Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Perhaps there should be a warning on books which incubated as doctoral dissertations. Caution: This book is written research, not researched writing. I had the same reaction to this work as I had to Peter Silver's "Our Savage Neighbors"; it reads like a term paper. The 250 pages of text are supported by 50 pages of densely packed endnotes which would otherwise be very impressive if the reader were not constantly aware of the author's insistence on including in the text every iota of information cited in each endnote. It seems as if each factual assertion is followed by tedious, and eventually mind-numbing, examples of the punitive or corrective action taken by authorities. After a while, the reader suspects that the assertion is made so that the supporting material can be brought to bear, that such statements are merely bridges from one set of citations to the next. Don't take my word for it. At least some of the same ground is covered in books such as Kate Colquhoun's recently published "Taste" and Roy Porter's "English Society in the Eighteenth Century." Read a few pages of either to see what popular history is all about; solid research is assumed and essential to the credibility of the work, but it's the writing which makes each a distinguished addition to the genre. There is no doubt that a great deal of time and effort went into "Hubbub," enough to convince a university publisher that the end product just might succeed on the commercial market. If so, it will be the publisher and not the reader who will be richer for the exercise.

Cockayne has served up a marvelous tour of the underside of early modern England, filled with the wild, the weird and the harrowing facts of everyday life on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. I was especially impressed with her survey of the maimed and crippled among even the privileged and the intelligentsia, a side of English history never shown on "Masterpiece Theatre."

British historian Cockayne's fact-filled, copiously illustrated history digs into the less savory corners of 17th and 18th century urban life.

"This book is about how people were made to feel uncomfortable by other people - their noises, appearance, behavior, proximity and odours," Cockayne begins. She introduces us to some of the people who were kind enough to leave behind a written litany of their complaints and impressions, gives a brief overview of urban inconveniences of the time and then plunges happily into the squalor with chapters concentrating on various aspects of unpleasantness.

These chapters have pithy titles: Ugly, Itchy, Mouldy, Noisy, Grotty, Busy, Dirty, Gloomy, and, finally "Such things as these...disturb human life."

Poverty and overcrowding, together with a general lack of sanitation naturally provide much of what we pampered souls would find intolerable, but Cockayne, while delving deeply into these subjects, covers much more, from the cost and care of clothing across the social spectrum to the timeless social satire and condemnation of people who made themselves offensive by trying to act younger than they were.

Women come in for special approbation for everything from aging and bad housekeeping to talking - A ducking chair for "scolds" was a standard piece of public equipment in most towns.

She explores food spoilage and the devices sellers used to disguise its putrid state, the free discharge of waste from businesses like tanners and butchers, the prevalence of dangerous chemicals, roaming animals and air so thick that burning buildings were detected by the crackling noise of the fire rather than the sight of smoke.

All of this is as fascinating as it is disgusting and Cockayne has chosen numerous prints, including lots of Hogarth engravings, to illustrate the complaints of the times. While welcome, these would have been better served in a larger format as their details are difficult to make out without Cockayne's explanations.

Indeed, this is a problem with the book as a whole. Cockayne has crammed so much material into the available space that parts read more like a list than a narrative. The quotes, facts, and descriptions are fascinating, but difficult to absorb.

Copiously footnoted (with notes in the back, thankfully), this is a book that is best enjoyed in small doses.

A fascinating look at the ugly side of English life in the 17th & 18th centuries. An AMAZING amount of impressive research went into creating this work, and it provides many unique examples of just how dirty life was. Many of these examples are great for use in the classroom. Many, however, are unnecessary. Cockayne seemingly never omitted a bit of interesting research she did, and it makes the work long-winded and repetitive at times. The lack of organization is frustrating at times, but her descriptions of Hogarth's (and others') works more than makes up for it. A good read for an instructor to skim and look for tidbits to pepper class with.

I bought this book because I wanted to incorporate a new "life in an early modern city" lecture into my survey Western Civ course at a national university. Both a joy to read and extremely useful for my purpose, I advise anyone interested in the period to pick up this book. I think I paid about 10 bucks for the hardcover on Amazon...a steal! Cockayne relishes in the the less agreeable experiences of urban life...this is not a "well rounded view of urban life" as she tells us in her 1st chapter. Her interest centers on how city folk perceived the world through their 5 senses. Well illustrated and documented with often hilarious quotations of contemporaries, (I found myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion) I heartily recommend this book.

If Emily Cockayne's point was to deromanticize, deglamorize the past, I think she succeeded. Who would want to live in the past after reading this? Some of the descriptive details will, undoubtedly, turn people's stomachs. While blowing the romantic miasma off history is a good thing as is understanding the real, physical existence people lived, this book has an overarching problem--it lacks a strong thesis, which the detailed evidence should support. The thesis is implicit at best, nonexistent at worst. A thesis is the skeleton that give shape and guidance to the body of the work. Without that, this book is a blob that fairly oozes details on everything icky about the 17th and 18th centuries. It's great for novelists, who don't necessarily want the thesis, but definitely need the details. It's harder for teachers and scholars to use because, after a point, all the detail simply becomes too great to plow through. It is a problematic work.

Unlike some of the other reviewers I found this book very readable. Full of facts about life in the "good old days". I will admit that the subject matter she covered is very facinating to me, so I am biased in that extent. But again I found it very readable. Five stars.

Heavily repetitive, a continuous narrative of researched facts on the 'Noise, Filth and Stench'of ancient English cities in the 16 and 1700s and with nearly a quarter of the book taken up with source notes this work reads like a doctorial thesis - and that may well have been its origin.

However; this sometimes heavy read is leavened with over 70 maps and illustrations (many of them the marvelous William Hogarth prints) and sparkling bursts of the actual voices of the citizens of those mud daubed, filth flooded and noisy bedlams. Some treasured nuggets gives us the whimsical spellings of the original English language as it evolved, we read of the crude disposal of sewerage as being; "dampnifyed" and "rite ineffecion" and `verye noisome .. whereof maye ensue a pestilent harme".

With conditions like these it in the poorer streets it is with surprise that we read that even the prestigious Colleges of Oxford suffered flooding with foul water to the extent that "the servants used to punt themselves in a wooden wash tub across the flooded cellar in order to draw beer".

Among other delightful nuggets that author Emily Cockayne describes are the bedlam of the street's traffic, with accidents, fisticuffs and "grosly abused" pedestrians. One offered solution, even in the late seventeenth century, was that traffic should keep to the right hand side. How strange then that the English choose instead to drive on the left!

A book to be read and enjoyed by the "history buff" and then added to the collection of books on London, civil works and civilization and the trials of city living.

There are plenty of good descriptions of "Hubbub" in other reviews. I'm simply noting that the book is well written and engaging. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.

Hubbub is from hunger. How could you take what could be fascinating subject matter and subject it to a pedantic, scholarly narrowing and create a totally boring piece of work that is unreadable? This author has succeeded. A compilation of footnotes does not an interesting book make. Don't waste your money. I did.