Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101096 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'Taking us by the hand, Emily Cockayne leads us through the streets of early modern London - Manchester, Bath and Nottingham, too - and shows us a series of Hogarthian prints come to life.' --Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

'To read Hubbub is to be transported back to that sense of childlike wonder in everything gross and revolting ... One of the many delights of this jolly, anecdote-laden history is that, just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.' --Melanie McGrath, The Evening Standard

'...a thoroughly entertaining read, one whose greatest pleasurers lie in the extraordinary accumulation of incidental detail to be found in its teeming pages.' --Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times

Review
'Cockayne spares the reader nothing, from bad breath ... to eyebrow dandruff ... entertaining and full of interesting detail.'

The Sunday Times, April 8th 2007
'... a thoroughly entertaining read,...pleasures lie in the
extraordinary accumulation of incidental detail to be found in its teeming
pages.'

Customer Reviews

Great read...
I finished reading this excellent book yesterday. I was slightly dubious about it at first, with the subject matter being what it was, but far from it being an out and out grime-fest it proved to be an insightful and well written social history of the very late Tudor and Stuart periods.
The text gives you a really good impression of wha life must have been like for 'ordinary' folks in these times and all the grisly, dirty and unhygienic things they were exposed to.
There is reliance on the work of Diarists and Social Commentators of the time and they prove to be helpful and amusing.
Thomas Tyron in particular stood out to me as a particular joy - with his neurotic and obsessive ideas (but in actual fact they turn out to be rather forward thinking with hindsight).
I can't really find any fault with this book at all, and I was very sad to have finished it. I think it would be excellent for anyone studying the period in history, or indeed, for anyone with a passing fascination for matters of grime and hygiene! Well worth a read.

Seriously Interesting
A scholarly but very readable and interesting book.

Until Victorian redevelopers went crazy with their wrecking balls, all English towns and cities were (to modern eyes) unbelieveably picturesque, interesting and beautiful - dense, labyrintine treasure houses packed solid with fascinating buildings, streets, alleys, courts, watercourses, and fragments of medieval fortifications.

But the old maps and engravings do not show the indescribable filth, noise and stench - caused by overcrowding, primitive sanitation, heavily-polluted (or non existent) water supplies, coal smoke, proto-industrial effluent and bad food - with which the inhabitants lived. To a ;arge degree, most became innured to them, but disgust at extreme squalor is innately human, and detailed research into the "nuisances" for which legal redress was sought in the 17th and 18th centuries is illuminating.

Our modern dull, dreary, uniform, motor-traffic-polluted cities have lost their soul, but undeniably, as a result of the destruction of their predecessors, human lives are now safer and longer.

The book is well recommended.