The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [56]
We will probably never know what made young George Bryan Brummell a zealot for cleanliness, any more than we can understand why he took the Prince of Wales and London society by storm. The grandson of a shopkeeper and the son of an upwardly mobile clerk, Brummell, who was born in 1778, was an unlikely champion of washing and sober dress. In the late-eighteenth-century aristocratic society to which he aspired, men of dubious cleanliness wore gaudy colours and showy fabrics, and newspapers reported on men’s fashions at least as enthusiastically as they did on women’s. By about 1810, when the plainly dressed Brummell had become the standard of elegance, fashionable men were competing to wear the most unostentatious blue coats, black trousers and white shirts. Without peacock colours and extravagant trim to distract the eye from their dirt, they took up soap, water and brushes.
Little of this could have been predicted when “Buck” Brummell, as he was then called, was entertaining his classmates at Eton with his dry wit. In later years, they recalled his white stock, the stateliness of his walk and the dismay that dirty streets on a rainy day caused him. Other than that, he seemed an unremarkable young man, who left Oxford after a few months at age sixteen and joined the Tenth Hussars, commanded by the Prince of Wales. Brummell was neither particularly handsome nor obviously talented at anything. But somehow his nonchalance, his graceful deportment and his undefinable charisma captivated the sophisticated thirty—six—year—old prince.
“His clothes seemed to melt into each other with the perfection of their cut and the quiet harmony of their colour… He was the personification of freshness and cleanliness and order.”
—Virginia Woolf, “Beau Brummell”
Brummell described his aesthetic—apparently born fully matured—in a few famous phrases. Of his revolutionary restraint in dress, he said, “If John Bull turns around to look at you, you are not well-dressed, but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.” Of his consummately neat looks, he explained, “No perfumes, but very fine linen, plenty of it, and country washing.” The country washing referred to his linen, not his body, but a scrupulously clean body was the ground upon which Brummell built his elegance. In a daily, three—hour operation, he began by washing every part of himself. After shaving, he abraded himself with a “flesh—brush” made of pig’s bristles—a Regency strigil, in effect—until he looked as if he had scarlet fever. Then, taking up a dentist’s mirror and a tweezers, he removed every extraneous hair from his face. In his simple but perfectly tailored coat and pants, with starched white linen, which he changed at least three times a day, there was nothing extraordinary about Beau Brummell except his extraordinary neatness and cleanness.
While stylish London did its best to imitate him, legends circulated about Brummell’s devotion to cleanliness. He travelled everywhere with his own chamber pot, having once suffered the horror of seeing a cobweb in one in a country house he was visiting. (Such a pot, in a folding mahogany case with a carpet cover, was listed in the sale catalogue of his effects.) He is said to have objected to the admission of country gentlemen to Watier’s supper club, certain that their boots would smell of horse manure and cheap blacking. A story was told about his stay at Belvoir Castle, where, in the gallery reserved for bedrooms, a great bell hung, to be pulled only in case of fire. About half an hour after the household and their guests had retired for the night, the bell began to ring loudly enough to rouse not only the entire castle but the neighbouring houses. Confusion ensued, and everyone rushed into the hall in their night-clothes, but no fire could be found. Finally, Brummell advanced in his deliberate way, saying complacently, “Really, my good people, I regret having disturbed you, but the fact is my valet forgot to bring me my hot water.”
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