June, he wrote to his old friend John Holland in Sheffield: "my manuscript of his hitherto unknown writings has now fills several hundred pages of foolscap and in increasing daily". His original aim had been to produce a commentary on the many writings that he had discovered and which he believed could be attributed to Defoe. Eventually, as the number of his editorials grew, Lee decided to turn them into a new biography of Defoe's later years.
In this biography, Lee included a chronological catalog of all Defoe's works, in which he rejected thirty titles that had previously been attributed to Defoe by Walter Wilson, and added sixty-four distinct works that he had discovered himself and which he now attributed to Defoe.
Lee's method of deciding attribution was somewhat unscientific - he declined to state his reasons for attributing each work on the basis that it would take up too much space and simply stated his view that: "long and critical study of a great author may result in so full an acquaintance, that his writings will be recognized by the student in a moment, as the voice of a familiar friend."
The result of Lee's work was Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, Extending From 1716 to 1729. It appears to have been completed in November 1868, and was published in April 1869, in three volumes by John Camden Hotten of Piccadilly. Volume I was the new life of Defoe, and volumes II and III contained his hitherto unknown writings. The price to subscribers was 27 shillings, and to the general public, 36 shillings.
Hotten's publicity for the books described them as "comprising several hundred important essays, pamphlets, and other writings, now first brought to light after many years' diligent search by William Lee". It continued to promote the qualifications of Lee as the books' author:
"For many years it has been well known in literary circles that the gentleman to whom the public is indebted for this valuable addition to the knowledge of Defoe's Life and Works has been an indefatigable collector of everything relating to the subject, and that such collection had reference to a more full and correct Memoir than had yet been given to the world."
Hotten used to occasion of the publication of Lee's biography to release a new edition of Defoe's best-known work, Robinson Crusoe. This was reprinted from Lee's own rare and valuable copy of the original edition of 1719. Lee wrote a short historical introduction addressed "to girls and boys - young and old - everywhere". The book was copiously illustrated with nearly one hundred specially-commissioned drawings by the French artist Ernest Griset.
Lee's Life received a generally warm press; although reviewers were agreed that Lee was an out-and-out idolater of Defoe, and that he was wildly over-confident in his attributions. Even Lee's old friend, John Holland, raised the point in the review he wrote for the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 5 May 1869:
"On two points - one moral, the other critical - Mr Lee may expect to find himself at issue with thoughtful readers; viz. his all-comprehensive admiration of the author of Moll Flanders, with the principles of the politician who served his party - faithfully or otherwise by a system of the most unblushing journalistic duplicity; and as to the certainty of the authorship of all the anonymous articles to the pen of Defoe."
A two-part article on Defoe, entitled "A Gentleman of the Press", in Charles Dickens' magazine All The Year Round in July of 1869, while based on Lee's book and providing a readable summary of his biography for the general reader, reached similar conclusions on his attributions:
"Some are doubtless the work of Defoe's hand; but as Mr Lee has no other clue for his guidance than that afforded by the letters to Mr De La Faye - and as he can only judge by his own construction of the internal evidence of style, that they were written by Defoe in the various periodicals with which he is thus known to have been connected, it is very possible that he may have included many articles and pages which belong to meaner parentage. At all events, they can by no means be unequivocally accepted as the mintage of Defoe's brain, though presenting more or less similarity in tone, manner, and style to hundreds of others, which are known to be his."
Lee took the accusation of hero-worship of Defoe lightly, saying the offence was an "easily forgiven one". Some years later, the received opinion (in the Encyclopedia Britannica) was that while "we have no authority but Lee's own impressions of style" for his attributions to Defoe, "the best qualified judges will in most cases agree that Defoe may very likely have written them" although "it cannot positiively be stated that he did."
Looking at Lee's work today, with the perspective of 130 years, he can clearly be accused of hagiography in his unwillingness to acknowledge any flaw in the character of his subject. However, modern scholars continue to debate the authorship of many works attributed to Defoe: by Lee, by his predecessors, and by his successors. Defoe's most recent biographer, Max Novak, noted that we have to acknowledge that: "much of the Defoe canon rests upon probability rather than certainty".
One blot on the book's launch was the publication shortly thereafter by James Crossley, a leading collector of Defoe' work, of some further pamphlets that he attributed to Defoe, and which he wrote he was surprised "had escaped Lee's attention". Since Lee had sought Crossley's assistance during his research for the Life and been refused it, Crossley's coup would appear to be the act of a hostile rival. Just as Lee had suffered attacks on his reputation while at the General Board of Health, he was to see again that participation in public life could be a competitive and ruthless business.
From his writings on Defoe, Lee comes across on one hand as a devoted royalist, a defender of the established church, a believer in firmness towards the "ignorant classes", and agrees with Defoe that servants should not be allowed to get above themselves. But he was also a free-trader, a strong advocate of "progress" - moral, intellectual, and material - and, perhaps not surprisingly given the experiences of his earlier career, a foe of "the clique of inferior trading busybodies" who monopolize local government. Above all, he was a fervent evangelical Christian. In the summary of his biographers, Furbank and Owens, William Lee was: "a very attractive man; intensely honorable, high-minded, and productive".
On anything to do with sex, however, he was most prim. Lee considered Defoe's Conjugal Lewdness dangerous and "by no means a book to be placed in the hands of young, unmarried persons of the present age". He was driven to explain Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack by the theory that they were written, not for the pure and delicate, but for convicted thieves and prostitutes to read, for the good of their souls, on the way to the plantations.
Lee and Hotten had published the book as a joint-profits venture; with Hotten, who had put up the larger share, having prior claim on any proceeds. Sales, however, did not enable Lee to recoup his outlay, and an acrimonious dispute arose between them.
He may then, or later, have been short of money, for in 1883, his Defoe library, along with a large number of other eighteenth century tracts, chapbooks, specimens of street literature, children's toy books, and a collection of illustrated match-book covers, were sold at auction by Puttick and Simpson.
Some time around 1890, Lee also moved his family from Paddington back across the river to Bedford Hill, Balham. This is where he died on 29 December 1891, at the age of 79, from heart disease and a stroke.
Publications
Early Writing
On Modern Carriage-Ways: being a paper read before the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, on Friday Nov. 3rd, 1843; by William Lee, Assistant Surveyor of Highways.
published at the request of the Society, printed by Robert Leader, Sheffield, 1843.
Second Report of the Commissioners for Enquiry into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts.
section on Sheffield by William Lee, pp. 188-94.
Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Borough of Sheffield: also an appendix to the first edition, containing a report on baths, wash-houses, etc.
by James Haywood and William Lee. 2nd ed. Publisher: Sheffield - J Bridgeford; London - C Knight, 1848. 159 pp.
Reports for the General Board of Health
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Bacup.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Retford, Clarborough, Ordsall.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Epsom.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Godmanchester.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Holbeach.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Knighton.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Loughborough.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Mileham.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Market Harborough, etc.
1849 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Swaffham.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the parish of Alfreton.
1850 - Further inquiry as to the boundaries which may be most advantageously adopted for Ashby-De-La-Zouch.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Alvaston & Boulton.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Bacup.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of parish of Burslem.
1850 - Further inquiry as to the boundaries which may be most advantageously adopted for the parish of Burslem.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of Diss.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the city of Ely.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Gainsborough.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the parish of Gaywood.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the borough of Great Yarmouth.
1850 - Report on Memorial from Great Yarmouth.
1850 - Preliminary enquiry into the sanitary condition of the township of Litton.
1850 - Further inquiry as to the boundaries which may be most advantageously adopted in Market Harborough.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the township of Nantwich.
1850 - Report on the state of the burial-grounds in the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the borough of Reading.
1850 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Southborough.
1850 - Memorial against the application of the Public Health Act to the district of Southborough.
1850 - Preliminary inquiries into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Walsoken and Wisbech.
1850 - Tabular Statement of the Present Cost of Water in Thirty-Two Towns, Etc, Visited by William Lee, Esq, Superintending Inspector.
1850 - Report on the application of sewerage water to irrigation and agriculture in towns visited during 1849-50
1851 - Report on a further inquiry as to boundaries which might be most advantageously adopted in Alfreton.
1851 - Report as to the boundaries of the district of Ashby-De-La-Zouch.
1851 - Report on a memorial from St John's, Bacup, objecting to the application of the Public Health Act.
1851 - Further inquiry as to the boundaries that may be most advantageously adopted for the district of Gainsborough.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the township of Kirkham.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the borough of Maidenhead.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the township of March.
1851 - Report on the state of the burial-grounds in the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the city of Norwich.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of Poulton, Bare and Torrisholme.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Rotherham and Kimberworth.
1851 - Further inquiry as to the boundaries to be adopted for the purposes of main sewerage in Rotherham and Kimberworth.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the town of Worksop: a further inquiry.
1851 - Further inquiry as to the boundaries which may be most advantageously adopted for sanitary improvement of Worksop.
1851 - Summary of Experience on Disease and Comparative Rates of Mortality, by W Lee, Esq, Superintending Inspector.
1851 - Inquiry as to the state of the burial-grounds in the township of Huddersfield.
1851 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of Dudley.
1852 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of Baildon.
1852 - Letter to the Local Board of Health for Durham on Mr Hawksley's Scheme for Main Sewerage.
1852 - Report on a scheme by Thomas Wicksteed for drainage of Leicester, and conversion of the sewerage water thereof into manure.
1852 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of Longbridge Deverill.
1852 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of Newbury.
1852 - Inquiry respecting the condition of the burial-grounds in the district of the borough of Reading.
1852 - Report on the boundaries which may be most advantageously adopted for purposes of main sewerage in borough of Wisbech.
1852 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Winterslow.
1853 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Arnold, Notts.
1853 - Two preliminary inquiries into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Burton Extra and Horninglow.
1853 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of Heanor.
1853 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the borough of King's Lynn.
1853 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water and sanitary condition of Eastwood and Greasley.
1853 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of Over-Darwen.
1853 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the borough of Tamworth.
1854 - Preliminary inquiry into the sanitary condition of the district of Surbiton.
1854 - Further inquiry as to the parish of Swindon.
1854 - Principles of Town Drainage: Report to the General Board of Health on Returns and Papers.
1855 - Preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, supply of water, and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of Bedford.
Writing on Daniel Defoe
Notes and Queries: a Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc.
Numerous articles in issues from the 3rd Series, V, 16 April 1864, to the 4th Series, V, 25 June 1870. London.
Daniel Defoe: his Life and Recently Discovered Writings, Extending from 1716 to 1729
3 volumes, John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, 1869 (reprinted George Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 1968, Burt Franklin, New York, 1969)
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner; now Correctly Reprinted from the Original Edition of 1719, with an Introduction giving a New History of Defoe's Masterpiece by William Lee, Esq.
with 100 original illustrations by Ernest Griset,
John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, 1869; reprinted Frederick Warne, London, 1878.
A Chronological Catalogue of the Works of Daniel Defoe
London, 31pp, "Only 12 copies separately printed; not for sale." 1869.
Primary Sources:
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On Modern Carriage-Ways, William Lee, Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, 1843 [British Library]
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Lease for 7 Duke Street, Westminster to William Lee and George Stevenson, 29 Sept 1852 [PRO: TS21/969]
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Letter to Board of Health for Durham on Mr Hawksley's Scheme for Main Sewerage, William Lee, London, 1852
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Letter to Board of Health for Durham in reply to a letter from Mr William Lee, Charles May, London 1852
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Letter to Marquis of Chandos: extraordinary powers assumed by General Board of Health, T Hawksley London 1853
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Report to the General Board of Health on a preliminary inquiry into the sewerage, drainage, and supply of water, and the sanitary condition of the inhabitants of parish of Arnold, county of Nottingham, William Lee, London, 1853
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Notes & Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, General Readers, London 1864-70
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All The Year Round: A Weekly Journal conducted by Charles Dickens, New Series, London, July 10, 1869
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Daniel Defoe: his Life and Recently Discovered Writings extending from 1716 to 1729, William Lee, London, 1869
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The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. William Lee, London, 1869
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Letter from William's son, Alfred Lee, to his great-niece, May 1947 [family document]
Secondary Sources:
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Robson's Birmingham and Sheffield Directory: 1839 (Digital Library of Historical Directories
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White's General Directory of the Town & Borough of Sheffield: 1849 (ArchiveCD Books, Cinderford)
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Memoirs of the Life and Writings of James Montgomery, John Holland and James Everett, London, 1854
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Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society: A Centenary Retrospective, 1822-1922, W S Porter, Sheffield, 1922
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A Popular History of Sheffield, J Edward Vickers, Sheffield, 1978
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The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, S E Finer, London, 1952
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Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement, 1832-1854, R A Lewis, London, 1952
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Early Victorian Water Engineers, G M Binnie, London, 1981
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The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels, Leipzig, 1845, translated 1887
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Sanitary Ramblings: being sketches and illustrations of Bethnal Green, Hector Gavin, MD, FRCSE, London, 1848
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The History of the Geological Society of London, Horace B Woodward, London, 1907
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Dr Pilling's Short Cut to China..and Other Stories of Rossendale Enterprise, Chris Aspin, Helmshore LHS, 1983
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The Book of Bacup, K F Bowden, Lancs, 1994
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The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, P N Furbank & W R Owens, New Haven, 1988
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William Lee of Sheffield: Sanitary Reformer & Defoe Bibliographer, P N Furbank & W R Owens, Book Collector, 1988
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The Defoe that never was: a tale of de-attribution, P N Furbank & W R Owens, American Scholar, Spring 1997
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The Defoe Canon: Attribution and De-attribution, Maximillian E Novak, Huntington Library Quarterly vol 59.1, 1997
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Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, Maximillian E Novak, Oxford, 2001
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Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910
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Menageries, Circuses, and Theatres, E H Bostock, London, 1927
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A Zoo on Wheels: Bostock and Wombwell's Menagerie, J L Middlemiss, Burton-on-Trent, 1987
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Clapham, Eric E F Smith, Lambeth, 1976
Acknowledgements:
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Andrew Mussell, Archivist of the Geological Society of London, for researching Lee's membership of the society.
Illustrations:
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Sheffield, around 1840 (engraving by Edward Finden, from a drawing by William Westall, c1830)
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The Music Hall, Surrey St, Sheffield (drawn Nathaniel Whittock, engraver J Shury, publisher Hinton, London 1830)
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Workmen Sweeping a Paved Town Street (from A Street Sweeping Machine by Joseph Whitworth, London, 1847)
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A Lodging House in Field Lane (from Gavin's Sanitary Ramblings, reproduced from the Poor Man's Guardian)
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The Court of King Cholera (Punch, 25 Sept 1852)
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Edwin Chadwick (Illustrated London News, 22 Jan 1848)
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A Meeting of the General Board of Health, Gwydyr House, Whitehall (Illustrated London News, Jul-Dec 1849)
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The Sanitary Police (Punch, 1848)
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Henry De la Beche (engraved William Walker, painted H P Bone 1848, Woodward's History of the Geological Soc)
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Title page from Lee's the General Board of Health Report on the Parish of Arnold
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Robert Munn's Cotton Mills at Bacup (from Aspin's Dr Pilling's Short Cut...)
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Lee & Stevenson's Lease for 7 Duke Street, Westminster
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Thomas Hawksley (from Binnie's Early Victorian Water Engineers)
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1848 Public Health Act: Lord Morpeth throwing pearls before... aldermen (Punch, Vol 15, 1848)
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The Dale Dyke Dam disaster, 1864 ("The Bradfield Reservoir near Sheffield", Illustrated London News, 19 Mar 1864)
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Tilbury Fort from the Site of Defoe's Tileworks (from Lee's Daniel Defoe...)
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The Band Carriage of Bostock & Wombwell's Menagerie (from Bostock's Menageries, Circuses, and Theatres)
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Workmen singing Christmas Waits ("Christmas Mummers", Illustrated London News, Dec 1863)
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Applebee's Journal: one of Lee's sources for Defoe's writing (from Lee's Daniel Defoe...)
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Title page of Volume II of Lee's Daniel Defoe...
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Title page of Lee's edition of Robinson Crusoe
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Ernest Griset illustration for Robinson Crusoe ("Crusoe's Campfire" from Lee's edition of Robinson Crusoe)