Made In America - Bill Bryson [144]
Even among the middle classes bathing was a novel experience until well into the 1800s. At the turn of the century one Elizabeth Drinker noted in her diary that she had just had her first bath in twenty-eight years, and the tone with which she recorded the fact indicates that there was nothing particularly remarkable in allowing a quarter-century or so to pass between immersions.8 Not until the 1820s did bath-tubs begin to be produced commercially, though for their first half-century they would be called bathing-tubs. Bath-tub is not recorded until 1870, when it appeared in a story by Mark Twain.
At about the time that bath-tubs first became commercially available, the toilet began its long, slow move indoors. At first it was generally installed in a small room separate from the bathroom, and was normally called the water closet in the British fashion, though there was a vogue – unfortunately short-lived if you ask me – for calling it a quincy after John Quincy Adams installed the first one in the White House. Bathroom is first noted in 1836, though toilet paper, intriguingly, isn’t found before 1880. Washroom also first appeared in 1880 and had been further euphemized into restroom by 1900.
If America got off to a slow start in terms of civilizing comforts, by the 1840s it was racing ahead of Europe and the rest of the world – ironically at just about the time that British criticisms of American life were reaching full shriek. Department stores and restaurants brought a measure of democratic luxury and convenience to the middle classes that their European counterparts would not enjoy for at least half a century. American trains were plusher, faster and equipped with lavatories at a time when Europeans had to hope for either a strong bladder or a short trip, and her city streets were better lit at night. Above all, where America began to stand out was in the quality of its hotels.
In the sense of a place to stay for the night, the word is, rather surprisingly, an Americanism. In French, hôtel signified a grand structure (as in hôtel de ville, ’town hall’), but as early as the eighteenth century Americans were using it to describe hostelries.9 America’s first grand hotel was the City Hotel in Baltimore, built in 1826. Three years later Boston’s Tremont House opened. Soon palatial hotels were opening all over the country – the Astor House in New York, the Burnet House in Cincinnati, the St Charles in New Orleans, the Maxwell House in Nashville.
These establishments led the way in the development of all manner of comforts – central heating, spring beds, elevators (New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel was the first hotel to get one, in 1859) and, towards the end of the century, electric lighting and telephones. Just as elevators made department stores possible, so too did they transform hotels. Previously rooms on the upper floors had to be let at a discount since few guests would wish to drag suitcases up and down several flights of stairs. Suddenly, thanks to elevators, rooms on the upper floors could be let at a premium. As the Otis Elevator Company’s sales literature persuasively cooed, guests could now ‘enjoy a purity and coolness of atmosphere, an extended prospect, and an exemption from noise, dust and exhalations of every kind’.10 Even the most critical foreign observer was hard pressed to find complaint with American hotels. Anthony Trollope, the novelist son of Frances, was so impressed that he devoted a whole chapter of one of his travel books to this most marvellous of New World innovations.11
Homes, too, became notably better equipped with conveniences like furnaces and artificial lighting than those of Europe, though the severity of the American climate made comfort an elusive goal even among the