Accidental death in early modern England is an understudied subject. It was more common than murder, suicide and execution, all of which have found their historians, and while less common than death by epidemic disease, it has similar lessons to teach us about attitudes to risk and public policy. In this valuable book Craig Spence sets himself the challenging task of achieving in a single bound a task that, he suggests, has taken historians of crime two distinct steps: first to establish a quantitative social history of fatal accidents, and then to interpret contemporary understandings of such mishaps and what they tell us about changing views of the world.
Spence's prime source is the near-complete run of weekly London Bills of Mortality published from 1654 to 1735, but his arguments rest on an impressively wide range of research in parish records, court records, newspapers and diaries. He explains well the administrative contexts in which the records were generated and is sensitive to the difficulties in using the Bills, rather than the more detailed coroners’ inquests used by historians of medieval accidents such as Barbara Hanawalt. The biggest problem is that deaths resulting from a period of illness following on and attributable to an accident may well not have been reported as accidental deaths by the parish Searchers, whose information parish clerks passed on to those compiling the Bills. In fact, this under-counting only amplifies Spence's argument for the ubiquity of accidents.
The study is set crisply in the context of London's history at the period when it was rising to be Europe's greatest city, its population roughly doubling over the period under consideration. A workforce featuring many inexperienced migrants, it is argued, may have been particularly prone to work accidents, and such explanations are offered for a number of the significant variations in the incidence of accidents between times of the year or between areas of the metropolis that are established in the quantitative parts of the study. Puncture wounds, for example, were much more likely to come from swords, as opposed to knives or other sharp objects, in Westminster or the West End than elsewhere, because of the large numbers of gentlemen wearing swords in those fashionable parts. After the phase of reconstruction following the Great Fire, the epicentre of building accidents moved from the City to the flourishing West End. Falls from ships in the port correlated with sailing seasons and longer-term booms and slumps in trade. Efforts to calculate the comparative risk of death in different industries such as brewing and building look less statistically secure, but in general the numbers do their job to very good effect.
Interesting disjunctions emerge between the hazards people feared and those they really faced. Raging fire was much more talked about than open water, but drowning was by far the bigger killer. The coaches of the rich, allegedly driven at reckless speed, killed far fewer than the delivery carts, wagons and drays needed to keep the city fed. Tobacco smoking was bad for the health in part because those who fell over with a clay pipe clenched between their teeth might find its long stem driven into their brain through the roof of their mouth. Some visibly alarming accidents, such as broken bones, were quite effectively treated by contemporary medical expertise, whereas many internal injuries were beyond help.
Several features of the book may prove controversial. Purists may worry about which of the details in the dramatic reconstructions offered of various incidents – of weather, words, gestures and thoughts – actually come from the primary sources and which from the author's imagination. More fundamentally, it is hard to get contemporary attitudes to the hazards of life into proper focus. It is implied that city folk welcoming the warmth of spring must also have worried about that season's increased risk of accidental death, but when accidents accounted for only 0.85 per cent of all London fatalities, perhaps they just enjoyed the sunshine and got on with life.
The book's emphasis on the special relationship between urban life and accidental death, on ‘the accident as an emerging trope of urban modernity’ (p. 10) and ‘popular perceptions of London as a dramatically lethal environment’ (p. 95), also raises questions. Many of the hazards of the countryside, from horses to drowning to guns, were the same as those of London. The case for London's uniqueness rests in part on literary and artistic works by Ned Ward, John Gay, William Hogarth and others, which both shared in classical traditions of romanticising rural life in contrast with the wicked city and cited fearsome London dangers far beyond accidents, of crime, deceit, drunkenness and atheism. Meanwhile other pamphlets, as the book shows, sensationalised drownings in rural floods rather than plunges into the Thames, and murders always made better copy than mishaps.
Similar qualifications might be made to arguments about changing attitudes to accident and risk. The pragmatic compatibility of belief in divine providence with the recognition of practical causes for mishaps is well demonstrated, as is the patchy nature of measures to impose ordered civility on an accident-prone world. It is intriguingly shown that some thought London's measures to protect pedestrians, unlike the free-for-all of Paris, were a badge of English liberties. But perhaps too much is made of the novelty of eighteenth-century attempts to cope with risk by practical provisions. It is indeed striking that a newspaper correspondent of 1751 suggested that it be made possible to open sash windows only from the top, to prevent falls. But already in the sixteenth century, as Mark Jenner has shown, London parishes were replacing open wells with parish pumps to stop people stumbling in, while elsewhere coroners were ordering fords and bridges to be properly maintained and millstreams fenced in; modernity may have been a long time coming. Nonetheless, a good book should provoke debate as well as admiration, and this book succeeds in both respects.
