In Accidents and Violent Deaths in Early Modern London, 1650–1750, Craig Spence attempts a systematic analysis of accidents and other types of sudden violent deaths in London with the aim of pushing beyond an anecdotal treatment of such events and placing them firmly in their contemporary cultural context, thus enriching our understanding of life in the early modern city. For Spence, London at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a place that was both hazardous and perceived as hazardous. Early modern Londoners were exposed to a massive range of hazards, and danger lay in wait for them every time they left their dwellings (or, indeed, in some circumstances while they were still in them), so much that “Early modern London appears to have been a city with a hazard on every street corner” (95).

Spence bases his analysis on a wide range of source materials, including various types of court records, personal diaries and cognate materials, ballads, pamphlets, and newspapers. However, his most important source is the Bills of Mortality published weekly throughout the period, which contained listings of all unnatural deaths in the capital. Between 1654 and 1735 the Bills listed 15,529 examples of what Spence describes as sudden violent deaths, of which 2,267 were suicide, 868 murder, and 12,394 accidental (although it should be noted that this category included 1,423 described as “found dead” and 817 “killed”). Spence then proceeds, through successive chapters, to describe the various forms of accidental death: falling off ladders or high structures, drowning, being run over by wheeled vehicles, being killed in London's streets by chance encounters with animals, industrial accidents. The seasonality of various forms of accidental deaths is addressed, as are their geographical distribution within London and its immediate environs. Altogether, melding the evidence of the Bills of Mortality with his other source materials, Spence constructs a detailed and wide-ranging overview of what is clearly an important subject, yet one that has so far attracted little attention from historians, not least for the period Spence is concerned with. His book is a scholarly and well-crafted study which will deepen our understanding of life in early modern London, and also alert historians to the importance of accidental death as a topic for historical investigation.

One inevitable drawback of the book is that, as Spence is aware, it is impossible to gain more than anecdotal insights into nonfatal accidents. Spence does make some interesting comments on this issue, above all looking at diaries and similar source material. Unfortunately (if understandably given his main focus on fatal accidents), he does not go into great depth here, leaving the way open for future investigation. What does emerge from his consideration of this and other issues is his welcome focus on what he describes as accident event narratives. These, he suggests, allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural resonances of fatal accidents, how they were mentally framed by those writing about them, reading about them, or talking about them. Broadly, Spence argues for a transition from a mind-set that attributed accidents to divine providence to a more “modern” view that attributed them to chance or probability and that fit in with a rise in consciousness (again, in Spence's opinion, a sign of “modernity”) of the need to regulate early modern London. This obviously creates very interesting questions that, again, call out for further study. For example, Spence notes a newspaper report of 1739 in which the death of a woman whose being run over by a brewer's dray was attributed to her foolishness in pushing her way forward in order to save time; one suspects that this type of “common sense” attitude to accidents existed long before the mid-eighteenth century.

Another problem, which once more will be resolved only by further research, is Spence's assertion that the hazardous, accident-prone world he has uncovered was essentially a London phenomenon. It is, of course, easy to see how such a conclusion might be supported: London had a large and unusually concentrated population; it had an unusual concentration of industrial and building construction activities; and, returning to the issue of accident narratives, it had an unusually literate population and a highly developed printing industry, so that information about fatal accidents could be circulated more widely and more forcefully. It is worth mentioning, however, R. F. Hunnisett's edition of Coroners' Bills 1752–1796 (1980). Hunnisett does not provide a breakdown of the subject matter of the 2,779 inquests his sources allude to, but on a rough count at least two-thirds of them arose from accidental deaths, indicating that Wiltshire, a county whose population was roughly a quarter of that of London's, experienced forty officially recorded accidental deaths a year. This may not indicate that hazards lay behind every hedgerow in Wiltshire, but is does suggest that the everyday experience of accidental death was not a purely metropolitan phenomenon.