The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester

Air quality became a keenly contested issue in the world's first industrial city. The devastating costs of Manchester's steam-driven economic miracle included acid rain, loss of biological diversity, and adverse health impacts. Competing environmental discourses about smoke were used by contemporaries to rationalize, naturalize or criticize the dramatic changes wrought by air pollution in nineteenth-century Manchester. Mosley breaks new ground by seeking to understand working-class ideas about air pollution, as well as those of businessmen and middle-class reformers. 'The Chimney of the World' concludes by reflecting on the continuities between past and present attitudes towards air pollution.