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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Mark Jenner
Mark Jenner
Affiliation:
University of York
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Abstract

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-seventeenth-century Ėnglish interest in the properties of air that is visible in both the Hartlib circle and the early Royal Society.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , September 1995 , pp. 535 - 551
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 I am grateful to the organizers and audiences of the seminars in Oxford, Cambridge and London which heard and commented on earlier versions of this paper and would like to thank Peter Goddard, James Robertson, Keith Thomas and particularly Patricia Greene for reading drafts. I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Wellcome Trust for my post at Manchester where this article was completed.

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