I came across Hubbub at the right moment. It was a few days after I’d recieved the keys for the new house, wandered about and realised how much work there was to do and fatefully tugged on that first bit of anaglypta paper which unravelled half the room and revealed what a bad state it was all in. I was about to spend the rest of the month (and who knows how long) in the muck, dust, discomfort and noise of house renovation and here was a book about the inconveniences of the past.
Emily Cockayne (cool surname) even had her own uncomfortable housing in mind, structuring her acknowledging about all the rough-n-ready places she’d lived in through the development of the book and the people who had helped in her journey - it was one of the warmest and classiest acknowledgements pages I have read. The book started as a dissertation about noise, and the place irritating noises played in cities in the early modern period, but grew to a more general discussion of “how people were made to feel uncomfortable by other people”.
To help navigate her journey through the noisome, she assembled a council of ‘inperts’, not objective factual experts, but people who were deeply alive to the experiences around them. Many of them were people I’ve already read and enjoyed; they include Samuel Pepys, Anthony Wood, Ned Ward, Jonas Hanway, Margaret Cavendish and Tobias Smollett. There were also people I was looking forward to meet like Mary Chandler. The little potted biographies of these inperts were written wittily, with an eye on their quirks and sensitivities.
Cockayne really enjoys Ned Ward, finding any occasion to mention him and even naming her son after him. Being fond of him myself, I knew I was in good company. More strange is her seeming affection for Jonas Hanway. Known as the most boring man in Britain, Hanway introduced the umbrella into the country and wrote a description of a journey from Portsmouth to London which Samuel Johnson reviewed by thanking God that the journey hadn’t been any further. In that same book, Hanway has a digression about the evils of tea drinking which led to a wonderful Johnsonian rant in the review. Hanway did have lots of ideas about how to lay out a street though, and a lot to say about nuisances, so I suppose the ol’ busybody was a useful find for the author.
One of the little joys of the book, apart from the use of words like ‘ugglesome’ were the names of people mentioned. There are many legal cases and official complaints mentioned in the book and they included people who rejoiced in names like Andrew Niblett, Abraham Shakemaple, Thomas Toopots and Sarah Smallwick.
The book focuses on four towns; London, Manchester, Oxford and Bath but Portsmouth, Nottingham, Coventry and many other places are mentioned as well. (It did help me to see the pride Johnson has in Lichfield, due to the Conduit Lands Trust, many of the problems of other towns were lessened in his hometown.) Indeed, focus is the problem of the book. It focuses on the towns, except when there’s an interesting titbit from somewhere else. It focuses on the testimony of the inperts, except when someone else has something relevant to say. Even the chapters, headed things like ‘Noise’ and ‘Gloom’ meander in and out of the subject. As such, the book was itself a hubbub, a cacophony of different voices, towns and time periods all mixing together and trying to shout over each other. It’s a little exhausting, and I read this book as I was spending three hours after work scraping decades of wallpaper off walls and so was pretty exhausted already.
There is a through story in the book which is reiterated in the last chapter. London was already a large city, Manchester growing from a small town into a metropolis, Bath a backwater into a fashionable spa and Oxford plodding along with its tensions between town and gown. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, they were dealing with mediaeval problems, like pigs rootling in the streets but as they grew, and as the modern world was born, had to keep up with increasing industrial process and expectations.
One interesting development was about street furniture. The traditional expectation was that every house had to pave and maintain the front of their houses as well as providing lighting, sometimes on a rota basis. As the century moved on, councils took the job of paving for themselves, creating more uniform streets. People began to hire other people to take over their lighting duties, which was then a job organised by the council for a fee - which is essentially one of the things the council tax does. The first independent lamplighter essentially worked himself to death with the responsibility of patrolling a large area every night and maintaining the lights.
This book also answered something I wondered, why Mount Pleasant is called that. It was originally a sarcastic name given to a large rubbish heap outside the city walls. I wonder if the hundreds of other Mount Pleasants outside of London have similar origins.
There were also some texts that added to my personal theory about the a symbolic role cucumbers played in early modern writings (now that’d be a PHD dissertation). There’s a woman in one of Ned Ward’s articles complaining that she is pregnant but has nothing to eat but a crust of bread and a cucumber, and the doctor, Thomas Cogan saying that cucumbers are not suitable for “flegmatyke and delicate persons who do not labour.” Cucumbers, only suitable for the tough labourer.
There are so many little bits and pieces all crammed together in this book. Whether its a town ordinance that states that wives are not to be beaten after nine at night; a watchman’s wife complaining that when he isn’t at work, he still announces the hours at night by farting, or the huge pig farm in London which drove house prizes down and ‘discoloured silver.’
Because of the subject matter, I’m tempted to say this book is like dumpster-diving, seeking the treasures among the detritus but that’s not fair, this book is packed with interesting information, it is a bit higgledy piggledy though.
