9 - ‘Telling Pretty Stories’: Constructing Accident Event Narratives

Summary

Good Christians all attend unto my Ditty,

And you shall hear strange News from London City;

The like before I think you ne'r did hear,

Which well may fill our hearts with Dread and Fear.

Ballad of the Strange and Wonderful Storm of Hail … (1680)

This article called home news is a new common hunt, tho’ upon a cold scent after casualties.

Daniel Defoe, Applebee's Original Weekly Journal (1725)

Accidents are undoubtedly social constructs; issues of cause, blame and responsibility are continually reworked in response to changing social and cultural norms and values. The word ‘accident’ was used frequently during the early modern period to indicate events and outcomes that were, in broad terms, incidental or unpredictable. Events could be for good or bad, hence the ‘happy accident’ of a chance meeting or good fortune. The idea that an accident, explicitly one that resulted in harm or casualty, was an irrational event was not held widely. Accidents were seen in one of two ways: as direct acts of divine providence or as having unique and unchartable origins that, while not of supernatural design, resulted from a set of ‘chance’ circumstances. From this perspective it is easy to see how such views suppressed the development of a more rational explanation of accidents as repeatable events with identifiable earthly causes. Indeed contemporary intellectuals actively resisted such a position. For example, through the careful recording and re-creation of a set of specific conditions Francis Bacon aimed to repeat experimentally ‘unique’ events that had originally occurred by the chance of nature. In some ways John Graunt took a comparable position when he expressed a view that sudden violent deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality brooked no critical analysis beyond simple enumeration, as each was the result of specific and to some extent unique circumstances.

In a wider social and cultural context the term accident was applied with a range of historical and terminological nuances that framed the perceptions of contemporary recorders and consumers of such events. The following discussion focuses on the popular construction, recording and dissemination of accident events in the form of narratives of disaster. Such narratives were situated within a tradition of oral story-telling and collection and transmission through manuscript recording in letters, diaries and journals.