London, by Accident

Anyone researching the social history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has turned up accidents. They litter official records, personal correspondence, diaries and journals, medical writings, and many other sources, including classic primary sources that have offered many scholars and students insights into daily life over the years—as any reader of Samuel Pepys will tell you. One such find that I have often used in talks, papers, and conversation to illustrate the realities, as I have seen them, of the quotidian yet serious dangers of manual labor in the premodern world (here, life at sea in particular) comes from a brief early eighteenth-century entry in the practice journal of Henry Watson. Watson was a Royal Navy surgeon who recorded the sad end of one Thomas Story, a sailor who had the great misfortune to fall to his death from the foretop of a Royal Navy ship. The instant the man hit the deck, he was far beyond anything Watson and Enlightenment surgery could do for him. As a result, the sailor warranted only two brief lines in the manuscript: "Tho. Story falling from the fore top upon the Deck fractured the Cranium all to pieces, the Dura and Pia mater flying out upon the Deck. He dyed." Watson then marked the entry with a set of crossed bones, sketched in the margin.¹ His terse account, with its shocking violence and blunt conclusion, seems to me to convey the resignation of a practitioner unable to put up much of a fight against the accidents that his contemporaries agreed were inevitable in the dangerous places where he and his comrades lived, worked, and often died. Story's story, as it were, has helped me illustrate a great many points about life at sea, the challenges that faced medical practitioners, the frustrations of working with the rare and laconic surgical diaries we have available, and much more.

In the many times that I have told this story, though, it has never occurred to me to question the categories of "accident" and what Bishop Grosseteste University historian Craig Spence calls "sudden violent death." Nor have I given critical attention to the sort of narrative structures that historical actors used to frame such events, never really considering the very notion of an "accident" as culturally constructed. At first blush, accidents and bloody violence easily appear to be transhistorical phenomena. For many of us, the notion of accident is deeply naturalized. But Spence's important new book, Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750, pushes hard against uncritical approaches to stories like the one Watson relays. He argues persuasively that "accident events are social constructs" (214); that is, that they are "communally constructed events contingent upon the social structures and cultural configurations within which they take place" (1). Proceeding from this initial insight, he shows not only that the history of accidents is amenable to sustained critical engagement by social and cultural historians, but also that we indeed have a great deal to learn from closely and carefully studying this history in the way he has begun to do here. Specifically, he seeks at once to provide a strong base of data about accidents and violent deaths in London during this period, and also to locate accidents in British mentalities, discourses, and visions of the metropole. In the complex landscape that he traverses here, rationalistic interpretations of accidents begin to challenge providentialist thinking, while "civilising project" impulses toward what would become modern western regulation of urban space compete with deep and long-standing visions of the city as intrinsically disordered and dangerous, and with resignation to accidents and violence as inherent to life in it.

This book focuses, then, on a topic of great importance to the lives of Britons and to their perceptions of the world they inhabited, filled with accidents and violent deaths. These categories describe a great deal in this book, from fatal falls like Story's, to the many collisions that occurred in the city's...