The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [61]
Now that rough equality between the classes was dying out. In 1804, Lady Buckingham celebrated her birthday with a dance for the tenant farmers on her estate. “We all danced with the tenants,” one of her house guests reported. “I laughed a great deal to see the different mixture of people. We could hardly breathe it was so hot and the smell was beyond anything.” The fact that the poor smelled unpleasant was only noticeable once Lady Buckingham and her house guests washed more and hence smelled better. When William Makepeace Thackeray coined the term “the Great Unwashed” in 1849, in his novel Pendennis, he was naming a new kind of class divide.
English women “wash every other part of the body, but, unhappily for their own comfort as well as that of their husbands, they seem averse to let clean water reach the vagina.”
—Dr. William Acton, 1841
The threat of disease made this particular chasm not just disagreeable but frightening, and nowhere more so than in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution had been born and was mushrooming most quickly. Spurred on by the belief that unventilated rooms, foul odours and decomposing garbage made them sick, the middle classes in mid-century were taking steps to clean themselves and their houses. But the filthy conditions of the urban poor were more difficult to correct, and dangerous not only to themselves but to the larger population. Again and again in his novels, Dickens uses the fear of contagion to symbolize the interconnectedness of society on all levels. The smallpox that spreads from the wretched hovel of Jo the crossing—sweeper to the comfortable home of Lady Dedlock’s daughter in Bleak House (1853), for example, is a forceful reminder that the neglect of its weakest members makes society as a whole vulnerable.
At the same time, the squalor of the industrial cities was worsening. The potato famine in Ireland sent tens of thousands of poor people to England, especially to Liverpool. In 1841, the twenty—seven houses of Church Lane, in the St. Giles district of London, held 655 people. Only six years later, the same houses held 1,095 people. Unclean water and filthy housing allowed typhoid, typhus, diphtheria and other infectious illnesses to flourish as a matter of course. But it was the appearance of cholera—an acute, often fatal disease, native to China and India—in the 1830s that finally terrified Britons into action. Out of self-interest, if not benevolence, England needed to clean its meanest slums and most desperate people.
In the summer of 1842, after three years’ work, Edwin Chadwick presented his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain to the House of Lords. Aided by dozens of local observers, Chadwick, the secretary to the Poor Law Commission, painted a horrific picture of life without ventilation, functioning privies, clean water or privacy. Entire families—parents and children from babies to adolescents—slept in one bed. Chadwick quoted a doctor who was asked about the hygiene of the workers in his district. He answered: “Generally extremely filthy. I have said that I could almost smell from what street a man came who came to my surgery: I do not think the poor themselves are conscious of it, but the smell to other persons must be extremely offensive. I certainly think that the want of personal cleanliness, and of cleanliness in their rooms, and the prevalence of fever, stand in the relation of cause and effect.”
“HARD WORK AND COLD WATER”:
THE WATER BABIES
One of the nineteenth century’s most popular works for children, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies appeared in 1863 and was reprinted nearly a hundred times. Behind the adventure story lies the Victorian conviction that cold water would transform a filthy ragamuffin into a model citizen. It centres on Tom, a young chimney sweep whose physical,