The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [38]
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson defended a friend, the poet Christopher Smart, who was sent to a madhouse. One of the charges against Smart was, as Johnson put it, that “he did not love clean linen.” To which Johnson, whose poor grooming was notorious, added that he himself “had no passion for it.” The middle and upper classes in the seventeenth century did have a passion for clean linen. Today we appreciate the appeal and the connotation of crisp white clothing and bed-linen—Estée Lauder’s popular perfume White Linen, launched in 1978, was joined in 2006 by the even more impeccably named Pure White Linen, personified by Gwyneth Paltrow—but our ancestors took it far more seriously.
OF MADRID NIGHTS AND CHAMBER POTS
“At eleven at night every one empties those things in the street, and by ten the next day it is so dried up… They say it’s a thing prescribed by their physicians; forthey hold the air to be so piercing and subtle, that this kind of corrupting it with these ill vapours keeps it in good temper.”
—English courtier, 1623
On the basis of their “white and fine linen,” Fynes Moryson singled out the women of Brabant as the cleanest in the Netherlands. When Marie Adelaide, the daughter of the Duc de Savoy, became engaged to the Duc de Bourgogne, she was sent to the French court to be educated. Madame de Maintenon, who was in charge of her care, measured the twelve-year-old’s cleanliness by her need for linen. “They give her fresh underlinen every week,” she wrote the girl’s mother about Marie Adelaide’s servants, “but she is cleaner and neater, by far, than the majority of children, and scarcely needs clean clothes.”
The linen in question for both men and women was a smock-like shirt, or chemise, that reached to the knees. (Since Englishwomen did not wear underpants until the eighteenth century, the smock was their only underwear. Women on the Continent were wearing silk or linen under-breeches at least by the sixteenth century.) A story about a beautiful Renaissance aristocrat, Mary of Cleves, is a telling glimpse into a time that saw fresh linen as the route to cleanliness and that savoured at least some bodily odours. At her wedding to the Prince de Condé, the sixteen-year-old princess danced long and hard. Repairing to a cloakroom to freshen up, she changed her chemise. As usual, there is no mention of applying water, much less soap, to her perspiring upper body, simply the change of linen. At the same time, the Duc d’Anjou (later Henri III) entered the cloakroom to brush his hair and mistook the princess’s damp and discarded chemise for a towel. Wiping his face with it, he fell instantly in love with its pheromone-laced smell and the woman who produced it.
A young man courting an Austrian peasant girl hid his handkerchief in his armpit during a dance. When the object of his affection became flushed with exertion, he gallantly wiped her face with his handkerchief. His perspiration succeeded where all else had failed, and she was instantly smitten.
As linen became ever more the emblem of cleanliness and hence gentility, the man’s shirt and the woman’s chemise became increasingly visible. After being hidden under wool or fur in the Middle Ages, a thin edge peeks out at the collar in the last decades of the fifteenth century. In Hans Holbein’s portraits of Elizabethan men and women, a broader expanse of linen sees the light of day, under a V-necked or round-necked over-garment. In the seventeenth century, the shirt comes into its own—for men, flaunting falling bands or cravat at the neck, gaping through slashed sleeves, ballooning out from the bottom of the doublet; for women, sporting ruffles at the plunging neck, with full sleeves that extended well beyond the dress sleeves.
The linen shirt begins to emerge, as seen in Hans Holbein’s brother Ambrosius’ sixteenth-century