The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [62]
One day, cleaning a great house, Tom loses his way in its endless chimneys and exits into a lady’s bedroom. There he finds a big bath filled with water and a sleeping girl with golden hair and white skin. Stunned, Tom wonders, “And are all people like that when they are washed?” and tries to rub some of the soot off his wrist. Then, he catches sight of himself in a mirror—“a little ugly, black, ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth. He turned on it angrily. What did such a little black ape want in that sweet young lady’s room?”
Tom’s conversion begins at that minute, with the realization that he is filthy. He falls into a delirium, saying over and over, “I must be clean, I must be clean.” Only after dying and finding a new life as an amphibious water baby can Tom be reborn as a human who appreciates “hard work and cold water.” Kingsley, an Anglican minister and keen sanitary reformer, ends by admonishing his young readers: “Meanwhile, do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman.”
Another doctor, from Chipping Norton, described a husband, wife and five children all ill with smallpox in one bedroom with two beds. The walls, the sheets and the patients were black; “two of the children were absolutely sticking together.” Disarmingly, the doctor adds that he has enjoyed many a biscuit and glass of wine in a dissecting room holding ten bodies under dissection, but he completely lost his appetite during his visit to the smallpox cases: “The smell on entering the apartments was exceedingly nauseous, and the room would not admit of free ventilation.”
“I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social intercourse difficult to persons of sensitive nostril. The matutinal tub divides the classes more effectually than birth, wealth or education.”
—Somerset Maugham, On a Chinese Screen, 1922
The poor themselves could be equally disarming about their personal habits. One man, when told that he had to be washed on admittance to a workhouse, protested that this was equivalent “to robbing him of a great coat which he had had for some years.” A collier in Lancashire, asked how often the drawers (those who transport coals) washed their bodies, answered, “None of the drawers ever wash their bodies. I never wash my body; I let my shirt rub the dirt off; my shirt will show that. I wash my neck and ears, and face, of course.” Of the young women working in the colliery, he said, “I do not think it is usual for the lasses to wash their bodies; my sisters never wash themselves, and seeing is believing; they wash their faces, necks and ears.” His standard of cleanliness was that of the seventeenth century: you washed what showed (“seeing is believing”) and let your linen do the rest. When the interviewer mentioned the collier’s traditional full-dress outfit of white stockings and starched, ruffled shirt, the worker assured him that the whiteness covered a wilderness of dirt: “Their legs and bodies are as black as your hat.”
In the wake of Chadwick’s report, England faced the cumbersome business of improving sanitation for the poor. Repairing, enlarging, ventilating and plumbing antiquated slums would be the work of decades, even generations. Building bathhouses was easier. Since the closing of most of London’s public bathhouses in the sixteenth century, the city had usually supported a few baths, which as in Paris were used as much for assignations and barbering as for bathing. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, as washing became more fashionable, some commercial bathhouses—with a more single-minded focus on bathing—opened, but with fees and facilities designed for the middle and upper classes.
CASANOVA IN 18TH-CENTURY LONDON
“In the evening