Jane Austen's England

by Roy Adkins,Lesley Adkins

  Even in the Houses of Parliament the stench was unbearable, as Elizabeth Fremantle found during a visit in May 1806: ‘Mr. Campbell and John Poulett breakfasted with us, and accompanied us to Westminster Hall. We had Peers’ tickets and being rather late could only get bad places in a crowded high Gallery behind the Throne. We could see and hear but little, the heat and smell were insufferable, we therefore got away by two o’clock.’110

  As with laundry, soap was a luxury when washing bodies. Some fine soaps were imported, and in London in 1789 Andrew Pears started manufacturing a fine, transparent soap. The washing of bodies, or more likely parts of bodies, was done with water poured from a jug into a basin, usually at a washstand within a bedroom. Bath-tubs and showers were rare, as were public baths. Manual workers such as miners and agricultural labourers were easily spotted from their stained, chapped hands and swarthy, suntanned or even blackened skin. Many never washed or washed only on Sundays. Rivers and streams provided one means of washing for those who could swim, but Robert Willan advocated public baths: ‘all ranks of society would be greatly benefited by the establishment of cold and tepid baths, accessible at a moderate expense; for, by a strange thoughtlessness, most men resident in London, and very many ladies, though accustomed to wash their hands and face daily, neglect washing their bodies from year to year.’111

  Cosmetics were used as much to hide blemishes such as smallpox scars as to add beauty. Similarly, perfumes were probably used more for hiding smells than creating a pleasing impression. Some body odours were overpowering and difficult to tolerate, as Jane Austen found in November 1800: ‘Miss Debary, Susan and Sally all in black…made their appearance, and I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.’112 Toothpicks were the most effective means of dental hygiene, most commonly pointed pieces of wood or quill, which the wealthy kept in ornate silver or gold cases. One housewives’ manual suggested: ‘For a stinking breath. GET two handfuls of cummin, stamp it to powder, and boil it in wine; and drink the sirup morning and evening, for fifteen days.’113

  Toothpowder comprised abrasive materials such as bicarbonate of soda that whitened the teeth. ‘The Amboyna Mouth Powder is prepared from a DRUG the Produce of a far foreign Country, and imported by a GENTLEMAN of FORTUNE,’ one advertisement claimed, ‘…It fastens, whitens, and preserves the Teeth, makes the Gums and Lips of a beautiful red, instantly sweetens the breath…It removes all foulness the Mouth is subject to from Diet or a disordered Stomach.’114 Some toothpowders were so abrasive that another advertisement warned: ‘Enamel becomes thinner and thinner, and at last, being quite eaten away, and clean gone, a once beautiful Set of teeth are changed into so many unsightly fibrous and rotten Stumps.’115

  Mr James Rymer of Reigate in Surrey advocated the use of his own toothpowder, priced at 2s. 9d. per box, which ‘is used in the common Way with a Tooth-Brush, or the Teeth may be rubbed with a little of it upon the Corner of a Towel by those who dislike a Brush’.116 Bone and ivory toothbrushes had bored holes filled with coarse animal bristle, held in place by thin wire. Rymer called his toothpowder the Cinchona Dentifrice, and its main ingredient was Peruvian bark, which was also used in treating malaria and from which quinine is derived.

  Menstruation is an aspect of women’s personal hygiene about which little was written, except occasionally by medical men, who also advised Peruvian bark to treat period pain. An early form of hot-water bottle was also recommended by the physician Alexander Hamilton: ‘If…the pain become violent…a bladder, two-thirds filled with hot water, should be kept applied to the lower part of the belly.’117 It is uncertain whether girls and women wore any sanitary protection, especially as most of them wore no underwear. They may have fixed strips of linen between their legs, which would have been rinsed in water and reused, and some women possibly made disposable pads from absorbent material like cotton-wool or sheep’s wool, though such materials were too expensive for most. It is also likely that women, especially outdoor manual workers, did nothing. Certainly Hamilton observed that ‘Women in the higher ranks of life, and those of a delicate nervous constitution, are subject to sickness, headache, and pains in the back and loins, during the periodical evaccuation. Those of the lower rank, inured to exercise and labour, and strangers to those refinements which debilitate the system, and interrupt the functions essential to the preservation of health, are seldom observed to suffer at these times.’118 How those women of ‘the higher ranks of life’ coped is difficult to comprehend, especially when thin gowns became fashionable.

  How people relieved themselves while out and about is another area shrouded in uncertainty. When at their clubs or out to dinner, men urinated into ceramic chamberpots (also called ‘jordans’ or ‘piss pots’) that were hidden behind curtains, screens or in cupboards, though Louis Simond found that at dinners he attended, there was no attempt by men to be discreet: ‘Drinking much and long leads to unavoidable consequences. Will it be credited, that, in a corner of the very dining-room, there is a certain convenient piece of furniture, to be used by any body who wants it. The operation is performed very deliberately and undisguisedly, as a matter of course, and occasions no interruption of the conversation.’119 He could not understand why chamberpots were ‘not placed out of the room, in some adjoining closet’.120

  Outdoors, women and men were known to urinate and defecate in streets and side alleys. At his trial for theft Samuel Duck claimed: ‘I had been to Knightsbridge [London]; coming home about a quarter after eleven, I had occasion to go up this alley to ease myself.’121 In a letter published in the Bath Chronicle in July 1777, one citizen appealed for cleaner streets: ‘By a proper attention to regulations, some plan might be, doubtless, formed for restraining, not only the nasty practice of easing nature on the pavement in almost every corner, but also the equally disagreeable one, of throwing urine and other foul water, &c. from the windows into the streets, (where it is very common for passengers to be greatly incommoded and injured).’122

  Indoors at home, especially at night, ceramic chamberpots or wooden buckets were used, and chamberpots were sometimes built into a piece of wooden furniture known as a ‘close stool’ or ‘commode’. Confusingly, some leading furniture designers began calling any piece of furniture fitted with drawers a commode, and so the term ‘night commode’ was adopted to distinguish those with chamberpots.123 Servants were responsible for emptying the chamberpots into slop-pails for collection by the nightsoil men, or else the contents were poured into the outside cesspit, on a dunghill in the garden and sometimes even into the street.

  Toilets for daytime use were generally in small outhouses in a corner of the garden or a yard, with a half-door for ventilation and light. The terminology is confusing, but usually the primitive toilet comprised one or more wooden seats over a cesspit or cesspool and was called an earth or ash closet. The outhouse building containing the toilet was the privy, necessary, necessary house, house of office or jericho. The Weston Longville parsonage garden had separate facilities for the servants, as Woodforde’s diary entry for 13 July 1780 revealed: ‘The old Jericho (alias servants necessary house) pulled down to day and a new one going to be built elsewhere.’124 At Over Stowey in the terrible winter of 1814, William Holland referred obliquely to his building: ‘It freezes hard…The path made through the snow to a Certain House in the garden is as slippery as glass and I more than once had nearly fallen in passing along notwithstanding the caution I took.’125 Houses and taverns without gardens or yards might have necessaries in their cellars, and communal necessaries with several seats for men and women were to be found at public attractions like pleasure gardens.126

  The stench was minimised by sprinkling soil or ashes into the pit now and again, and while some cesspits might drain to a nearby watercourse, most had to be emptied when full. Accidents did occur, as in the summer of 1808: ‘The body of a child, belonging to Sarah Lord, of Rochdale, which had been missing three weeks, was, on Tuesday se’nnight, found in a necessary, into which
it is supposed to have accidentally fallen, and was smothered in the soil.’127 In London in December 1814, another accident occurred when Catherine Tewner dropped her newborn baby into the cesspool of her necessary house. At her trial for murder, one man testified that ‘we tore up the privy to get the child out; I gave all the assistance to find the child; we did not find the child; we sent for a nightman.’128 The nightman was George Nicholls, and he also gave evidence: ‘I immediately stripped, and went down; I dragged seven times, and the eighth time I brought a female child up…A child that fell from its mother could not have gone down so low, without it had been poked down with a pole it could not.’129 Despite his damning words, Catherine was acquitted.

  Toilet paper was not then manufactured, and people cleaned themselves with whatever cheap or free materials were to hand, like leaves and moss. Necessaries might be provided with scrap paper, especially torn-up newspapers and letters, and in October 1814 Patrick Smith was found guilty of robbing David Weit, recently discharged from the militia, at Chelsea. ‘This is the piece of paper that was dropped in the necessary,’ one witness declared. ‘The prisoner took part of this paper to wipe his backside with…here is Weit, drummer, upon it; it is part of his discharge.’130 In the Lake District Nelly Weeton was puzzled why human excrement was not utilised to improve the farmland, considering that ‘The people in this house have, most of them, very great natural abilities that way, as the devastation amongst Mr. Pedder’s newspapers can daily testify.’131

  From the 1770s public health began to be taken more seriously. Streets were widened and paved, open drains covered over and new ones constructed, though drains were not intended for sewage, as flushing toilets – water-closets – were still rare. These water-closets had wooden seating placed over lead or glazed ceramic bowls, and in order to remove the waste, they were flushed with water from a piped supply or water stored in a cistern tank. Decent drainage was needed, and experiments were done with handles and plunger mechanisms to empty the waste into pipes, but as these pipes were unventilated, noxious gases filled the rooms. The first patent taken out to resolve the problem of the closet’s inefficient valve was by the London watchmaker Alexander Cumming, and a patent for an improved version was taken out three years later in 1778 by Joseph Bramah. By 1797 nearly six thousand of Bramah’s water-closets had been made, and it remained the standard model for decades. Even so, the old-style water-closets with their terrible smells continued to be built, while most people kept their cesspits and chamberpots.

  In towns and cities, the contents of chamberpots were taken away in carts by nightsoil men (the ‘nightmen’), who also cleared cesspits by climbing into the shafts and digging out the contents, which is what George Nicholls did when looking for the newborn child. There was no organised system of removing detritus, not just for nightsoil but everything from butchery waste to cinders from open fires. The unscrupulous dumped their waste in streets and streams, and at Cowley in Gloucestershire Samuel Rudder observed that ‘the poor labouring people are so abandoned to nastiness, that they throw everything within a yard or two of their doors, where the filth makes a putrid stench, to the injury of their own health, and the annoyance of travellers, if any come among them’.132

  Animal carcasses were disposed of in various ways, and thousands of worn-out horses died each year and were fed to dogs or passed to knackers’ yards, where every part was used, such as for tallow, glue and horsehair. Some authorities employed scavengers to keep the streets clean, especially of horse dung, and much of the detritus including nightsoil was sold to farmers for manuring their fields. A survey of agriculture around London in 1794 showed how much farmers paid:

  The price of night-soil, horse-bones raw, bones boiled, bones burnt, and coal-ashes, six shillings a load; soot eight pence a bushel; horn-shavings from six to seven shillings a sack…and hogs hair, if wet, fifteen shillings a cart-load…The barges on the river Thames, supply from the different dung-wharfs, those cultivators of land who reside near the banks of the river, at a much cheaper rate. This manure is composed of horse-dung and the sweepings of the streets mixed together.133

  Jane Austen sometimes stayed with her brother Henry at his London apartment in Henrietta Street. This was a fashionable part of Covent Garden, but it was only a short distance from scenes of squalor. The state of one street just a few minutes’ walk away was brought to the attention of a parliamentary committee in 1816:

  I cannot pass by the filthy state of the street, and the alleys and yards in Short’s-gardens, which is of a fair width, and requires nothing but the attendance of the scavenger, to be as clean as any other part of the town; on the 10th of September at the ends towards Drury-lane there was a quantity of human ordure floating down the kennel, apparently the emptying of many privies, and causing a stench sufficient to breed a pestilence.134

  SIX

  SERMONS AND SUPERSTITIONS

  The rector of a parish has much to do…he must make such an agreement for tithes as may be beneficial to himself and not offensive to his patron. He must write his own sermons; and the time that remains will not be too much for his parish duties, and the care and improvement of his dwelling.

  Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

  The Anglican version of Protestant Christianity practised by the Church of England was the official religion, upheld by the law and financed by the people. Within a list of Church of England livings printed in the Hampshire Pocket Companion of 1787, the rectories for the deanery of Basingstoke included ‘Dean—George Austin; Steventon—ditto’.1 This was Jane Austen’s father, who was rector of the parish of Deane and of nearby Steventon. When he retired to Bath in 1801, his son James took over as his curate at Steventon. Jane wrote to Cassandra about how they were let down in their attempts to find a curate for Deane: ‘Mr. Peter Debary has declined Deane curacy; he wishes to be settled near London. A foolish reason! as if Deane were not near London in comparison of Exeter or York.’2

  Lords, landowners and clergy were intertwined, both socially and financially, and the appointment of clergy was generally due to friends, family, influence and attending the right university college, something that the Frenchman Louis Simond had observed: ‘You meet in the best society a number of young clergymen, brought up in the expectancy of some good living, of which their friends or family have the presentation.’3 Men might be selected who anticipated marrying into a particular family – the kind of social manoeuvring that occurs in Jane Austen’s novels and also affected her own family. ‘Yesterday came a letter to my mother from Edward Cooper to announce, not the birth of a child, but of a living,’ she told her sister in 1799; ‘for Mrs. Leigh has begged his acceptance of the Rectory of Hamstall-Ridware in Staffordshire, vacant by Mr. Johnson’s death.’4

  Entering the Church was for most clergymen not a religious calling but a traditional career choice for the middle classes, and also for the younger sons of the gentry and upper classes who were not in line to inherit the family’s estates. Most were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge universities, such as George Austen (St John’s College, Oxford) and William Holland (Jesus College, Oxford). A class divide therefore existed between clergymen and most of their parishioners, and that was exacerbated by resentment at paying tithes as well as fees for baptisms, burials and other services.

  James Woodforde, also an Oxford graduate, became rector at Weston Longville in December 1774 when the living was presented to him by his college, as Jackson’s Oxford Journal reported: ‘A few days ago the Reverend James Woodford, Fellow of New College, was presented by the Warden and Scholars of that Society, to the Living of Weston-Longville, in the county of Norfolk, worth 300l. per annum.’5 Nowadays he is usually referred to as Parson Woodforde.6 ‘Parson’ is a title normally reserved for those clergy – rectors and vicars – who received tithes, but in popular usage any parish clergyman was called the parson.

  Rectors and vicars were beneficed clergy who held the living of one or more parishes. If they had more than one living
, a curate was employed to perform their duties. Charles Sturges was vicar at St Mary’s Church in Reading and also rector at St Luke’s in Chelsea. William Holland was his curate at Reading until 1779, when he became vicar for Over Stowey in Somerset. In 1786 Holland also became rector of Monkton Farleigh near Bath, but returned permanently to Over Stowey in 1798, leaving a curate in charge at Monkton. These multiple livings (referred to as ‘pluralism’) were subject to criticism. In July 1790 John Byng was staying at Holbeach, Lincolnshire, in an inn opposite All Saints Church: ‘The waiter…did not advise me to stay the service of tomorrow [Sunday], as their poor curate…had but a bad delivery…as for the rector of this rich living, he never was here but when presented to it. Think of that ye bishops: and yet this living was given to him by the Bishop of Lincoln!’7 Byng was constantly irritated by non-resident clergy, as at Knaresborough in Yorkshire: ‘I enquired of the Clerk if the preaching was good? “Aye”, said he, “from our Curate”. “But where is your Rector”? “He never comes but once’t a year, at election of the Parish officers…He was put in by Ld. Loughborough”.’8

  The higher classes and the clergy were also bound together by Freemasonry. Woodforde summarised his introduction to the Order at Oxford on 21 April 1774:

  I went with Holmes to day to the Free-Masons Lodge held this day at the New Inn, was there admitted as a Member of the same and dined and spent the afternoon with them. The form and ceremony on the occasion I must beg leave to omit putting down. Paid on admission for fees etc. £3.5.0. It is a very honourable as well as charitable institution and much more than I could conceive it was. Am very glad in being a Member of it.9