At Home - Bill Bryson [188]
Water, when it was used at all, tended to be purely for medicinal purposes. By the 1570s, Bath and Buxton were both popular spas, but even then people were dubious. “Methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water,” Pepys noted in the summer of 1668 when considering the spa experience. Still, he found he liked it and spent two hours in the water on his inaugural immersion, then paid someone to carry him back to his rooms wrapped in a sheet.
By the time Europeans began to visit the New World in large numbers, they had grown so habitually malodorous that the Indians nearly always remarked on how bad they smelled. Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.
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,