Emily Cockayne
Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600-1770.
Yale University Press, 335 pages, $35
Ever since Cain founded the first city, cities have the reputation of being havens for murderers, crooks, and conmen, snobs and hairdressers, brothels and bars, restaurants and coffee houses. All the pleasures, really, with the only serpent in sight being municipal government. Cities have also given rise to the pleasures of indignation. Here, for example, is an ancestor of the famous Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, “disgusted of Manchester,” on a day at the races:
To display that Scene of Iniquity in its proper colours, would sully the imagination and taint the minds of men afresh … the representation of it only, is so odious, that no pure Eye can see, nor modest Ear can hear, without Horror and Astonishment; … [blasphemy and obscenity was] so shocking to the Ears of every modest person, as to make them tingle.
Disgusted of Manchester appears in Emily Cockayne’s enchantingly icky new book, Hubbub. He is unusual there not because of his distaste but because of his refusal to color in the sensory outlines (his most vivid physical word—“tingle”—describes his reaction rather its source). Cockayne’s period was not known for mealy-mouthedness, and she obviously suits it; her book is chockablock with hair-raising contemporary descriptions and illustrations of “filth, noise and stench.”
Scholarly writing stares dispassionately into the distance, and Cockayne, a historian, can deploy the telescopic tools of scholarship:
