The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [57]
Although the Prince of Wales and Brummell had a falling out in 1812, probably because Brummell’s tart tongue ran away with him, it was his gambling debts that made life in England impossible. In 1816, he escaped his creditors by fleeing to Calais. His life in exile makes sad reading. He continued his cleansing rituals, even when taken to debtors’ prison in Caen in 1835. The loss of his freedom did not worry him as much as the absence of his dentist’s mirror, tweezers, ewer and basin, shaving and spitting dish, soaps, pomades and eau de Cologne. Their arrival in prison raised Brummell’s spirits considerably, and an astounded Frenchman described the care with which he washed all the parts of his body every day, using twelve to fifteen litres of water and two of milk. Between two and four in the afternoon, he would appear in the prison courtyard, perfectly coiffed and in immaculate linen.
After he was released, his debts mounted while his health declined. Sixteen months before he died of tertiary syphilis, which had probably plagued him for years, his intestines became paralyzed and he lost control of his bowels. The man who dreaded dying of “filthiness,” as he said when he was separated from his elaborate toilet kit, was now unable to keep himself clean. Luckily, his mental state had deteriorated so much that he seemed unaware of his condition. Cared for by the Sisters of Charity in an institution for the mentally ill, he died at sixty—two in 1840.
Brummell’s most tangible legacy, the starched white cravat, barely survived him. His wit, so admired in his London days, has neither the sting nor the complexity of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams. His name endures as a byword for a male fashion plate, but his real achievement was the connection he forged between gentlemanliness and cleanliness. At the beginning of Brummell’s career, according to his nineteenth—century biographer William Jesse, combs, hairbrushes and nail brushes “were not in general and indiscriminate use amongst the members of the clubs in St. James’s Street.” In 1886, when Jesse wrote Brummell’s biography, they were to be found in the dressing rooms of every London club. Clean and dirty had exchanged places: now the latter, not the former, was considered eccentric.
BATHS AND HOW TO TAKE THEM
EUROPE, 1815–1900
Charles Dickens was born to be clean. Finicky, fastidious, with a dandy’s taste in flashy waistcoats, he regularly inspected his children’s bedrooms for the slightest evidence of untidiness. He was also a champion of progress, which is where people placed cleanliness in the nineteenth century. In the summer of 1849, the novelist and his family rented a house on the Isle of Wight. Dickens crowed to friends that they had driven a local carpenter and “all visitors in search of the Picturesque” mad by erecting an immense wooden caravan on the beach, which shut in a waterfall and converted it into “A Shower Bath! … Which we take, every morning, to the unbounded astonishment of the aboriginal inhabitants.” Dickens sat under the shower in a big tub that was perforated at the sides and bottom. Although he took a daily cold bath in London—still a minority activity—his improvised shower struck him as even better.
As a result, when he bought a London house just off Tavistock Square in 1851, Dickens had an expensive, state-of-the-art bathroom built that included both a bathtub and a cold shower. Sending his architect a sketch of a curiously modern-looking tub and shower, framed