In our hall hangs a nineteenth-century framed handbill, hand-blocked in red and blue, printed by the ‘Inmates at the Prevention and Reformatory Institute, 237 Euston Rd, London’. It used to hang in the parlour of a farmhouse near Louth in Lincolnshire, close by the chair in which, according to family legend, John Wesley sat when he came to tea one memorable afternoon. It says:
RULES
To Be Observed By This Family.
Waste Not, Want not
Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing
be lost—John vi.12.
Do everything at its Proper Time
To everything there is a Season, and a time to
every purpose—Eccls.iii
Put everything in its Proper Place.
Use everything for its Proper Purpose.
Rise early. Be industrious.
Let all things be done decently and in Order—Cor. xiv.40
BE PUNCTUAL. BE REGULAR. BE CLEAN.
The chair still has a place of honour; but the Rules have been relegated by the next generation to a lowly space next to the coat rack. We no longer need to be told ‘Be Clean’—being clean is hardly worthy of comment. Even so, there are still some visitors who look at the Rules and say simply: ‘I agree with that.’ That handbill speaks with distant voices that can still be heard, but are growing fainter.
There is a certain timelessness about cleansing and cleanliness that seems to intrigue all of us—and even horrify us, when ancient purification mentalities crop up in modern politics—but there is no real mystery about cleansing and cleanliness. Historically speaking, all of it comes from somewhere, and has a reason for being. This book starts from the premiss that everything about cleanliness is datable, and traceable, and tackles its well-hidden history head-on, across all fronts. Cleansing was such a universal subject, and so obviously consisted of any number of different histories, all of them probably interrelated in various ways which we knew very little about, that it would have been unwise to leave out any scrap of evidence.
Seek and ye shall find: under every rock that was turned over were fresh sources, new angles, new events, and new people waiting to be disinterred. Hygiene was almost virgin soil, a historian’s dream. The work originally started in the nineteenth century, and many years later ended up in the Neolithic; I then slowly worked my way back again towards the twenty-first century. The trawl gradually started to turn into a coherent story. Inevitably, many of the details have had to be cut; and individual histories and close historical interpretation very much reduced, painfully, sometimes to a mere half-sentence. But half a loaf is better than none.
A few preliminary comments will be helpful. I have gradually come to think of the words ‘clean’, ‘purity’, and ‘hygiene’ as representing three—possibly even four—historical dimensions piled on top of one another, overlapping through time (for reasons I will touch on later). Simple ‘cleanliness’ I think lies at the bottom of everything, and seems to me to represent our animal and human side—not only the demands of our extremely ancient biology, but also our very ‘Neolithic’ love of grooming, orderliness, and beauty. Purity was man-made, but also lies in deep levels of time as a psychology that produced certain refined religious, or supernatural, ideologies of divine perfection and pollution that were socially imposed on animal nature and the material world. ‘Hygiene’ derives from the classical Greek word for wholesomeness and human healthiness, which then became a shorthand term for the Greek natural science of preserving and extending life. The first half of the book sketches out these main themes in some detail; while the second half deals with the subsequent literary and social history of European personal hygiene in its original, and much broader, ancient Greek sense, popularly known as ‘the regimen of health’—what we did (and do) for ourselves in order to preserve our bodies, with or without trained doctors, or publicly provided facilities. You could call it a social and cultural history of preventive medicine.
There was a lot of solid material evidence involved in all of this; but it was always obvious that there was an ‘immaterial’ world that was just as real, if not more so, to many of the actors concerned—cleanliness is, after all, next to godliness. To the religious mind the two worlds were fused as one, and could not be separated: it is called holism. This is why there had to be a history of personal hygiene and purity. The religious mind also revealed a further secret: patriarchal ascetic Puritanism had effectively wiped the history of grooming and cosmetic care from the European records, certainly from the history of hygiene. They genuinely despised its very close and happy associations with beauty, women and sex. Yet grooming and cosmetic care are two of the most intensive and regular forms of bodily cleansing that we do to ourselves, and fully deserved to be rescued.
Readers will be familiar with some parts of the story, but probably not the whole—it is not the normal view of personal hygiene. This is scarcely your fault. In fact there hasn’t been a book on the general history of hygiene for over fifty years. One historian complained in 1974 that ‘there has been no serious scholarly study of personal hygiene. The subject has been treated as a source of amusement and has been presented in the context of social history as entertainment.’ Heaven forbid. He was of course referring to the large genre of jocular coffee-table books on the history of the bath and toilet, each one a labour of love and wit, from the immortally named Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper (1969) by Wallace Reyburn, to the international best-seller Lawrence Wright’s Clean and Decent: The History of the Bath and Loo (1971).1 The serious nineteenth- and twentieth-century work on hygiene had gone into Victorian sanitary public health; and into numerous inconclusive attempts to measure the rate of hygienic Progress through economic statistics. The real death-blow in the 1970s was the switch to demography, which concentrated on the causes of birth, death, and population increase, and emphasized the importance of food supplies and marriage rates, but which provocatively reduced all types of hygiene (public or private) to a late, and minor, demographic factor. It did not look good. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the whole landscape has changed. Hygienic behaviouralism has crept back onto the agenda. The range of potential sources had grown significantly, largely owing to the sociological historian Norbert Elias, who built a psychological theory of decreased dirt tolerance (and increasing bodily refinement) into his influential study The Civilising Process; and to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who revealed the politics of pollution in Purity and Danger. We can now study hygiene without necessarily asking whether it was ‘successful’ or not; and can put the hardline models of demographers and economists (temporarily) to one side.
But if you get rid of the myth of Progress, what are you left with? Why do hygienic standards so frequently and confusingly overlap? Why (as Lawrence Wright put it) has ‘a living Englishman complained of his Oxford college that it denied him the everyday sanitary conveniences of Minoan Crete’; why has the design of baths scarcely changed in 3,000 years; why do we still have rats, lice, and fleas despite all our advances in antibiotics?2 The problem really lies in our old-fashioned philosophy of time. The March of Hygiene was traditionally thought of as an undifferentiated, linear flow of Time—also known as ‘true’ time or, as Marx called it, ‘Absolute’ time. Time as a regular succession of physical events, flowing steadily like a river. Or time measured mechanically—clock time. Traditional Western thought was strong on linear time, easily described by drawing a line on a piece of paper. If you were an ancient Greek you would have drawn a circle. If you were Hegelian you would have drawn a spiral. If you were a Victorian ‘positivist’ you would have drawn a gently rising line, a single path stretching ahead to a utopian infinity: the social philosopher William Morris gave a full account of this wonderful hygienic world to come (somewhere around the year 2003) in his famous utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890).3 Reading this work now brings a strange sense of temporal dislocation, and wry amusement. Real life is so much grubbier and unpredictable than it is in the imagination, and far more heavily weighed down with burdens from history.
But there is a more modern philosophy of time, derived from Einstein and developed by early twentieth-century European historians, which solved these temporal problems at a stroke. Norbert Elias thought of time as a river flowing at three different speeds and levels: deep, slow biological time; quickening human socio-historical time; and right at the surface, the flickering ephemera of individual memory. This became the basic structure and principle of the book.4 The Annales historian Fernand Braudel also described multidimensional time as an ‘orchestra’ of different histories, each with its own score, acting in concert. These succinct descriptions ended up providing the basic theory and chronology of the book, because, empirically speaking, comparing all the evidence from all the sources, multidimensional time-theory was the only philosophical principle that actually appeared to work. Multidimensionality accounts for all the historical continuities as well as all the historical changes. It allows the processes of Nature and Nurture to be complementary and coexistent, rather than mutually opposed; and it makes all ideas of hygienic ‘progress’, ‘modernization’, or even ‘evolution’, suddenly look like one-dimensional tunnel vision.
It would certainly take an orchestra of histories to deal with such a multifaceted phenomenon as cleansing, over such long periods. There are just two further points to be made here. I am unashamedly looking for universal trends, but do not claim to be anything other than a local European (in fact a British) historian. Potentially every part of the world—or any social group—has its own unique profile and history of cleansing, purification, or hygienic practices, and its own cultural mix. Like chess, human hygiene is played out with a set of basic options, giving rise to a very wide variety of situations. Secondly, I am not looking at dirt, but at standards of cleanliness and the reformers of cleanliness; which may make it appear as if I am taking an ‘optimistic’ historical standpoint, which is not the case. The science of hygiene is far too complex for that. Food, water supply, clothing, housing, climate, seasons, geographical location, height above sea level, size of settlement, drainage, building styles, earth floors, occupations, work patterns, immunity levels, age, sex, status, professional medical help, standards of midwifery, maternal child care, and now genes, have all been cited as ‘variables’ which could shorten—or lengthen—the lives of individuals. You could also add handkerchiefs, toothpaste, or soap. Multidimensional, multi-causal, multi-variable—how do you judge a moving bio-system?5
I recently came across the seventeenth-century scientist Robert Boyle’s classic definition of ‘The Requisites of a Good Hypothesis’: ‘That it be consistent with itself … [and] at least be consistent with the rest of the Phaenomena it particularly relates to, and does not contradict any other known Phaenomena of Nature, or any manifest Physical Truth’. That was all right; but on the next page was a rather more alarming list of ‘The Qualities and Conditions of an Excellent Hypothesis’: firstly, ‘That it be not Precarious, but have sufficient Grounds in the nature of the thing itself or at least be well recommended by some Auxiliary Proofs’; and secondly, ‘That it be the Simplest of all the good ones we are able to frame, at least containing nothing that is superfluous or impertinent’.6 Acutely aware of the many gaps in evidence and constant reliance on the expertise of so many others, I can only hope that the hypothesis and results coming from these first few exploratory trenches are neither too precarious nor impertinent.