The buzz of business

Although London was widely recognised in the early eighteenth century as a city of great size, prosperity and modernity, many commentators also habitually associated the city with excessive noise. In Amusements Serious and Comical (1700), the satirist Tom Brown described ‘mighty’ London as ‘this Prodigious and Noisy City,’ characterising it as being overwhelmed by ‘Crowd, Noise and Perpetual Hurry.’ To Brown’s narrator, the ‘confused Clamours’ of the city were enough to ‘Stun him, Fright him, and make him Giddy.’ ¹ These effects – noise, hurry, clamour – are a part of the city’s modernity and its prosperity, registered in critical and negative coding. This article is an enquiry into the sonic discourses of London’s prosperity and modernity in the period, exploring them in the context of wider negotiations between commerce and formations of civility and politeness. Investigating the connection between civility and noise, it asks whether civility must always be quiet and peaceful. As Hillel Schwartz suggests, towards the end of his very long study Making Noise, the urban conditions for civility are not simply engendered by absence, peacefulness and silence. ² This enquiry proceeds by examining the coffee house and the exchange, two celebrated ‘spaces of modernity’ in the city (to use Miles Ogborn’s phrase). ³ As soundscapes, both these locations produced confusion, clamour and noise, but as this chapter shows, writers in the early eighteenth century, from Ned Ward and Tom Brown to Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, made innovative efforts to describe the distinctive sonic effects of these places. In particular, they observed a characteristic buzz or hum of commerce and assembly that they associated with sociability and civility, although they could not agree upon its dimensions, causes or ramifications.