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  • Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600-1770
  • Joel T. Rosenthal
Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600–1770. By Emily Cockayne (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007) 335 pp.

This book is a powerful and convincing antidote to any inclination to wax romantic about life, whether private or public, in early modern England. Concentrating primarily on the urban world (London, Manchester, Bath, Oxford, and a few other cities or large towns), and relying largely on journals and diaries, pamphlets and treatises, and town and court records, it elaborates on how and why so much of life was ugly, smelly, dirty, flea-infested, and garbage-strewn.

Working from the premise that "the five senses act as the mediators between the outside world and the mind," Cockayne explores both what we can term the objective conditions of life and a host of contemporary perceptions from different towns and from observers of various classes and perspectives. With a focus on aspects of life that ranged from the less-than-comfortable to those that were deadly and/or grossly offensive, [End Page 110] Cockayne presents aspects of existence and social interaction that she pithily characterizes under the headings of ugly, itchy, mouldy, noisy, grotty, busy, dirty, and gloomy. The reasons for these dystopian and pervasive conditions are easy to imagine, and there is no shortage of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century voices to show that people were aware of the problems at the time, even if solutions were hard to find.

Most people in this world had few (if any) changes of clothing, and washing what they did have was a laborious and imperfect process. Food brought into cities, especially in warm weather, spoiled quickly; much ingenuity was devoted to how to keep it sellable, if not necessarily edible. Noisome industrial and processing operations accompanied urban and domestic life; municipal efforts to confine tanneries and slaughter houses to certain quarters of the town—driven by reasons of comfort and property values as well as of health—had limited success. With urban growth came congestion, as well as continuous noise, air pollution, and the plight of the homeless. Sewage and waste were all too conspicuous, though not so clean and fresh water. Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn wrote of the need to pay attention when walking; broken pavement could collect stagnant water and collapse underfoot to create huge ditches and life-threatening mudholes.

Most contemporary observers and critics were, almost by definition, from the middle and upper classes—literate women and men describing scenes that often revolted them, at least on the page. That some of these observers came from abroad, already armed with Anglophobic sentiments, made their criticisms even more pointed. Cockayne is cognizant of the class bias of her sources, as well as of the class-related nature of the evils that could beset urban life, though she might have included statistics for such quantifiable factors as mortality, wages, the cost of food and clothing, carrying costs, etc. But her mix of things moral and social with those physical and biological reveals a world infrequently explored, and her inclusion of sixty-two black-and-white illustrations show that the problems therein engaged social critics and commentators at the time, sometimes satirically and sometimes derisively. William Hogarth's genius as an illustrator was not always a kindly one, and Edward Bury's observation in 1677 that the sight of a drunken man was "enough to overset a mans stomack" might still resonate. Yet, Cockayne's book demonstrates that many aspects of the world now lost are not much of a loss. [End Page 111]

Joel T. Rosenthal
State University of New York,
Stony Brook
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