The essence of Olde England

Thanks to English novels and countless BBC period pieces, Americans have a rather idealized view of 18th-century English life, impressions that still shape our views of the Mother Country. You could see it in the striking Anglophilia that greeted the queen’s recent visit to our shores, with the deference paid to protocol and ancient notions of refinement.

But the young English historian Emily Cockayne thinks it’s worth noting that historians (and Masterpiece Theatre directors) have omitted a few sights, sounds, and, perhaps most notably, stomach-churning smells of England’s past.

When she watches a film set in the 1700s, Cockayne said in an interview from her home in Norwich, England, her reaction is, “Why is that lady not holding her dress up? Women held their dresses up as a matter of course.” That’s because, in the words of the noted architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, London streets then were characterized by “Lakes of Mud and Rills of Stinking mire.”

Meanwhile, as filmmakers stress the period glamor, academics, Cockayne argues, focus on the century’s literary and artistic achievements, or the philosophical, political, and scientific advances of the Enlightenment, leaving much of the era’s sensory world, noxious to our modern sensibilities, unexplored.

Cockayne’s new book, “Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England” (Yale), a surprise hit (for an academic title) in her home country, is an amusing and occasionally gag-inducing attempt to rectify this imbalance — to portray the grittier and grottier side of life in England in the mid-1600s through the 1700s. The goal, as she writes, is to explain “What made eyes water, ears ache, noses wrinkle, fingers withdraw and mouths close.”

The approach dovetails with a trend in historical writing about the senses — a subject of study that Yale historian John Demos, in a review of Peter Charles Hoffer’s “Sensory Worlds in Early America” for the London Review of Books last fall, described as “the newest of the new.” It’s also social history from the bottom up, but with the emphasis on the day-to-day, she said, not the exotic rituals that other social historians have often explored. She noted the Princeton historian Robert Darnton (just named director of the Harvard University Library), who wrote a famous essay on cat massacres in pre-revolutionary France. That’s “quite interesting,” Cockayne said, “but it’s not normal. I’m more interested in the normal things, the mundane things that ordinary people go through.” Cockayne justifies stressing the fouler aspects of the mundane because they’ve been so often neglected.

When you think of a high-society dance in the England of the 1770s, for example, this passage in Tobias Smollett’s 1771 novel, “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,” probably isn’t what you have in mind: “Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues...besides a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.” Though the description is lightly fictionalized, Cockayne says, odor-wise it’s dead-on.

And those elegant wigs, synonymous with this period of English history? They “needed much care and attention to stop them getting matted, lugged, lank, and greasy,” Cockayne writes. Their owners freshened them up by sprinkling them with powder made from low-grade flour, which, unfortunately, tended to attract lice. Society women, whose elaborate hairdos remained untouched by water for weeks or months, also resorted to flour touch-ups, with the same wriggly results.

The reader squirms and fans his armpits. Diaries in this pre-antibiotics era, amply quoted here, are full of laments about eczema, impetigo, eyebrow dandruff, scabies, chilblains, boils, and ringworm. It was an itchy, itchy world. And behind the stately neoclassical facades and Augustan prose there lurked a “secret epidemic” of venereal disease. James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, complained in his famous London Journal of “damned twinges, that scalding heat,” despite an encounter he had undertaken whilst “armoured.”

English cities were notoriously filthy. Back-alley outhouses and “dunghills” — garbage-heaps-slash-compost-piles that built up outside many houses — added to the urban miasma. In an age of smallpox, pockmarked flesh was common, and women clashed over whether to cover such imperfections with dabs of black cream (stylish, some thought) or to simply embrace what nature had given them. (Presentiments of today’s Botox debate?)

Nor were the ears spared. Hawkers of wares of all sorts screeched on street corners, often unintelligibly — and given the thinness of windows and walls, there was no place to hide. Confided Jonathan Swift to a journal, about one particularly ample-lunged salesman: “I wish his largest cabbage was sticking in his throat.”

Still, “Humans generally cope,” Cockayne writes in the end. “Maybe,” she says, speaking of our 18th-century predecessors, “we can give them some credit for working out what the body could tolerate.”

Indeed, Cockayne suggests, we must guard against the sin of condescension toward the past. In the book, she criticizes the late Princeton historian Lawrence Stone, rejecting as ahistorical his claim that “personal and public hygiene” in this era “was largely disregarded.”

OK, so people hardly ever bathed. Nevertheless, says Cockayne, a good rubdown with a pigs’-hair brush did eliminate lice, and made people presentable, by their lights. Perhaps our own hygiene-obsessed period, with our daily shampooings and our hand disinfectant in every purse, doesn’t represent a Platonic ideal either. Perhaps, filth-wise, there’s a middle ground.

Christopher Shea’s column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail criticalfaculties@verizon.net.