Stench & the City
Emily Cockayne: Hubbub
The New York Sun, July 11, 2007
If there's one voice that can be heard above the hubbub described in Emily Cockayne's aptly titled new book, it is the voice, splenetic, dyspeptic, and thoroughly fed up, of the grumbler in high dudgeon. For all their traditional stoicism, the English have always known how to complain, and to do so with an acerbity and wit that leaves more famously querulous nations (yes, Jacques, yes, Pierre, I'm talking about you) looking like little more than whiny schoolchildren.
When it comes to the topic of "Hubbub" (Yale University Press, 335 pages, $35), the squalor, grubbiness, and general unpleasantness of everyday life in the cities of 17th- and 18th-century England, there was, as its author shows, plenty to gripe about. And to help her, she's recruited an awkward squad of sourly eloquent grumblers, from Samuel Pepys to the "slightly deranged" vegetarian and would-be "boghouse" reformer Thomas Tryon (who died in 1703, allegedly and appropriately, of "Retention of Urine") to the "notoriously peevish" Oxford antiquarian, Anthony à Wood (1632–95).
Here, for example, is what Matt Bramble, the fictional alter ego of the reliably grumpy Tobias Smollett (1721–71) had to say about a society ball in Georgian Bath:
Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; beside a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.
Imagine that? You'd probably rather not. But after working your way through the vivid, splendidly horrible pages of "Hubbub," a book that so revels in the nastiness it describes that most of its chapters appear to have been named after Snow White's worst nightmare ("Ugly," "Itchy," and "Mouldy" are just three of their dank and dismal number), you won't be able to avoid doing so. Not only that, you will understand that the stench of assafoetida drops was merely one of the lesser assaults on the senses of poor Mr. Bramble. That party was about as good as it got. Beyond the masterclass theater of ballroom and grand house lay the smoky, reeking cityscapes of early modern England, territories where the medieval was only yesterday, and could, quite easily, have become tomorrow.
It was a muddy, desperate world of licentious fustilugs, determined dog-skinners, essential gunge-farmers, and rootling "piggs," of dissolute rakehells, and the drabs who serviced them, a world of urban dunghills and city "hog-styes," a world inhabited by people marked by tetters, morphew, "psorophtalmy" (eyebrow dandruff, since you ask), and pocky itch, and clothed in grogram tailored by botchers. If you suspect that one of the many pleasures of "Hubbub" is the exuberant vocabulary that so enriches the texts cited by its author, you'd be right. Delightfully, it's an exuberance that has infected Ms. Cockayne herself: She must be one of the few 21st-century writers to use words such as axunge, muculent, and smeech.
This evident, and endearing, empathy for the period of which she writes is more than a matter of language. Yes, it's true that, in a refreshingcontrasttothecarefully picturesque, fiercely scrubbed picture that is the hallmark of BBC manufactured-for-export flummery, the dryly amusing Ms. Cockayne "unashamedly" highlights the worst of urban life of the time. Nevertheless, it's also evident that she is, as she says, determined to guard against what historian E.P. Thompson has called the "enormous condescension of posterity." Some aspects of their ancestors' life might revolt modern Englishmen, but may have been a matter of indifference, or even enjoyment, to their grimy forebears.
At the same time, it would be even more condescending to believe that the citizens of the septic isle were simple fatalists, passively accepting the muck, chaos, and disease that surrounded and, not so occasionally, engulfed them. As Ms. Cockayne's grumblers, not to speak of countless lawsuits against slatternly neighbors and slovenly tradesmen, reveal, they were anything but. Life could be better. Life ought to be better. Life would be better.
This was an age, perhaps the first, of a self-consciously progressive modernity. Raging in the 1740s against the state of the British capital's streets, Lord Tyrconnel sneered that they gave the impression of a place populated by
a herd of barbarians. … The most disgusting part of the character given by travellers, of the most savage nations, is their neglect of cleanliness, of which, perhaps, no part of the World affords more proofs than the streets of London … [the city] abounds with such heaps of filth … as a savage would look on with amazement.
Running through that speech is the implicit understanding that Englishmen had left barbarians and barbarism behind. Englishmen could do better. Englishmen ought to do better. Englishmen would do better.
So, eventually, they did. Twenty years later, parliament passed a series of laws designed to tidy up those streets of shame and much more besides, laws that were just part of an accelerating, if uneven, modernization that quite literally paved the way for industrial revolution and economic triumph.
And some of the credit for this must go to the grumblers. If necessity is the mother of invention, then discontent is the father. So buy this marvelous book, the most engaging work of social history I have read in years, and let Ms. Cockayne introduce you to a cast of characters you will never forget and a past we have failed to remember.
One tip: "Hubbub" is best enjoyed after eating, not before.