HUBBUB: FILTH, NOISE & STENCH IN ENGLAND
By Emily Cockayne
Yale University Press, $35, 336 pages
London — After a Fashion
By Alistair O’Neill
University of Chicago Press, $24.95, 240 pages
REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES
A friend of mine recalls being on a drunken revel in Beirut with Kim Philby, on a
Christmas Eve shortly before the notorious British turncoat spy for the Russians escaped to Moscow. Philby masqueraded as a Times correspondent, and both men turned nostalgic for London’s Fleet Street newspaper district and the pubs thronged with drunken journalists like themselves.
“Ah, to be in Fleet Street on Christmas Eve,” Philby exclaimed. “And see the peas and carrots steaming on the sidewalk.” He never saw London again.
A coarse anecdote to be sure. But it is advance warning that at least one of the two books under review is not for the weak of stomach. For while Samuel Johnson is correct that “[w]hen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” the London of history and even of today is a rough place to live for those of delicate sensibilities.
“Hubbub,” by British scholar Emily Cockayne, is just the book for readers who have savored the rowdiness and earthy chaos of the London of Hogarth prints (especially “Gin Lane” and “A Rake’s Progress”) and the dining-seduction scene in the film “Tom Jones.”
The book is more broadly gauged in that she has also done exhaustive research on similar conditions and trends in the university town of Oxford, the manufacturing center of Manchester, and the stylish holiday-health spa for the rich at Bath. But the focus remains on London, from the medieval enclosed village of Elizabeth I and the 1600s through the 1770s when it rivaled Constantinople in size and sprawl and was unrivaled in wealth by any capital in the world.
The evolution of great cities is at root the story of how each city’s culture and attitudes about living together change over time to meet changing circumstances. So this is a story about people, and it is one that is thoroughly researched and written with a light but informative touch.
The London of Queen Elizabeth I was certainly big enough for its time, but most of its 200,000 inhabitants still lived and worked within the city walls, originally built as fortifications. If the citizenry were ugly, diseased and in an almost-permanent state of rebellion about something or other, it was because there were few certainties about healthful and congenial living, and much of what was certain was just plain wrong.
While the gorgeous Hollywood actress Cate Blanchett seems to be making a franchise as a portrayer of the Virgin Queen, the fact is that Elizabeth had stumps of teeth that were black from the custom of putting excessive amounts of sugar into everything from wine to meat sauces, her heavy white makeup contained lethal doses of lead and she was pretty much bald during the last decades of her life.
Small wonder, then, that ordinary Londoners were even uglier as a rule. Archeological studies reveal that almost all adults suffered from debilitating dental decay due to the overuse of sugar, tobacco and coffee, and from the absence of simple cleaning practices. Smallpox left heavy scarring on faces. Other diseases and infections left open sores and scars, and attempts to remove them usually involved bogus remedies laced with mercury.
Birth defects and deformities among children abounded, due largely to the infections carried by women and the inadequate and sometimes poisonous diets available to poorer citizens. Various poisons were used to preserve meat, fish and vegetables, and alum was regularly used to whiten the flour used in bread — when reformers interfered with the practice, the people rioted against being offered brown bread.
Any attempts at rudimentary sanitation went, you should pardon the expression, out the window once the city began to spread westward beyond the city walls and south along the Thames banks where warehouses, factories and food-processing operations used the river as a general waste removal system as well as a water source.
Public sewers, such as the one that ran down Fleet Street, remained uncovered until the 1760s. Those householders who lacked privies simply tossed their waste out the windows into ditches, called kennels, that ran down the middle of most streets, hopefully to be flushed away by rainfall. The famed diarist Samuel Pepys reported that a neighbor had to be taken to court to repair their common wall into his kitchen basement when it leaked the neighbor’s waste into his home.
Even the fresh vegetables brought by barge down the Thames from the market garden villages upriver were contaminated, because the barges made their return upriver bearing sewage for sale as fertilizer. Most meat could be fresh, because cattle, sheep and even poultry were herded through London streets to be butchered, but the offal was then disposed of casually as an addition to the general miasma.
When coupled with the almost constant noise of street sellers screaming about their wares, the clash of carriage and wagon wheels on uneven paving stones, the barking of roving packs of dogs, and the uproar of squabbling housewives and ale-house drunks, it is a wonder that anyone got any rest in London. That is, if they were not kept tossing in their beds from the continual infestations of fleas, lice and scabies that defied eradication.
Two conclusions emerge from Ms. Cockayne’s reportage. One is that many of the vexations of the London of three centuries ago still annoy Washingtonians today. Dermatologists report a return of the common bedbug and scabies in even the poshest Georgetown homes this summer, mosquitoes still ruin our garden dinners and violent crime still wracks our streets even as pollution, suspect drinking water and inadequate public health services threaten us.
The other, more problematic, is that sometimes you have to destroy in order to rebuild. In 1665, London was visited by the worst of a cycle of bubonic plagues caused by flea-infested rats, which thrived in the warrens of unsanitary, shabby housing that choked the city. It took the Great Fire of 1666 to clear much of that space so the broad thoroughfares that so delight the modern tourist could be built. I am not suggesting that for Washington, mind you. Still, it makes one think.
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As for “London — After a Fashion” I must say something that will get me into trouble with other Londonophiles. I was in and out of the city during the emergence of the Carnaby Street-Twiggy-Jean Shrimpton fashion revolution so aptly portrayed in the Atonioni film “Blowup.” I am sorry, but it all seemed a rather empty attempt to catch up with the revolutions going on in the Paris of nouvelle vague films and haut couture, or New York’s underground movies and the rag trade rebels who are now pillars of the international establishment.
Author Alistair O’Neill is a London fashion and design curator, but he has a tough time filling his 240 pages. The book is padded out with faintly bizarre histories of how Victorian fashionistas used tattoos to express their modernity and the belated 1936 birth of British Surrealism, which apparently depended on hiring Salvador Dali to do covers for Vogue magazine’s British edition.
By the time one wades through the impact of Anthony Burgess’s 1961 novel of “ultra-violence,” “A Clockwork Orange,” and into the 1990s, when piles of construction-site trash were being curated at major London museums, one has to wonder what motivated the editors of the University of Chicago Press to offer this book to even the most enthusiastic American fans of London.
James Srodes was a correspondent for both the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs of London for 25 years.
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