The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [58]
When Dickens designed false bookcases and books to disguise the door from the drawing room to his study, he invented a seven-volume series facetiously called “The Wisdom of Our Ancestors.” In addition to volumes called Superstition, The Block, Ignorance, The Rack, Disease and The Stake, was one simply titled Dirt.
The water closet, or toilet, also in the bathroom, would be partitioned off. “I think (as a matter of sentiment),” he wrote the architect, “the Bather would be happier and easier in mind, if the W.C. did not demonstrate itself obtrusively… I have not sufficient confidence in my strength of mind, to think that I could begin the business of every day, with the enforced contemplation of the outside of that box. I believe it would affect my bowels.”
Dickens got his first-class shower, whose strength was such that it was known in the family as “The Demon,” but not without more expense. Within a month of the family moving in, the water in the bathroom failed twice. Dickens wrote an indignant note to the Water Works, and an inspector arrived with remarkable speed and pronounced that an additional cistern, capable of holding 300 to 400 gallons, was needed. Describing himself half—jokingly as “helpless and affrighted,” Dickens ordered the second cistern immediately.
Bozerian’s Shower Bath, 1878. Exercise as well as hygiene: in this British invention, the showerer activates the water by pedalling.
Letting cold water pour down on one’s head was still controversial enough that the heiress Angela Burdett Coutts, Dickens’ friend and collaborator in charitable projects, expressed concern about its safety. Thanking her for her solicitude, he responded, “But I do sincerely believe that it does me unspeakable service. I take but a very small part of the shock, on the head; and I have quite a remarkable power of enduring fatigue for which I believe I am very much indebted to this treatment… I think it is of service to me as a Refresher—not as a taker out, but as a putter in of energy… You have not seen the dreadful instrument yet, as it is set up here!”
Not everyone shared Dickens’ enthusiasm for “the dreadful instrument” or for thorough washing in general, but more and more were experimenting with immersion. While they waited for the requisite pluck or plumbing to enter a shower or bathtub, people continued to clean themselves piecemeal, using a basin and pitcher for a stand-up wash, or a small, low tub in which they sat for a sponge bath. Ultimately, a full bath or a shower became the gold standard of cleanliness, but this did not happen for the majority of Europeans until the twentieth century. Submerging the body in water while washing it was a lost practice, and people recovered it gropingly and tentatively. That a doctor would write an article in 1861 called “Baths and How to Take Them” may seem slightly comical to us, but her audience was grateful for professional guidance through unfamiliar territory.
Hygiene manifestos and manuals multiplied in the first half of the century, as scientists ventured into a new world where cleanliness and health overlapped more than they had for centuries. The reigning doctrine of infection since the Middle Ages, the miasmatic theory, held that disease spread through bad smells, stuffy air and rotting material. Cleanliness obviously limited the spread of miasmas, but now there was an additional reason to keep clean. Beginning in the 1830s, the idea of the skin’s respiratory function captured the attention of scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. If the pores were plugged with dirt, the theory went, carbon dioxide could not exit through the skin, and experiments on animals suggested that