On the streets outside were the bells, the wagons, the cries, the barking dogs, the squeaking of shop signs blowing in the wind. But there was another sound, relatively unfamiliar to Londoners of later generations. It was that of rushing water. The sixteenth-century city was crossed by streams and rivers. The sound of water from fifteen conduits mingled with the noise of the Thames and its lapping tides, audible along all the lanes and thoroughfares which led to the river. Great wheels were used to pump water from the Thames into small wooden pipes, and their endless grinding and reverberation added materially to the overwhelming noise of the city.
In 1682 it was still the same endless sound, like a great shout perpetually renewed. “I lie down in Storms,” Sir John Oldham announced in that year, “in Thunders, rise.” He evokes the “Din” of the “restless Bells” as well as
Huzza’s of Drunkards, Bellmen’s midnight Rhimes
The noise of Shops, with Hawkers early Screams.
The allusion here is to a city that is always wakeful; there is no end to its activity, neither at night nor at day, and it lives continually. In the seventeenth century, too, London was still a city of animals as well as people. Samuel Pepys was disturbed one night by a “damned noise between a sow gelder and a cow and a dog.” The noise of horses, cattle, cats, dogs, pigs, sheep and chickens, which were kept in the capital, was confounded also with the sound of the great herds of beasts being driven towards Smithfield and the other open markets; London consumed the countryside, or so it was said, and the noise which accompanied its devouring appetite was everywhere apparent.
It has often been observed how foreigners, or strangers, were astonished and perplexed by the noise of London. On one level it was regarded as representative of London’s “license,” where the boundary between anarchy and freedom remained ambiguous. In a city filled with an implicitly egalitarian spirit, each inhabitant was free to occupy his or her own space with endless noisy expressiveness. In Hogarth’s engraving of 1741, The Enraged Musician, a foreign visitor is assailed by the sound of a sow-gelder (perhaps a descendant of the one who annoyed Pepys), by howling cats, a girl’s rattle, a boy’s drum, a milkmaid’s cry, a ballad-seller’s plaintive call, a knife-grinder and a pewterer at their respective trades, a carillon of bells, a parrot, a wandering “haut-boy” or oboe player, a shrieking dustman and a barking dog. The significance of these heterogeneous images is that they are all striking and familiar London types. Hogarth is here celebrating the noises of the city as an intrinsic aspect of its life. It is the prerogative of Londoners to make noise; therefore, noise is a natural and inevitable part of their existence in the city. Without that right, for example, many of the vendors and street-sellers would perish.
Those who came to the city as visitors were not of course necessarily able to share Hogarth’s implicit enthusiasm for this native uproar. In Tobias Smollett’s novel of 1771 Humphry Clinker is dismayed by its nocturnal aspects. “I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street and thundering at every door,” thus illustrating the fact that time itself can be imposed with a shout. In the morning, too: “I start out of bed, in consequence of the still more dreadful alarm made by the country carts, and noisy rustics bellowing green peas under my window.” Commerce, as well as time, must be understood in raucous terms. Joseph Haydn complained that he might fly to Vienna “to have more quiet in which to work, for the noise that the common people make as they sell their wares in the street is intolerable.” Yet there were others who so wished to enter the spirit of London that they rejoiced in the clamour and embraced it like a lover. “The noise,” Boswell wrote upon his first arrival in London in 1762, “the crowd, the glare of the shops and signs agreeably confused me.” He arrived in the capital by way of Highgate, from which eminence he would already have heard the noise. “Let anyone ride down Highgate Hill on a summer’s day,” Laetitia Landon wrote in the early nineteenth century, “see the immense mass of buildings spread like a dark panorama, hear the ceaseless and peculiar sound, which has been likened to the hollow roar of the ocean, but has an utterly different tone … then say, if ever was witnessed hill or valley that so powerfully impressed the imagination with that sublime and awful feeling, which is the epic of poetry.” So the noise of the city partakes of its greatness.
This sense of disturbing, almost transcendental, sound was essentially a discovery of the nineteenth century when London represented the great urban myth of the world. Its noise became an aspect of its mightiness, and horror; it became numinous. In 1857 Charles Manby Smith, in the paradoxically entitled The Little World of London, described it as “that indefinable boom of distant but ever-present sound which tells that London is up and doing, and which will swell into a deafening roar as the day grows older [and] now rises faintly but continuously upon the ear.” The “roar” here suggests the presence of some great beast, but more significant is this sense of a continuous, distant sound as if it were a form of meditation or self-communing. We read in the same narrative of “the uninterrupted and crashing roar of deafening sounds, which tell of the rush of the current of London’s life blood through its thousand channels-a phenomenon, however, of which the born Londoner is no more unpleasantly conscious than is the Indian savage, cradled at the foot of a cataract, of its everlasting voice.” This is an interesting image, which identifies London itself with some kind of natural force; at the same time it covertly admits savagery among the citizens, in a locale both untamed and untamable.
From three miles’ distance, in what was then an “outlying” suburb soon to be drawn within the vortex of the city, the sound of London is “like the swell of the sea-surge beating upon a pebbly shore when it is heard far inland.” Here is a haunting impression of proximity to the great city. That perpetual sound was variously compared to Niagara, in its persistence and remorselessness, and to the beating of a human heart. It is intimate and yet impersonal, like the noise of life itself. That same intuition was vouchsafed to Shelley who wrote of
London: that great sea whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
The adjectives “deaf” and “loud” summon up an image of pitiless activity; the verb “howls” one of fear, pain and rage in equal measure. The noise is one of greed and helplessness, as if it were in a perpetually infantile state. Its noise is ancient, but always renewed.