The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [59]
THE GREAT DIVIDE
“Are you a bath person or a shower person? It is impossible to exaggerate the character-revealing difference between the two.”
—Michel Tournier, Le miroir des idées, 1994
Although we now know that such deaths were caused more by loss of thermal control than by respiratory problems, the nineteenth—century physiologists who did the experiments convinced the hygienists that cleansing the pores regularly with warm water was crucial to health and even to life. When Francis Bacon bathed in the seventeenth century, he took remarkable precautions to keep the pores as tightly closed as possible, to minimize the water that entered the body. Now, doctors urged the opposite course. To them, a dirty skin, which was still seen by the peasantry as protective and strengthening, interfered with the proper functioning of the body.
On a visit to England in the 1860s, the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine found its houses deficient in taste. On the outside, they veered from bland to overly picturesque, “like toys made of painted cardboard.” Inside, they lacked the French attention to matching colours and styles of furniture. But what they lacked in appearance, they made up for in comfort and service, especially in their bedrooms. On his dressing table in a country house, Taine found a large jug, a small jug, a medium one for hot water, two basins, a toothbrush dish, two soap dishes and a water bottle with tumbler. On the shelf underneath was a shallow zinc tub for the morning sponge bath; nearby was a towel horse with four different kinds of towels, one very thick. In the morning, a servant brought a jug of hot water and a linen mat to stand on while washing; the water was replenished before luncheon and dinner. Taine begged pardon for these “trifling details,” but they showed the degree of luxury demanded by the English: “It has been laughingly said that they also spend one-fifth of their lives at a wash-basin.”
Bathing for health as well as cleanliness, at home or in a hotel—all possible with the folding bath cabinet.
Taine’s view was shared by many of his compatriots, who had regarded England since the end of the eighteenth century as the land of modern conveniences and hygiene. But the French overestimated the extent of British cleanliness. In 1812, London’s Common Council refused to supply the Lord Mayor with a shower bath in his residence because “the want thereof has never been complained of.” The master of a Cambridge college had a different reason for saying no when it was suggested that baths be built for the students: there was no need, he responded, since “these young men are with us only for eight weeks at a time.” Even Queen Victoria, when she took up residence in Buckingham Palace in 1837, had no bathroom. She used part of her allowance for clothing and personal items to have hot water piped into her bedroom, where she bathed in a portable tub.
Piped—in water on every floor and multiple water closets and baths had been feasible since the mid-eighteenth century, but few people, even prosperous ones, took advantage of the technology until a century later. When personal daintiness was not particularly desirable and servants could carry the water, why disrupt the household by installing a complicated system of pipes, boiler and cisterns? Hot piped water did begin to appear upstairs in expensive English houses around the 1840s, but the old ways still suited many people for decades to come. Even for people who went in for modern improvements, the situation was not perfect. The geyser, a small tank attached to the bathtub where piped—in cold water could be heated when a bath was wanted, became popular in the 1860s. Usually powered by gas, it was loud and dangerous, exploding every so often.
SPANISH ABLUTIONS
“The Duke of Frias, when a few years ago on a fortnight’s visit to an English lady,