The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [60]
—Richard Ford, English Hispanophile and essayist, 1845
Nor was a bath in one of the stately homes of England guaranteed to be pleasant, at least as Lord Ernest Hamilton remembered his boyhood in the 1860s and ’70s. Immersed in a large iron tank that was shrouded on the outside in mahogany, the bather consulted a brass dial and chose Hot, Cold or Waste. When cold water was wanted, a clean, colourless flow appeared from a circle of perforations at the bottom of the bath.
A call on the hot water supply, however, did not meet with an effusive or even a warm response. A succession of sepulchral rumblings was succeeded by the appearance of a small geyser of rust—coloured water, heavily charged with dead earwigs and bluebottles. This continued for a couple of minutes or so and then entirely ceased. The only perceptible difference between the hot water and the cold lay in its colour and the cargo of defunct life which the former bore on its bosom. Both were stone cold.
Small wonder that these tubs “were not popular as instruments of cleanliness.” Lord Ernest and his brother used theirs instead as a lake for toy boats and as an occasional aquarium.
Luckily for the Briton who was intent on cleanliness, there were various ways to achieve it, each described in a book published in 1860, The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen. A warm bath of 96 to 100 degrees would clean best, according to the anonymous author, but left the bather powerless and prostrate. A cold bath “cleanses less, but invigourates more.” It was a perilous venture even a day after eating a heavy meal, and “persons of full temperament” should avoid it altogether. As for the shower, which was dangerous for general use, the less said the better.
In 1849, at Miss Browning’s Academy at Blackheath, parents paid extra for their daughters to take a weekly hot bath. Two sisters who did so were called “the bathing Garretts.”
The Habits of Good Society goes into considerable detail about materials and technique for the bath it considers safest, the daily sponge bath. A flat metal basin, about four feet in diameter, should be filled with cold water. The ideal sponge, as coarse as possible, is a hefty one foot in length and six inches across. When completely filled with water, it should first attack the stomach: “It is there that the most heat has collected during the night, and the application of cold water quickens the circulation at once.” To soap or not to soap the body is debatable, but the writer prefers a rough towel or hair glove, without soap. After a man’s bath, the author recommends exercise, with or without dumbbells: “The best plan of all is, to choose some object in your bedroom on which to vent your hatred, and box at it violently for some ten minutes, till the perspiration covers you. The sponge must then be again applied to the whole body. It is very desirable to remain without clothing as long as possible, and I should therefore recommend that every part of the toilet which can conveniently be performed without dressing, should be so.”
The people wielding sponges and boxing at lampshades were almost invariably from the middle and upper classes. The working class still lacked the means for thorough and frequent washing, a fact that was making the English increasingly uncomfortable. Somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century, people started becoming aware that the poor were dirtier than the well-off. Although that sounds like an obvious and ancient idea, it was in fact relatively new. When the middle and upper classes feared water, roughly from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, they washed as little as peasants or the urban poor. In fact, since the royal body was the most precious body in the kingdom, and hence deserved the greatest protection from the dangerous assault of water, it is possible