FLORENCE KING: Cesspool in the City Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770
Cockayne, Emily
BOOKS IN REVIEW he advice for paleos in thrall to the medieval world land, but for those who wish they had lived in Repeating in his ” A basement cesspit contained what dropped into his...
...Houses with unhatched cellars to pedestrians groping their way home through the unlighted streets, who suddenly found themselves falling into a black hole and landing headfirst in a load of… er, night-soil...
...The best people tried everything to The open-front stalls were regularly splashed by passing vehicles, covering food and shoppers with mud and who knew what else...
...It was also the dawn of the neighbors’ lawsuit...
...Describing the olfactory experience of attending a high society ball in Bath, he says: “Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulences, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile, besides a thousand frowzy streams which I could not analyze...
...one garment was “so beliquor’d and belarded” that it caught fire by itself...
...Thanks to the overcrowding brought on by rapid urbanization, the homes of the city’s craftsmen doubled as workshops...
...Conduits carried river water to houses but most people did their washing in them for lack of residential plumbing hookups...
...By the time the clothes got to them, they were “smutted, food-stained, sweat-ridden, pissburnt, and might shine with grease...
...It was everywhere...
...The best time to shop was early in the morning before meat spoiled or got too flyblown...
...Tapeworm was common in people because it was common in pigs, and everyone ate pork...
...where lazy nightmen dumped the dung they were supposed to bury...
...Householders by and large ignored the law...
...A shoemaker wasn’t too bad, and even a carpenter was tolerable, but armourers, ironmongers, and coppersmiths used sledgehammers, and copper SEPTEMBER 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...Having a tailor, a wigmaker, or a bookbinder next door was okay...
...OXFORD SCHOLAR, author Emily Cockayne A N teaches history in the East Midlands and is associated with Open University, Britain’s televised college curriculum...
...The fastidious washed the most problematic parts but most people used a pig-hair brush to dislodge lice...
...When you start yearning for the good old days,” warned, “say one word: dentistry...
...and where riverfront houses built cesspits to empty directly into it...
...class distinctions obtained to a degree but all offended...
...grease made from the fat of goose kidneys, attracting unpenned pigs that followed the wagons, rooting through the spill-over to get at anything edible...
...The same river barges that brought vegetables from the country transported the city’s collected night-soil to the country for use as fertilizer—floating E. Coli cultures going back and forth across the Thames day after day...
...Between the stiff brush and the soap made from rancid fat and ashes, skin infections were rife...
...If eating Upper-class women did not comb their hair for three months lest they spoil their coiffures...
...Bakers put stones in their dough to cheat on the weight, and made “white” bread by adding alum to wheat flour...
...O’Rourke famously reminded paleoconservatives that the perfect past was just a verb tense, not a revealed truth...
...Jonathan Swift wrote a poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” about a footman who sneaks into the boudoir of his employer, the fair Celia, to indulge his fantasy of examining her possessions at close range...
...Her book enlists a host of primary sources but her most entertaining one is the fictional character, Matt Bramble, from the Tobias Smollett novel, The Adventures of Humphrey Clinker...
...Men began wearing wigs so they could shave their the food didn’t kill you, merely shopping for it could...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW he advice for paleos in thrall to the medieval world land, but for those who wish they had lived in Repeating in his ” A basement cesspit contained what dropped into his door to be collected by those civic solutions based on cooperation and personal fronting on the sidewalk presented a memorable peril quired to repair the paving in front of their houses but they seldom did, so at The wheels also leaked axle 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007 collections include The Florence King Reader, Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again...
...When a pile of… er, night-soil got really big, it was called a “dunghill...
...WORK AT HOME...
...is where it’s at, the ultimate escape, the new American dream, but it was par for the course in London at the dawn of the Industrial Age...
...Everybody scratched and everybody smelled...
...Bramble is an 18th-century Felix Unger, a hypochondriac who complains about everything, especially dirt...
...Hair was powdered with white flour to soak up the greasy dirt, but this only clogged the roots and attracted more lice...
...Nobody but the rich had new clothes...
...After going through her dresses, her brushes and combs, and her towels, he opens her “close stool,” a chamber pot concealed in a chair, “ amorous fits, Oh...
...The poor made do not just with second-hand garments but more likely fourth- or fifth-hand...
...When the cesspit began to fill up, the householder was required to empty it and put its contents, officially called “night-soil,” outside the “nightmen...
...Going to the communal pump and lugging buckets back home was too much trouble, so the full-immersion bath was virtually unknown...
...Like Pepys’s neighbor, they let their cesspits fill up until the collected putrefactious gases rotted walls and caused floors to collapse...
...conceal their dirt and mask their odors, including using lotions containing arsenic...
...S (YALE UNIVERSITY P, 335 , $35) Reviewed by Florence King OME YEARS AGO P.J...
...The best people tried everything to conceal their dirt and mask their odors, including using lotions containing arsenic, but Matt Bramble would not let them get away with it...
...By now even the crustiest paleos are probably put off by Stuart and Georgian England, but the era may still represent the good old days to career-minded progressives and single moms if our late-night infomercials are any guide...
...Still other landlords, to keep it off their own property, dumped it in churchyards or public buildings...
...Celia, Celia, Celia s--ts...
...heads and avoid the torment of an itching scalp, but the wigs, made from real hair, got just as greasy and dirty and attracted lice as well, and the webby canvas underside of the wig scratched unbearably...
...Householders were releast the potholes were filled with something...
...Butchers inflated meat with their own breath or stuffed rags in cavities to bulk out the carcass...
...The contemporary love of purgatives and the questionable source of some food supplies must have worsened the state of the privies” is how the straightfaced British author understates the case...
...The primary source was the Thames, where Londoners threw anything they needed to get rid of, including dead bodies...
...Pepys, the unflagging diarist, records that he “stepped into a great heap of turds” that had entered his cellar from his neighbor’s cesspit...
...Here he is on London milk, which was carried through the streets in open pails: “Exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, overflowings from mud carts… dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys, the spewings of infants… and finally the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture under the respectable denomination of the milk-maid...
...There was plenty: rotting viscera dumped by butchers, maggot-infested flour dumped by bakers, and liquifying cabbages turning into matching brown slime, compliments of the produce sellers...
...This is apt when England was still a green and pleasant the bustling, overcrowded, gin-soaked London of Pepys and Swift the cautionary word is s--t...
...and the wife of a used-clothes dealer described her life as an unending dank prison of “nitty coats and stinking hose...
...The overriding problem was lack of clean water...
...And if you didn’t watch where you were going, you could be knocked down by a whole carcass of beef hanging from the roof...
...Florence King’s STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991 to 2002, and, most recently, Cesspool in the City Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne RESSPAGES BOOKS IN REVIEW Fishmongers disguised spoiled fish by coating the gills with fresh blood from more recent catches...
...It was one of responsibility, the kind we still have, that are guaranteed to work provided the governing authority can revise human nature and repeal the law of averages...
...it when people used the privy—a wooden box with a hole in it—on the floor above...
...There was one in front of the Royal Exchange but the nightmen left it there, which was just as well because a wagon full of… er, night-soil spilled its contents when it hit the cavernous potholes in the roads...
...A few wells existed but they frequently doubled as urinals...
...It was also on people’s minds...
Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 7
