From user to consumer: water politics in nineteenth-century London
Bibliographic record
Abstract
one and a quarter million inhabitants in the East End of London awoke to a water shortage.Charles Lyel, a householder and member of the Hackney Vestry, complained that the East London Waterworks Company had stopped his constant delivery and switched back to intermittent supply.Water was turned on between 9 and 10 in the morning and fl owed for a mere two to three hours, with the result 'that I am deprived of my morning tub, [and] there is no bath for the children in the evening'.To be told by 'the company that the supply "is ample for all legitimate use" is adding insult to injury', Lyel told The Times. 1 East Enders without Lyel's benefi t of a cistern, or occupying the upper fl oors of tenements, were still less fortunate.People began to store water in jugs, buckets, basins or any container available.Others began to mobilize consumers against water companies.John B. Kyffi n, a draper of Hackney Road, had for some days put up with the 'scant supply of water' for his shop and twenty-six assistants.When the water necessary for domestic purposes 'practically ceased altogether' on 15 and 16 July, he had had enough.Looking at the rates (local taxes) water companies were collecting on his 200 property and at his toilets with 'no fl ushing remedy' and assistants taken ill while local authorities received a million gallons to water the roads, Kyffin took the company to court for failing to give the statutory 'proper supply of water for domestic purposes'.Kyffi n lost but proceeded to mobilize consumers across Hackney with support from the vestry and fellow ratepayers. 2 The battle between consumers and water companies during the 1895 East London 'water famine' marked a formative stage in the breakthrough of a new consumer identity and politics in the modern period.Water has been mainly understood in the context of public health, urbanization, housing, leisure and the material environment. 3hile building on this research, this chapter seeks to reconnect the contestation of a basic good (water) to central problems of modern consumer society, in particular the formation of the consumer around questions of needs, rights and waste.Whatever their particular infl ection, from Veblen to recent post-modern accounts, most seminal texts have structured their narratives of consumer society or consumerism around the expansion of desire, affl uence and commercial objects and spaces and their role
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".