Introduction

Summary

Master and keeper of the mad folks Alphonso

Pray sir, be moderate; such accidents will happen sometimes, take what care we can. Damn accidents!

John Vanbrugh, The Pilgrim (1724)

Accidents by their very nature happen anytime and anywhere. The particular character and circumstances of any given accident are nonetheless formed with reference to the environment within which it occurs; in the case of historical study, period and place are of paramount concern. Furthermore, the appreciation of accidents and the responses made to them as lived experiences are inevitably contingent upon various social and cultural framings. Put more directly, accidents are best understood as communally constructed events contingent upon the social structures and cultural configurations within which they take place. As a result, those who suffered accidents in the past were rarely seen as simply unfortunate victims of chance but were characterised with reference to contemporary values and understandings of status, environment, occupation and behaviour.

In studying the accident and sudden violent death more generally, the historian is presented with both methodological and conceptual challenges. The potential that such events provide for the critical exploration of facets of past society, together with the opportunity to gain insight into patterns of thought and behaviour, nonetheless make this a desirable academic venture. Sudden violent death presented early modern communities with various difficulties of both a social and cultural nature; such deaths could not be ignored. Responses ranged from immediate practical actions to more considered attempts to understand and explain what were, after all, uncommon events. As we might imagine, through such consideration there were moments at which specific hazards and broader risks, both physical and social, came to be recognised; although longer-standing attitudes that saw the victims of sudden violent death as representing evidence for happenings beyond human control clearly hampered steps toward more rational conclusions. While this stands true of the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth cautious early steps toward modernity encouraged such events to be seen as threats to be managed rather than misfortunes to be explained.

This book reveals and reviews accident events, and by association other forms of sudden violent death, in the contextual setting of the early modern city, specifically the metropolis of London. The 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.