The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [82]
Things go from bad to worse when Eliza realizes that she is expected to take off all her clothes, something else she has never done before, since she sleeps in her clothes. “It’s not right: it’s not decent,” she protests. Mrs. Pearce answers that she can change from “a frowsy slut to a clean respectable girl” or return to selling flowers, and Eliza cries, “Oh, if only I’d a known what a dreadful thing it is to be clean I’d never have come. I didn’t know when I was well off.”
Eliza Doolittle might have bathed in a bathroom like this one, from an upper-middle-class English house at the start of the twentieth century.
Mrs. Pearce pays no attention. As if preparing to do surgery, she puts on a pair of white rubber sleeves, fills the bath with hot and cold water, tests its temperature with a thermometer, and adds bath salts and a fistful of mustard. Finally she takes up an intimidating, long-handled scrubbing brush and lathers it with a soap-ball. Eliza, by now “a piteous spectacle of abject terror,” enters the tub and Mrs. Pearce snatches away her bath gown and sets to work. The stage direction reads, “Eliza’s screams are heartrending.”
Heartrending they may be, but Eliza learns to like her bath. When she returns to the drawing room, dressed in a kimono, and joins Professor Higgins and her father, Mr. Doolittle tries to take credit for how well she’s cleaned up. She says,
I tell you, it’s easy to clean up here. Hot and cold water on tap, just as much as you like, there is. Woolly towels, there is; and a towel horse so hot, it burns your fingers. Soft brushes to scrub yourself, and a wooden bowl of soap smelling like primroses. Now I know why ladies is so clean. Washing’s a treat for them. Wish they could see what it is for the likes of me!
Only one thing about the bathroom still displeases Eliza. Brought up to abhor nudity, she is appalled by the presence of the looking glass. She doesn’t know where to look, considers breaking it and settles for throwing a towel over it. Some taboos die harder than others.
Eliza Doolittle came by her suspicions about the bath naturally. Age-old doubts about cleanliness lingered on well into the first third or half of the twentieth century in parts of Europe. A London social worker summarized the tepid attitude she found in the slums, around the time that Shaw wrote Pygmalion: “Generally speaking the people of the neighbourhood do not clamour for facilities for bathing and washing, but when such are there, the fashion for using them steadily increases.” Getting accustomed to the public baths was only the beginning. The poor had to be convinced of the health benefits of washing thoroughly. Women had to be assured that the premises were clean, quiet and patronized by schoolmistresses and other genteel women.
The baths at Dunfermline, Scotland, were unusually popular. In a survey carried out in 1913–14, half the bathers were women, an exceptionally high percentage. Accounting for the baths’ success, the investigators noted excellent accommodations and a population of “superior factory hands” without baths in their homes, schools or factories. Equally important, the baths had an enthusiastic staff and the town had “a complete absence of any social stigma attached to the use of the baths.” Even so, we would not consider Dunfermline a particularly well-washed town, at least judging by its bathhouse. A grand total of 36,510 baths were taken in a year in its thirty tubs. For a population of 28,000, that works out to one bath a year for two—thirds of the people, and two baths a year for the remaining third. Yet these figures were impressively high when compared with other places in Britain.
Perhaps a love of washing could be instilled more easily in young minds. Observers had noted the unwholesome air of slum schoolrooms, rank from dirty clothes and bodies. An international congress on school hygiene held in Paris in 1910 recommended that shower baths be built in all schools. Larger towns in Norway,