The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City by William M. Cavert (review)

London today is called “the smoke.” The smoke that has puffed out of its chimneys for nearly five centuries is now a name for the city. It is sluggish to think that environmental pollution became an issue or got much worse with smoke-spewing “industrial-age” factories and their sooty detritus. “I am inclined to believe that London now is more unhealthful than heretofore,” John Graunt worried in 1662. London “is more populous,” he diagnosed, and “few sea coals were burnt [there six decades ago] which now are universally used.” Not quite right: 27,000 tons of coal were shipped from Newcastle in 1581—most of it for homes not noxious trades like brewing—144,000 in 1626, and double that a dozen years later. Smoke, William Cavert says in his splendid, ground-breaking, and elegantly-written book, was “quite real” (33). It was called “sulfurous,” at the time, “unwholesome,” and “prejudicial.” It shortened lives, although the 152-year-old man killed by smoke in William Harvey’s opinion, had a good innings. It is estimated that pollution perilous SO₂ concentrations were at least seventy-times higher back then than now.

Early modern Londoners experienced and explained smoke in ways particular to the city’s conditions, cultures, economics, and politics. This will be the lasting impact of Cavert’s book: “the process by which smoky air came to be a fundamental part of the image and experience [of] life in London” (xvi). It is split into four sections: “Transformations” (historiographies and contexts), “Contestations” (responses), “Fuelling Leviathan” (consumption), and lastly “Accommodations” (representations and lives defined). There is a bitter-sweet irony running through this book. The “benefits” of harmful clouds of “smutty” smoke were greater than the hurt it caused that was evident to early modern science, medicine and its legal definition as a “nuisance.”

It was a price worth paying, it seems, but it began with a lie. Pricier wood was not running out as many were led to believe. Cavert might had said more about “advertizing” and “selling” coal. But it worked. In the twinkling of an eye historically speaking, coal became a pulling-string in London’s social relations, economic balancing, political maneuvering, and tightrope orderliness. London could not do without it. Like corn, coal bound the well-to-do and have-nots in mutualities and obligations that were sorely tested whenever scarcity loomed. Magistrates needed to make sure that the poor got heat as well as corn to eat. Chapter 7 is called “the moral economy of fuel,” though we hear little from “below.” Nearly all the “noise” comes from magistrates and merchants. The near silence in pauper quarters in these pages—apart from looting in the 1640s when Parliament slapped an embargo on Newcastle coal—is striking, but it’s worth remembering that there was only one food riot in early modern London. Magistrates did a good job keeping coal supplies topped-up but their main motivation, I think, was keeping order.

Coal “brought benefits that rendered its dirtiness acceptable,” Cavert says in a punchy line that will define his book (xviii). It was a double-edged sword. Complaining and coughing were drowned out by the value of coal to the military, economic, and political priorities of the fiscal-military state as war and empire hogged resources. The busy east-coast coal trade put money in merchants” pockets and taxes in royal coffers but it was also key for national security: the coal fleet boosted naval power and its able-seamen served on warships. The steady stream of coal to London mattered more than filthy pollution (chapters 8 & 10). The “fight” against “unwholesome” pollution was waged on local fronts for the most part starting with the crown. Elizabeth took brewers to task but not more offensive home hearths. James became fixated on “smoky” St. Paul’s. His son, however, was propelled by a fusion...