The ability to manufacture discontent from whatever materials are to hand is one of the most consistent characteristics of human nature. In Hubbub, pithy historian Emily Cockayne roams the seamy, stinky and squelchy side of English life: ‘The experiences presented here are unashamedly skewed towards the negative . . . . I am deliberately not presenting a rounded view of life — I am simply presenting the worst parts of it.’
For those with a cheerful predilection towards grime, gunge and disease, the torrent that follows is riveting. Within chapters headed Ugly, Itchy, Mouldy, Noisy, Grotty, Busy, Dirty and Gloomy, Cockayne rolls like a pig in a delicious vat of mud.
Why she chooses the period 1600-1770 is not clear; it may be just that her sources, ranging from the diarist Samuel Pepys to the novelist Tobias Smollet, encompass it. Others, in London, Bath, Oxford and Manchester, include Thomas Tryon, the vegetarian advocate of avoiding toilet seats, Robert Hooke, polymath and microscopist, whose drawing of a flea has become his legacy, and the diarist-parson James Woodforde.
Even though the populations of these cities were comparatively small, so that by the mid-18th century London numbered 750,000, Oxford 11,000, Bath 7,000 and Manchester 17,000, those who whinged and grumbled in print evidently felt as squashed as the most irritated Tube traveller today.
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