The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [45]
Lady Mary’s dirtiness was remarked upon, no doubt because she was an aristocrat, but in many ways it suited the England of her day. Women wore leather or bone stays, sometimes for decades, without washing them. Their quilted underskirts, also never washed, served until they were reduced to filthy, greasy tatters. Thomas Turner, a Sussex grocer in mid-century, held that a man should bathe regularly each spring—once—in connection with the annual bloodletting. His was not an extraordinary view. Travelling up the social scale, as Lady Mary’s reputation makes clear, did not guarantee an increase in cleanliness. James Boswell, an educated member of the Scottish landed gentry and Samuel Johnson’s biographer, washed so rarely that his odour was infamous. The Duke of Norfolk’s servants seized the opportunity to bathe him when he was insensible from drink. In his right mind, he never washed more than hands and face.
UNPEELING AN UNDERSHIRT
“[The Marquis d’Argens] had worn a flannel under-waistcoat four years and durst not take it off for fear of catching cold. The King [of Prussia] drove out one fear by another, and told him that if he persisted to wear that waistcoat, his perspiration would be entirely stopped, and he must inevitably die. The Marquis agreed to quit his waistcoat. But it had so fixed itself upon him that pieces of his skin came away with it.”
—James Boswell, 1764
Rich and poor, men and women lived in close connection with each other’s dirt, excrement and bad smells. The traditional departure of the ladies from the dining room after dinner in smart English houses enabled the gentlemen to open a door in the Chippendale sideboard, or a sliding panel in the wall, extract a chamber pot and relieve themselves without interrupting the conversation. Lord Chesterfield knew a man who ripped a few pages from his copy of Horace’s poems when he went to the privy and read them while defecating. When he had finished, he wiped himself with the poems. The fact that he wiped at all meant that he was more fastidious than many of his contemporaries.
And yet change was in the air, wafting down from the top of the social ladder. Long-standing habits of mind and body were being unsettled—at least for some aristocrats, gentry and members of the enlightened middle class—and the centuries-old aversion to water was weakening. The causes, as large as Romanticism and as small as the popularity of cotton clothes, are various, and the English love of the cold bath is as good a place to start as any.
One of the first important post-classical recommendations for this daunting practice appears in John Locke’s 1693 treatise on the rearing of a boy, called Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In it, he recommends washing the boy’s feet every day in cold water and putting him in shoes so thin that they would leak and let in more water. “It is recommendable for its cleanliness,” Locke writes of his idea, “but that which I aim at in it is health.” He claimed that immersing the boy’s legs and feet in increasingly cold water would harden and strengthen him. Although Locke was a doctor as well as a philosopher, his theory had more to do with wishful thinking than sound physiology. Also, his classical education had familiarized him with the ancient effeminate-warm-water versus virile-cold-water debate, and he emphatically sided with such hardy cold-bathers as Horace and Seneca.
In 1701, another doctor, Sir John Floyer, published The History of Cold Bathing, which made much more extravagant claims for immersion in cold water. The history consisted mostly of stories about the Greeks, Romans and unlettered northern peoples who bathed in cold water, followed by a catalogue of wondrous cures.