Nostalgia de la boue, indeed

What is it with the British and the perfectly revolting? One is reminded of the Fugs' doleful ditty, "Wide, Wide River" ("Flow on, flow on/River of shit/Right from my toes/On up to my nose") -- if it were describing a matinee picnic on the Avon.

First, there's Clare Clark's new novel coming out in May (discussed below), which does describe the Thames in the 18th century as "no more than a stinking brown ditch of rotting shit." This, after her debut with The Great Stink.

And now there's Emily Cockayne's Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770. Christopher Hart in The Literary Review has a merry old time with the book, managing to hold his nose, cover his ears and give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up all at once: "it's a veritable feast of filth and foulness, and I loved every minute of it. The chapter titles tell you immediately what to expect: 'Itchy,' 'Mouldy,' 'Noisy,' 'Grotty' and 'Dirty.' They sound like a South West Trains service."

A research associate at the Open University in East Midlands, Ms. Cockayne offers her readers a journey to an England past, "an England where people still drank ale instead of tea for breakfast, defecated in the streets as if it were the right of every freeborn Englishman to do so" and where Samuel Pepys wouldn't mind if a lady at the theater let fly and accidentally spat on him -- "providing the lady was pretty."

Perhaps it's the instinctive response of many British to their own posh self-marketed image. I know that whenever I see another handsome, Georgian-period London street in another Masterpiece Theatre costume drama, I try to imagine it filled with "the disagreeable Objects of bleeding Heads, Entrails of Beasts, Offals, raw Hides, and the Kennels flowing with Blood and Nastiness." At the very least, the street would be deep with horse manure (and people trying vainly to sweep it all up), while inside the homes, all those gleaming, maid-polished surfaces would be covered with gritty coal dust and perhaps a thin layer of grease from the vats of animal fat being burned at nearby slaughterhouses and pigsties.

Indeed, there's a street in northwest London named Mount Pleasant -- which, it turns out, was actually the locals' sardonic term for a huge pile of the "merdurinous" that stank there for years. Nowadays, Mr. Hart points out helpfully, "Mount Pleasant" is best known as the home of this.