The politics of London air John Evelyn's Fumifugium and the Restoration

Abstract

A B S T R A C T . Historians have commonly described John Evelyn's pamphlet about London smoke pollution, Fumifugium, as a precocious example of environmental concern. This paper argues that such an interpretation is too simple. Evelyn's proposals are shown to be closely related to political allegory and the panegyrics written to welcome the newly restored Charles II. However, the paper also shows that Fumifugium was not simply a literary conceit; rather it exemplified the mid-seventeenthcentury English interest in the properties of air that is visible in both the Hartlib circle and the early Royal Society.

The atmospheric lifetime of black carbon

“…John Evelyn's 1661 pamphlet, Fumifugium (Jenner, 1995). Measurements of 'smoke' in Kew Gardens a century ago were more than 100 times larger than values observed since 2000.…”

Decision-making under uncertainty in environmental health policy: new approaches

“…In other situations, it is the lack of decision that has provoked disasters. Examples include the 1952 Great Fog of London that resulted in 4000 fatalities in a few days, a result of failure to control air pollution first emphasized by John Evelyn in his 1661 Fumifugium pamphlet [68] and the disastrous 1930 Meuse Valley industrial fog in Belgium [69]. The opposite governmental policy approach is illustrated by one employed in Japan: In response to widespread deforestation and its ecological consequences, the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo era (1603–1868) introduced a courageous policy based on restrictive and incentive regulations that led to forestry science and the sustainable use of wood.…”

Introduction

“…26 Similar remarks have been made for urban spaces, increasingly subject in the early modern period to air and water pollution that contemporary residents often perceived as a danger for their physical and spiritual wellbeing. 27 In rural areas, the constitution of soils was linked to the character of local populations: soils were widely believed to be composed in the same way as human bodies, that is from combinations of four fundamental qualities, hot and dry or cold and moist, and to become 'out of heart' should these qualities become imbalanced. 28 Correspondingly, the drainage of the English fenland was claimed, by one anonymous poet, to have remarkable physical and moral effects on the humoural complexion of the fenlanders:…”