At Home - Bill Bryson [190]
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 brief spell of celestial importance.
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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