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The Citizen's Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England, by Pamela K. Gilbert; pp. viii + 194. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007, $39.95, $9.95 CD-ROM.
If one of the goals of Pamela Gilbert's prolific output over the past decade or so is to convince us that health and disease were central concerns of the Victorian period, then she has surely succeeded. Her books, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels (1997), Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004), and now The Citizen's Body and its companion volume, Cholera and Nation (2008), trace the ways in which understandings of disease shaped personal experience, urban space, middle-class behaviors, and public institutions in the nineteenth century. In The Citizen's Body, which examines the relationship between definitions of the healthy body and what she calls "citizenship," she argues that determining someone's "fitness for citizenship" (3) became especially important in the period between the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts, when new criteria were needed for assessing a person's right to participate in government. For Gilbert, the mid-Victorian political and philosophical conception of the liberal individual was inseparable from the material, physical, and physiological concerns of the body. The ideal citizen not only possessed but also embodied desirable values through self-containment, cleanliness, and good hygiene. Further, as Gilbert asserts, the process of demonstrating these qualities took place in the social sphere, an increasingly significant arena that mediated between public, political spaces and private, domestic ones.
In section I, she situates her subject historically,...