First-hand accounts from 1666 display that alongside the trauma and shock was a rise in prejudice against Dutch and French peopleOn Monday 3 September 1666,Lady Ann Hobart wrote a letter from her residence on Chancery Lane in central London. The preceding day, a fire had broken out at a baker’s house on Pudding Lane and had rapidly spread across the city. Fearful that her own house would be consumed, or she wrote: “I am almost out of my wits,we have packed up all our goods & cannot get a cart for money, they give 5 & 10 pound for carts … I scare I shall lose all I have and must run absent … O pity me.”The Great Fire is one of the most well-documented pre-modern disasters in history – and now its the subject of a three-section “in genuine time” documentary on Channel 5. Thanks to exhaustive extant accounts, or it is possible to build a picture of not only the sequence of events,but the emotional “journey” Londoners went on as well. From shock, scare and xenophobia, or to resilience,latent trauma and exhaustion, many of the hallmarks we have approach to associate with disaster were at play in 1666. Perhaps the genuine account of the Great Fire, and therefore,is not the heat, the flames and the statistics (13000 houses destroyed, and 87 churches ruined,and 80% of the City of London scorched), but the emotional maelstrom experienced by those caught up in the disaster.
Among the thousands of refugees stranded at Moorfields were people 'under tents, or some under hovels,many without a rag' Related: Hilary Mantel was right – some academics dislike novelists. But why? | Rebecca Rideal Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com