Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a dramatic increase in its urban population, as a hitherto largely rural economy transformed itself into an urban one. Though the political and social issues arising from these events are well-known, little is known about how the British legal process coped with the everyday strains that emerged from the unprecedented scale of these changes. This book explores the river pollution dilemma faced by the British courts during the second half of the nineteenth century when the courts had to confront the new incompatible realities arising from the scale of untreatable waste flowing into the rivers.