Spence, Craig
Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650-1750
Suffolk: Boydell Press
288 pp, £19.99, ISBN: 9781782049005
Publication date: 2016.
As a historian who has found extreme fascination with the Bills of Mortality, my interest was peaked (and/or piqued) by the work Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650-1750 by Craig Spence. Accidents is a book that attempts to explain what the Bills of Mortality did and the purpose it served in society but also a look at some of the inconsistencies within them that added to some confusion and questionable statistics. Spence has stated on his website to be a “historian and archaeologist. His interests are varied but he has expertise in late 17th and early 18th century London, social and cultural history, and archaeological practice.” I think we get to see that in this work as it bounces between storytelling of a cultural shift, but also a data driven archaeological sense of change happening.
Working through the book structure, Spence split the book into three parts. Part one, which included chapters one and two, are more of a broad understanding of the physical lay of the land and social reactions to death in general respectively. Part two, which included chapter three through six, covers what was deemed as an accident and how these accidents were listed in the Bills versus what actually occurred. Incidents like fires or water related deaths, everyday accidents that could happen in the cities, rarities like carbon monoxide, and seasonal deaths are all discussed in their respective chapters in quite a bit of detail. Finally part three, which included chapters seven through nine, looks at the social and medical changes that death brought to Early Modern London.
Before I get too far, I want to examine and explain the difference between chapter two and nine. These two chapters seem similar but are quite different and I appreciate it. Both sections look at death in society and how the culture of the time engaged it or not, but the difference is that chapter two dives into why these deaths began to be counted and how suicide or murder is defined. However, in nine, Spence takes a look into how sudden or violent death affected society and how it digested that information. There is now more private records like diaries, looking at how the average person was understanding and handling (or not) the deaths happening around them became easier. However, this chapter also dives into the news of these deaths changing as well.
The Bills of Mortality were just an example of how information began to switch from oral retellings to pamphlets, and then soon to newspapers! It is great to see how this transformed visually and historically because people could then understand what was happening in other parishes much faster than before. Then, there is a downside of politics coming into play here. As Spence puts it “It was not only the London papers that utilised sudden-death narratives. Early provincial newspapers often recycled metropolitan news, in part to establish a publisher’s credibility but also, more prosaically, to fill column space: as Cranfield phrased it, they were ‘a mere parasite upon the London press’.” (p 233) As we have seen in other works, like Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England, written news could change the perception of the information and this could then affect how the top-down versus bottom-up reactions could be vastly different, if not opposite. In this case, we see the Bills serve as possible way to question daily life for each class and even how the government attempts to respond or ignore the issue while getting wrapped up in the politics of misinformation or narrative made.
I truly was not sure if I liked this book when I first started reading it because the introduction drew me in with storytelling, then took a flip to data and a more mathematical view. I do tend to be a story not data driven historian. But, after getting through part one of the book, I understood the style of the work better and I really enjoyed it. This book seems to be that middle ground between the data historians and the historians that thrive on stories. Straight out from the beginning, Spence stated that this book’s “aim is not to reduce portrayal of such incidents and fatalities to anecdotal tales of ‘human interest’ or, for that matter, to see them as a window onto ‘everyday life’ in the past. Rather, it is to comprehend who, among hundreds of thousands of Londoners, encountered such events, how the city’s bureaucracy recorded and elaborated their circumstances and why they did so, and what practical responses might follow.” (p 2). I think he did just that in this book. There is not a focus on what ‘everyday life’ was like unless it was necessary to the story, like in the section about urban accidents. Overall, I like that this book stretched one mile wide but six miles deep per say.
My final thought is that this works shows a broader interest in the historiographical side of this time but from a data format. If historians can see things like a 1.6:1 male to female suicide rate compared to the previous 5.2:1 (p 36), there can be questions asked about how suicide was defined before or if the data was skewed because of something else happening like parishes changing, fires loosing records, etc. There are some places Spence could have made more deductions about the data he found, but I also feel like that defeats the purpose of the work. This is a bit more of an overview or “how to read the Bills of Mortality” and I found that it begins the process of gathering information to create further discussion, not too many hard arguments here.
