It goes back a long time.
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It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to cope with, had neither the funds nor the inclination to enforce it. In 1867, however, a new Act required Poor Law guardians to keep registers of vaccinations and to fine – and, in case of non-payment, imprison – parents who flouted the law. Within a few years, anti-vaccination leagues had sprung up: over three decades, Durbach estimates their number at around two hundred. They flourished in many parts of the country and counted supporters from all classes but were, predictably, strongest in radical London and the industrial north, drawing in those lower-middle-class shopkeepers and working-class artisans and operatives who made up the shock troops of the temperance, naturopathy, anti-vivisection, spiritualist and so many other single-issue movements. The leagues publicised cases of children ‘murdered’ by the law, organised demonstrations against the Acts (with Jenner hung in effigy), raised money to pay the fines of resisters, harassed auctioneers at the distraint sales held when offenders couldn’t pay their fines, organised against pro-vaccination candidates at elections, and for three decades generally made the lives of the Poor Law officials charged with enforcing the Acts a misery. After 1889, a good many boards of guardians thankfully took advantage of the appointment of a royal commission on the vaccination acts to stop enforcing the legislation.
With their extreme language and often heterodox beliefs, the anti-vaccinationists lent themselves to ridicule. Their organisations belonged, the journalist Blanchard Jerrold asserted in 1883, alongside ‘The Association for the Total Suppression of White Hats! The Anti-Flower-in-the-Button-Hole League! The Society for the Abolition of Green-Tea Drinking! The Association for the Restriction of Glove Fastenings to One Button! The Local Option Snuff Confederation!’ – and Durbach is forced to admit that ‘these accusations of eccentricity struck rather close to home.’ But Durbach belongs to that class of historians one might term the ‘anti-condescensionists’: that great parade of researchers who, inspired by E.P. Thompson, have set out to rescue not just the poor stockinger or Luddite but the homeopath and the spiritualist, the dress reformer and, now, the anti-vaccinationist, from that much quoted ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. She is out to recover and render comprehensible this often overlooked and admittedly rather odd movement. How well does she succeed?
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