by Bill Bryson
There is no doubt that some standards of cleanliness were expected. When an observer of the court of King James I noted that the king never went near water except to daub his fingertips with a moist napkin, he was writing in a tone of disgust. And it is notable that people who were really grubby were generally famous for it, among whom we might include the eleventh Duke of Norfolk, who was so violently opposed to soap and water that his servants had to wait till he was dead drunk to scrub him clean; Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer, whose surface was an uninterrupted accretion of dirt; and even the refined James Boswell, whose body odor was a wonder to many in an age when that was assuredly saying something. But even Boswell was left in awe by his contemporary the Marquis d’Argens, who wore the same undershirt for so many years that when at last he was persuaded to take it off, it had so fixed itself upon him “that pieces of his skin came away with it.” For some, however, filthiness became a kind of boast. The aristocratic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was one of the first great female travelers, was so grubby that after shaking her hand a new acquaintance blurted out in amazement how dirty it was. “What would you say if you saw my feet?” Lady Mary responded brightly.
Many people grew so unused to being exposed to water in quantity that the very prospect of it left them genuinely fearful. When Henry Drinker, a prominent Philadelphian, installed a shower in his garden as late as 1798, his wife Elizabeth put off trying it out for over a year, “not having been wett all over at once, for 28 years past,” she explained.
By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough. In 1701, Sir John Floyer began to make a case for cold bathing as a cure for any number of maladies. His theory was that plunging a body into chilly water produced a sensation of “Terror and Surprize” which invigorated dulled and jaded senses.
Benjamin Franklin tried another tack. During his years in London, he developed the custom of taking “air baths,” basking naked in front of an open upstairs window. This can’t have got him any cleaner, but it seems to have done him no harm and it must at least have given the neighbors something to talk about. Also strangely popular was “dry washing”—rubbing oneself with a brush to open the pores and possibly dislodge lice. Many people believed that linen had special qualities that absorbed dirt from the skin. As Katherine Ashenburg has put it, “they ‘washed’ by changing their shirts.” Most, however, fought dirt and odor by either covering it with cosmetics and perfumes or just ignoring it. Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.
But then suddenly water became fashionable, though still only in a medicinal sense. In 1702, Queen Anne went to Bath for treatment of her gout, which boosted its curative reputation and prestige very considerably, though Anne’s problems really had nothing to do with water and everything to do with overeating. Soon spa towns were cropping up all over—Harrogate, Cheltenham, Llandridod Wells in Wales. But coastal towns claimed that the really curative waters were those of the sea—though, curiously, only within the immediate vicinity of their own particular communities. Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast guaranteed that its waters provided a balm against “Apoplexy, Epilepsie, Catalepsie, Vertigo, Jaunders, Hypochondriack Melancholy and Windiness.”
The most celebrated pioneer of water cures was Dr. Richard Russell, who in 1750 wrote, in Latin, a book on the curative properties of seawater, translated four years later as A Dissertation Concerning the Use of Sea-Water in Diseases of the Glands. Russell’s book recommended seawater as an efficacious treatment for any number of disorders, from gout and rheumatism to congestion of the brain. Sufferers had not only to immerse themselves in seawater but also to drink it in copious volumes. Russell set up practice in the fishing village of Brighthelmstone on the Sussex coast and became so successful that the town grew and grew and transmogrified into Brighton, the most fashionable coastal resort in the world in its day. Russell has been called “the inventor of the sea.”
Many in the early days bathed naked (and often caused much outrage among those inclined to take a good long look, sometimes with the aid of a telescope) while the more modest draped themselves liberally, and sometimes dangerously, in heavy robes. The real outrage came when the poorer elements started to turn up; they often stripped off on the beach “in promiscuous numbers” and then shuffled into the water for what was, for most of them, effectively their one bath of the year. For purposes of modesty bathing machines were invented. These were simply wagons that could be wheeled into the water, with doors and steps that allowed the client to enter the water safely and discreetly. A big part of the beneficial effects of sea bathing wasn’t the immersion so much as the vigorous rubbing down with dry flannels afterward.
Brighton’s future was permanently assured when in September 1783, just as the American Revolution ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the Prince of Wales visited the resort for the first time. He hoped to find some relief from swollen glands in his throat, and did. He liked Brighton so much that he immediately built his exotic Pavilion there. The prince installed a private bath that was filled with seawater so that he didn’t have to expose himself to the gaze of the common people when he took his treatments.
George III, similarly seeking privacy, went to Weymouth, a sleepy port farther west in Dorset on the south coast, but was dismayed to find thousands of well-wishers on the beach waiting to observe his first dip. When he entered the water, draped in a voluminous gown of blue serge, a band hidden in a neighboring bathing machine struck up “God Save the King.” Still, the king loved his trips to Weymouth and went almost annually until his growing madness made it impossible for him to submit his troubled brain to public gaze.
The novelist and doctor Tobias Smollett, who suffered from respiratory difficulties, took the practice to the Mediterranean. He went swimming daily in Nice, to the astonishment of the locals. “They thought it very strange, that a man seemingly consumptive should plunge into the sea, especially when the weather was so cold; and some of the doctors prognosticated immediate death,” one contemporary wrote. In fact, the practice caught on and Smollett’s book Travels Through France and Italy (1766) did a great deal to create the Riviera.
It didn’t take long for charlatans to realize that good money could be made in the bathing game. One of the most successful was James Graham (1745–1794). A self-proclaimed physician, unqualified by anything beyond his own bravura, Graham became hugely successful in Bath and London in the second half of the eighteenth century. He used magnets, batteries, and other thrumming apparatus to cure patients of any number of disorders, but especially those responsible for sexual unhappiness, such as impotence and frigidity. He took medicinal bathing to a higher, enticingly erotic level, offering his clients milk baths, friction baths, and mudbaths—or Earth Baths, as he called them—all provided in a theatrical setting involving music, classical statuary, perfumed air, and scantily clad hostesses, one of whom was said to be Emma Lyon, the future Lady Hamilton and mistress of Lord Nelson. For those whose problems failed to respond to these enticing ministrations, Graham provided an enormous, powerfully electrified “Celestial Bed” at a cost of £50 a night. The mattress was filled with rose leaves and spices.
Unfortunately, Graham grew carried away with his success and took to making boasts that even his most devoted adherents found insupportable. He titled one lecture “How to Live for Many Weeks, Months or Years Without Eating Anything Whatever,” and in another he guaranteed his listeners a healthful life to the age of 150. As his claims grew more reckless, his business faltered and then went into steep decline. In 1782, his goods were seized to pay his debts and that was the end of James Graham’s career.
Graham is always portrayed now as a ludicrous quack, and in large part of course he was, but it is also worth remembering that many of his beliefs—cold baths, plain food, hard beds, windows opened wide to fill bedrooms with healthful frosty air, and above all an abiding horror of masturbation—became cherished fixtures of English life that lasted well beyond his bri
ef spell of celestial importance.
• • •
As people adjusted to the idea that they might safely get wet from time to time, long-standing theories about personal hygiene were abruptly reversed. Now instead of it being bad to have pink skin and open pores, the belief took hold that the skin was in fact a marvelous ventilator—that carbon dioxide and other toxic inhalations were expelled through the skin, and that if pores were blocked by dust and other ancient accretions natural toxins would become trapped within and would dangerously accumulate. That’s why dirty people—the Great Unwashed of Thackeray—were so often sick. Their clogged pores were killing them. In one graphic demonstration, a doctor showed how a horse, painted all over in tar, grew swiftly enfeebled and piteously expired. (In fact, the problem for the horse wasn’t respiration but temperature regulation, though the point was, from the horse’s perspective, obviously academic.)
Washing for the sake merely of being clean and smelling nice was remarkably slow in coming, however. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, coined the phrase “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” in a sermon in 1778, he meant clean clothes, not a clean body. With respect to bodily cleanliness, he recommended only “frequent shaving and foot washing.” When the young Karl Marx went off to college in the 1830s, his fretting mother gave him strict instructions regarding hygiene and particularly enjoined him to have “a weekly scrub with sponge and soap.” By the time of the Great Exhibition, things were clearly turning. The exhibition itself featured more than seven hundred soaps and perfumes, which must have reflected some level of demand, and two years later cleanliness received another timely boost when the government finally abolished the long-standing soap tax. Even so, as late as 1861 an English doctor could write a book called Baths and How to Take Them.
What really got the Victorians to turn to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing. The Victorians had a kind of instinct for self-torment, and water became a perfect way to make that manifest. Many diaries record how people had to break the ice in their washbasins in order to ablute in the morning, and the Reverend Francis Kilvert noted with pleasure how jagged ice clung to the side of his bath and pricked his skin as he merrily bathed on Christmas morning 1870. Showers, too, had great scope for punishment, and were often designed to be as powerful as possible. One early type of shower was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.
II
Perhaps no other word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than toilet. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of toile, a word still used to describe a type of linen. Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on the dressing table (whence toiletries). Then it became the dressing table itself, then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory itself. Which explains why toilet water in English can describe something you would gladly daub on your face or, simultaneously and more basically, water in a toilet.
Garderobe, a word now extinct, went through a similar but slightly more compacted transformation. A combination of guard and robe, it first signified a storeroom, then any private room, then (briefly) a bedchamber, and finally a privy. However, the last thing privies often were was private. The Romans were particularly attached to the combining of evacuation and conversation. Their public latrines generally had twenty seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus. (To answer an inevitable question, a channel of water ran across the floor in front of each row of seats; users dipped sponges attached to sticks into the water for purposes of wiping.) Being comfortable with strangers lasted far into modern times. Hampton Court contained a “Great House of Ease” that could accommodate fourteen users at once. Charles II always took two attendants with him when he went into the lavatory. Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, has a lovingly preserved privy with two seats side by side.
The English for a long time were particularly noted for their unconcern about lavatorial privacy. Giacomo Casanova, the Italian adventurer, remarked on a visit to London how frequently he saw someone “ease his sluices” in full public view along roadsides or against buildings. Pepys notes in his diary how his wife squatted in the road “to do her business.”
Water closet dates from 1755 and originally signified the place where royal enemas were administered. The French from 1770 called an indoor toilet un lieu à l’anglaise, or “an English place,” which would seem a potential explanation for where the English word loo comes from. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson installed three indoor privies—probably the first in America—which incorporated air vents to take the odor away. By Jeffersonian standards (or actually any standards), they weren’t technologically advanced: the waste simply fell into a collecting pot, which was emptied by slaves.
The Reverend Henry Moule, a vicar in Dorset, invented the earth closet in the mid-nineteenth century. The earth closet was essentially a commode that incorporated a storage tank filled with dry earth that, with the pull of a handle, released a measured dose of soil into the receptacle, masking the smell and sight of one’s leavings. Earth closets were much appreciated for a time, particularly in rural areas, but were swiftly overtaken by flushing toilets, which didn’t just cover one’s waste, but whisked it away in a torrent of water. Or at least they did when they worked well, which wasn’t always, or even often, in the early days.
Most people continued to use chamber pots, which they kept in a cupboard in their bedrooms or closet, and which were known (for entirely obscure reasons) as jordans. Foreign visitors were frequently appalled by the English habit of keeping chamber pots in cupboards or sideboards in the dining room, which the men would pull out and use as soon as the women had withdrawn. Some rooms came supplied with a “necessary chair” in the corner as well. A French visitor to Philadelphia, Moreau de Saint-Méry, noted with astonishment how one man removed the flowers from a vase and peed in it. Another French visitor at about the same time reported asking for a chamber pot for his bedroom and being told just to go out the window like everyone else. When he insisted on being provided with something in which to do his business, his bemused host brought him a kettle, but firmly reminded him that she would need it back in the morning in time for breakfast.
The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always—really, always—involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another. There were as many complaints about the lavatorial customs of the French as the French made of others. One that had been around for centuries was that in France there was “much pissing in chimnies.” The French were also commonly accused of relieving themselves on staircases, “a practice which was still to be found at Versailles in the eighteenth century,” writes Mark Girouard in Life in the French Country House. It was the boast of Versailles that it had one hundred bathrooms and three hundred commodes, but they were oddly underused, and in 1715 an edict reassured residents and visitors that henceforth the corridors would be cleared of feces weekly.
Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected, and the contents often seeped into neighboring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: “Going down into my cellar … I put my foot into a great heap of turds … by which I found that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.”
The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described. They worked in teams of three or four. One man—the most junior, we may assume—was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by the pit to raise and lower the buckets,
and the third and fourth carried the buckets to a waiting cart. Nightsoil work was dangerous as well as disagreeable. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions, since they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 related the case of one nightsoil man who went into a privy vault in a London tavern and was overcome almost at once by the foul air. “He call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face,” one witness reported. A colleague who rushed to the man’s aid was similarly overcome. Two more men went to the vault but could not get in because of the foul air, though they did manage to open the door a little, releasing the worst of the gases. By the time rescuers were able to haul the two men out, one was dead and the other was beyond help.
Because nightsoil men charged hefty fees, cesspits in poorer districts were seldom emptied and frequently overflowed—not surprisingly given the pressures put on the average inner-city cesspit. Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In St. Giles, the worst of London’s rookeries—scene of William Hogarth’s famous engraving Gin Lane—fifty-four thousand people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, eleven hundred people lived in twenty-seven houses along one alley; that is more than forty people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found sixty-three people living in a single house. The house had nine beds—one for every seven occupants. A new word, of unknown provenance, sprang into being to describe such neighborhoods: slums. Charles Dickens was one of the first to use it, in a letter of 1851.
Such masses of humanity naturally produced enormous volumes of waste—far more than any system of cesspits could cope with. In one fairly typical report an inspector recorded visiting two houses in St. Giles where the cellars were filled with human waste to a depth of three feet. Outside, the inspector continued, the yard was six inches deep in excrement. Bricks had been stacked like stepping-stones to let the occupants cross the yard.