‘Belching it Forth their Sooty Jaws’: John Evelyn's Vision of a ‘Volcanic’ City
Abstract Observers of seventeenth-century London often used anatomical or geographical metaphors when writing about an early modern city undergoing rapid physical, commercial, and demographic expansion. Between the 1640s and 1680s, the writer and diarist John Evelyn regularly used volcanic language and imagery to evoke a cityscape blighted by dense clouds of smoke emitted by the city's industrial furnaces. This vision of a ‘volcanic’ city was personal, inspired by Evelyn's exploration of Vesuvius in 1645, while reflecting a broader scientific and popular fascination with volcanic activity. Considered in the immediate political context, the ‘volcanic’ city was both a powerful expression of royalist anxiety about the instability of the capital, and an assertion of the need for a powerful monarch to actively regulate the social and commercial energies of the metropolis.
‘In fiction as in fact’: 40 years of literary studies in The London Journal
For four decades The London Journal has been at the heart of scholarly debate on the history and the culture of Britain's capital city, from the middle ages to the present. Despite the perception in some quarters that this is a journal primarily of relevance to historians, from the outset The London Journal has set out to cover ‘the fine and performing arts, the natural environment and … commentaries on metropolitan life in fiction as in fact’. Scholarly and theoretical trends within literary studies have evolved considerably over the last 40 years, and these developments can be traced in the ways in which contributors to The London Journal have variously engaged with literature. In exploring such engagements, this survey article discusses some notable articles published in the journal over this time-period, and concludes by evaluating the degree to which it has, as its founding principles stated it should, offered a truly ‘multi-disciplinary’ approach to London studies.
Interest in air pollution among early Fellows of the Royal Society
AIR pollution became a problem in London as early as the thirteenth century, shortly after the introduction of imported coal. The use of coal as a fuel in kilns in London and Southwark annoyed the public so much that a Royal Commission investigated the matter in 1284 (1). It recurred no doubt throughout the intervening centuries, but there appears to be little serious discussion of it as anything more than a transient local occurrence until the seventeenth century when a number of eminent men, such as Digby, Evelyn, Graunt and Petty, gave the matter their attention. The intense intellectual activity of the period and the formation of scientific societies catalysed many of the scientific developments of the period. But it was more likely that the interest in air pollution was engendered by the sharp deterioration in the quality of London’s air throughout the first half of the seventeenth century (2).