Stink for England

...Wigs became dirty, greasy, and matted, and required pounds of pomatum powder to cover their odor...

...Wesley, of course, did not invent this phrase...

...Because England changed quite drastically in social mores in the period after 1770, Cockayne's cut-off point in narrative, at least in part because revivalist preachers were persuading the English by the thousands to change their lifestyle...

...England's city streets were a constant cacophony of street hawkers, hammers banging metal, and the squealing of pigs, who often rutted wild through the waste and offal in the street...

...Noisy," in fact, is another chapter heading...

...What to do with personal waste was a constant problem of life in England's towns before the widespread introduction of the flush toilet in the 19th century and the construction of modern sewage pipelines...

...There was no refrigeration, either, except the opportunity for the very wealthy to maintain ice-cellars, so food began to spoil almost as soon as it was exposed to fresh air...

...A Hogarth illustration in the book, "The Enraged Musician," depicts a violinist attempting to practice while looking out of an open window on an alleyway filled with sources of noise that must have made his heart sink: a bawling baby, cawing cat, chirping parrot, piper playing his pipe, barking dog, and the screeching of a knife-sharpener's wheel...

...This volume is a useful corrective to unrealistic modern suppositions about urban life in jolly old England as a frolicsome idyll of handsome beaux and Jane Austen heroines...

...Many of the inhabitants of its pages are curmudgeonly grouches, and even some of their complaints will strike modern readers as unrealistic outrage at—well, life itself in the 18th century...

...Sometimes dead babies were discovered abandoned in houses of easement...

...But at bottom—so to speak—Hubbub is revelatory and as amusing as its author, who is described on her agent's website as living "with her busy husband and noisy daughter in an ugly house in Nottinghamshire...

...In fact, it's not for the faint of heart: Vomiting, flatulence, turds, carbuncles, even dead babies discarded on rubbish heaps float, as it were, in front of your eyes as Emily Cockayne, a lecturer at Britain's Open University, takes you on a tour of all the filth and discomfort of early modern England...

...Cockayne calls upon a broad variety of novelists, poets, diarists, and essayists for the raw material of her insight into the discomforts of life in the period she is looking at...

...David Aikman, senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, is writer-in-residence at Patrick Henry College...

...But when no less an authority on London life than Samuel Pepys records with disgust that his neighbor's sewage has seeped into his own basement, you know that this event is not a fluke...

...Street fruit sellers would often try to make their produce more attractive by spitting on it and polishing it with a dirty sleeve...

...But in the days before "every Englishman's home [became] his castle," and sophisticated Europeans were amazed at how prim, even prudish, the mid-Victorian English appeared to be, life in the growing metropolises of England could be exceedingly uncomfortable for the fastidious...

...Ordinary citizens in premodern England almost never fully immersed themselves in water, and the personal stench of others was a hazard in all social settings...

...Gin alcoholism, the scourge of British cities in the late 18th century, vanished, street crime was markedly reduced, and "cleanliness is next to Godliness" eventually became the watchword of the Victorian bourgeoisie...

...Then there were nightly revelers (often students in university towns) whose alcoholic forays were every bit as binge-like as they are supposed to be on college campuses today...

...Fops drenched themselves in scent to cover the worst of body odors, but most people took it for granted that they would encounter n c o people of rank personal odor or, at the very least, bad breath...

...Why pre-Wes-leyan...

...Traffic through the city streets was another source of noise, with draft animals often neighing or hooting...

...In one use of animals that will strike the 21st-century sensibility as particularly cruel, cats were sometimes used as parts of a musical instrument, their bodies held in place in a piano-like contraption and their cries—elicited by a spike being driven through their tails—tuned to a certain required pitch...

...Cockayne dwells almost lovingly on some of the more grotesque uglinesses of daily life in that era, and the reader is left wondering if the main purpose of the book isn't a tad voyeuristic...

...Since her sources, for the most part, wrote complainingly and in revulsion at their experiences in the daily squalor of life, they may be suspected of an exaggeration at times...

...Houses of easement," also known as "jakes," "boghouses," or "privies," were almost never watertight, so that waste filtered out into the street, nearby streams, "kennels" (the premodern open drainage water courses built into urban streets) and even neighbors' basements...

...The rank stench must have been horrifying, and there were court cases of citizen complaint at the worst offenses...

...perhaps it would have been useful to narrate a little of the processes by which urban life was, indeed, made more pleasant in urban England after her chronological cutoff date of 1770...

...The plain old Anglo- Saxon adjectives of distaste that comprise the author's chapter headings make it clear what this book is about before you really embark on the text...

...The only way to preserve meat was to season it with spices and salt...

...Often fresh, or at least recently introduced, produce would be advertised by street criers, who would draw attention to their wares as loudly as their voices permitted...

...John Cleland's Fanny Hill, a prostitute, in a passage from the novel cited by Cockayne, was offended by the extreme ugliness of her first client, whose breath also was "like a jakes...

...in 1605 Francis Bacon had pronounced that "cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God...

...You are conducted through English towns in all their Hogarthian squalor—and there are many Hogarth drawings to illustrate the text, often with a commentary on their content that approaches the forensic in detail—that pre-industrial, pre-Wes-leyan England could produce...

...The common practice of wearing wigs, which only began to decline in the second half of the 18th century, was another way that dirt and odors were gathered...

...If the most basic personal hygiene was marginal, so was personal cleanliness...

...In some cities, there were ordinances against beating wives after 9:00 p.m.: It interrupted the sleep of other citizens...

...Indeed, it wasn't...

...In Cockayne's chapter entitled "Mouldy," a French visitor reports that London's fresh produce was always likely to be impregnated with coal-smoke pollutants...