Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600-1770 (review)

Emily Cockayne's expansion of the range of social and environmental history to encompass sound and smell, and to some extent taste and (especially in the chapter headed 'Itchy') touch, is in principle an interesting and thought-provoking venture. Her geographical focus is overwhelmingly urban, with a strong metropolitan bias, and the period covered lies mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her dominant interests are pathological and scatological: the main purpose of the text is to give the reader access to disgusting contemporary descriptions of 'matter out of place', decay, ordure, discomfort and cacophony in early modern towns and cities. She mines an array of sources, some familiar, some unexpected, with an enterprising eye for the arresting and unpleasant; and she proceeds mainly by piling example upon example in loosely-themed chapters, so that the reader is led through the unsanitary discomforts of the urban maze, with signposts within the pithily-entitled chapters ('Ugly', 'Grotty', 'Mouldy') provided by allusive contemporary quotations. Interesting perceptions pop up almost at random along the way, as do cross-references to existing historical debates, which appear and then vanish like gibbering figures beside the track of a careering fairground ride.

The book is recognisably a certain kind of Oxford product, though tracing its origins to a Cambridge doctoral thesis on the more manageable themes of sounds and noise. It is long, sprawling, very detailed, based on extensive and imaginative research, untidy, unsystematic and self-indulgent, and takes limited and intermittent notice of wider historiography. Some of its vices are familiar from the problematic aspects of Keith Thomas's wonderful, but flawed, Religion and the Decline of Magic, which may be thought to have provided a dangerously seductive template for less talented writers; but some are Cockayne's own. She adopts a colloquial, button-holing, grating style, sometimes anachronistic (Robert Hooke might seem a 'creepy hypochondriacal nerd' [p. 4]), and her engagement with change over time is intermittent and not always convincing. She offers a cast of central characters whose writings are quoted more than most, but gives no rationale for inclusion and exclusion, and Joseph Massie and Jonas Hanway appear so often that they should probably have joined the list of gossipy potted biographies, with their disproportionate focus on personal physical and psychological peculiarities, that head up the introduction.

The treatment of variation between kinds of place is even less satisfactory. Despite its metropolitan focus, the book also, in a telling phrase, "often ventures into the provinces" (p.7): it uses examples from Oxford, Bath and Manchester as counterpoints to the experience of London. Here the author's lack of contextual grip becomes particularly apparent. Oxford is both a 'university city' (p. 11) and a 'muddy little market town' (p. 9), as well as being a 'corporation city' and various other things besides. We are given no idea (for example) of how many freemen it had or of how its changing corporate governance worked, and little idea (a couple of sentences) of the changing relationships between corporation and university. The treatment of Bath is similarly unsystematic, with little use made of the key works by Neale (especially) and Davis, and no awareness of the important book by Borsay on the emergence of Bath's 'Georgian' identity. Manchester is the worst served of the ostensible case studies: the standard work by Kidd is one of several to be ignored, as is the debate over whether it might be an advantage or a disadvantage not to have a Corporation; the 1773 enumeration of inhabitants is also ignored, with the result that the statement that by that time Manchester was bigger than Oxford and Bath combined is at best highly questionable; the author seems unaware of the significance of a 'township' as a local government district in northern England; she consistently spells the Mosley family as 'Mosely'; she is confused about proto-industrialisation and the timing of the emergence of the factory system, although it is...