At Home

• CHAPTER XVI •

THE BATHROOM

I

It would not be easy to find a statement on hygiene more wrong, or at least more incomplete, than this one by the celebrated architectural critic Lewis Mumford in his classic work The City in History, published in 1961:

For thousands of years city dwellers put up with defective, often quite vile, sanitary arrangements, wallowing in rubbish and filth they certainly had the power to remove, for the occasional task of removal could hardly have been more loathsome than walking and breathing in the constant presence of such ordure. If one had any sufficient explanation of this indifference to dirt and odor that are repulsive to many animals, even pigs, who take pains to keep themselves and their lairs clean, one might also have a clue to the slow and fitful nature of technological improvement itself, in the five millennia that followed the birth of the city.

In fact, as we have already seen with Skara Brae in Orkney, people have been dealing with dirt, rubbish, and wastes, often surprisingly effectively, for a very long time—and Skara Brae is by no means unique. A home of forty-five hundred years ago from the Indus Valley, at a place called Mahenjo-Daro, had a nifty system of rubbish chutes to get waste out of the living area and into a midden. Ancient Babylon had drains and a sewage system. The Minoans had running water, bathtubs, and other civilizing comforts well over thirty-five hundred years ago. In short, cleanliness and generally looking after one’s body have been important to a lot of cultures for so long that it is hard to know where to begin.

The ancient Greeks were devoted bathers. They loved to get naked—gymnasium means “the naked place”—and work up a healthful sweat, and it was their habit to conclude their daily workouts with a communal bath. But these were primarily hygienic plunges. For them bathing was a brisk business, something to be gotten over quickly. Really serious bathing—languorous bathing—starts with Rome. Nobody has ever bathed with as much devotion and precision as the Romans did.

The Romans loved water altogether—one house at Pompeii had thirty taps—and their network of aqueducts provided their principal cities with a superabundance of fresh water. The delivery rate to Rome worked out at an intensely lavish three hundred gallons per head per day, seven or eight times more than the average Roman needs today.

To Romans the baths were more than just a place to get clean. They were a daily refuge, a pastime, a way of life. Roman baths had libraries, shops, exercise rooms, barbers, beauticians, tennis courts, snack bars, and brothels. People from all classes of society used them. “It was common, when meeting a man, to ask where he bathed,” writes Katherine Ashenburg in her sparkling history of cleanliness, The Dirt on Clean. Some Roman baths were built on a truly palatial scale. The great baths of Caracalla could take sixteen hundred bathers at a time; those of Diocletian held three thousand.

A bathing Roman sloshed and gasped his way through a series of variously heated pools—from the frigidarium at the cold end of the scale to the calidarium at the other. En route he or she would stop in the unctorium (or unctuarium) to be fragrantly oiled and then forwarded to the laconium, or steam room, where, after the bather worked up a good sweat, the oils were scraped off with an instrument called a strigil to remove dirt and other impurities. All this was done in a ritualistic order, though historians are not entirely agreed on what that order was, possibly because the specifics varied from place to place and time to time. There is quite a lot we don’t know about Romans and their bathing habits—whether slaves bathed with free citizens, how often or lengthily people bathed, or with what degree of enthusiasm. Romans themselves sometimes expressed disquiet about the state of the water and what they found floating in it, which doesn’t suggest that they were all necessarily as keen for a plunge as we generally suppose them to be.

It seems, however, that for much of the Roman era the baths were marked by a certain rigid decorum, which assured a healthy rectitude, but that as time went on life in the baths—as with life in Rome generally—grew increasingly frisky, and it became common for men and women to bathe together and, possibly but by no means certainly, for females to bathe with male slaves. No one really knows quite what the Romans got up to in there, but whatever it was it didn’t sit well with the early Christians. They viewed Roman baths as licentious and depraved—morally unclean if not hygienically so.

Christianity was always curiously ill at ease with cleanliness anyway, and early on developed an odd tradition of equating holiness with dirtiness. When Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, died in 1170, those who laid him out noted approvingly that his undergarments were “seething with lice.” Throughout the medieval period, an almost surefire way to earn lasting honor was to take a vow not to wash. Many people walked from England to the Holy Land, but when a monk named Godric did it without getting wet even once, he became, all but inevitably, St. Godric.

Then in the Middle Ages the spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene and what they might do to modify their own susceptibility to outbreaks. Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapors to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years most people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it—and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everyone itched nearly all the time. Discomfort was constant, and serious illness was accepted with resignation.

Devastating diseases arose, killed millions and then, often, mysteriously vanished. The most notorious was plague (which was really two diseases: bubonic plague, named for the swollen buboes that victims got in the neck, groin, or armpit, and the even more lethal and infectious pneumonic plague, which overwhelmed the respiratory system), but there were many others. The English sweating sickness, a disease about which we still know almost nothing, had epidemics in 1485, 1508, 1517, and 1528, killing thousands as it went, before disappearing, never to return (or at least not yet). It was followed in the 1550s by another strange fever—“the new sickness”—which “raged horribly throughout the realm and killed an exceeding great number of all sorts of men, but especially gentlemen and men of great wealth,” as one contemporary noted. In between and sometimes alongside were outbreaks of ergotism, which came from a fungal infection of rye grain. People who ingested poisoned grain suffered delirium, seizures, fever, loss of consciousness, and eventually, in many cases, death. A curious aspect of ergotism is that it came with a cough very like a dog’s bark, which is thought to be the source of the expression “barking mad.”

The worst disease of all, because it was so prevalent and so devastating, was smallpox. (Smallpox was so called to distinguish it from the great pox, or syphilis.) Smallpox was of two principal types: ordinary and hemorrhagic. Both were bad, though hemorrhagic smallpox (which involved internal bleeding as well as skin pustules) was the more painful and lethal, killing 90 percent of its victims, nearly double the rate for ordinary smallpox. Until the eighteenth century, when vaccination came in, smallpox killed four hundred thousand people a year in Europe west of Russia. No other disease came close to the totals smallpox achieved.

For survivors, smallpox was a cruelly fickle disease, leaving many of its survivors blinded or dreadfully scarred, but others unscathed. It had existed for millennia, but didn’t become common in Europe until the early sixteenth century. Its first recorded appearance in England was not until 1518. A bout of smallpox began with the sudden onset of high fever, accompanied by aches, pains, and powerful thirst. On about the third day, usually, pustules began to appear and to spread across the body in quantities that varied from victim to victim. The worst news was to learn that a loved one was “exceeding full.” In such cases, the victim became essentially one large pustule. This stage was accompanied by more high fevers, and the pustules would break, releasing a foul-smelling pus. If the victim survived them she would generally survive the illness. But her problems were hardly ended. The pustules now scabbed over and began to itch in a most agonizing manner. Not until the scabs fell off did one know whether or how seriously one was scarred. As a young woman, Queen Elizabeth was nearly killed by smallpox, but she recovered completely and without scars. Her friend Lady Mary Sidney, who nursed her, was not so lucky. “I left her a full fair lady,” wrote her husband, “ … and when I returned I found her as foul a lady as the smallpox could make her.” The Duchess of Richmond, who modeled for the figure of Britannia on the English penny, was similarly disfigured a century later.

Smallpox also had much to answer for regarding the treatments of other diseases. The release of pus led to the conviction that the body was trying to rid itself of poisons, so smallpox victims were vigorously bled, purged, lanced, and sweated—remedies that were soon applied to all kinds of conditions and nearly always only made matters worse.

Clearly not all of these dreadful maladies were directly related to washing, but people didn’t necessarily know that or even care. Although everyone knew that syphilis was spread through sexual contact, which could of course take place anywhere, it became indelibly associated with bathhouses. Prostitutes generally were banned from coming within a hundred paces of a bathhouse, and eventually Europe’s bathhouses were closed altogether. With the bathhouses gone, most people got out of the habit of washing—not that many of them were entirely in it to begin with. Washing wasn’t unknown, just a little selective. “Wash your hands often, your feet seldom, and your head never” was a common English proverb. Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month “whether she needs it or no.” In 1653, John Evelyn, the diarist, noted a tentative decision to wash his hair annually. Robert Hooke, the scientist, washed his feet often (because he found it soothing) but appears not to have spent much time damp above the ankles. Samuel Pepys mentions his wife’s bathing only once in the diary he kept for nine and a half years. In France, King Louis XIII went unbathed until almost his seventh birthday, in 1608.

Water, when it was used at all, tended to be purely for medicinal purposes. By the 1570s, Bath and Buxton were both popular spas, but even then people were dubious. “Methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water,” Pepys noted in the summer of 1668 when considering the spa experience. Still, he found he liked it and spent two hours in the water on his inaugural immersion, then paid someone to carry him back to his rooms wrapped in a sheet.

By the time Europeans began to visit the New World in large numbers, they had grown so habitually malodorous that the Indians nearly always remarked on how bad they smelled. Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.

There is no doubt that some standards of cleanliness were expected. When an observer of the court of King James I noted that the king never went near water except to daub his fingertips with a moist napkin, he was writing in a tone of disgust. And it is notable that people who were really grubby were generally famous for it, among whom we might include the eleventh Duke of Norfolk, who was so violently opposed to soap and water that his servants had to wait till he was dead drunk to scrub him clean; Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer, whose surface was an uninterrupted accretion of dirt; and even the refined James Boswell, whose body odor was a wonder to many in an age when that was assuredly saying something. But even Boswell was left in awe by his contemporary the Marquis d’Argens, who wore the same undershirt for so many years that when at last he was persuaded to take it off, it had so fixed itself upon him “that pieces of his skin came away with it.” For some, however, filthiness became a kind of boast. The aristocratic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was one of the first great female travelers, was so grubby that after shaking her hand a new acquaintance blurted out in amazement how dirty it was. “What would you say if you saw my feet?” Lady Mary responded brightly.

Many people grew so unused to being exposed to water in quantity that the very prospect of it left them genuinely fearful. When Henry Drinker, a prominent Philadelphian, installed a shower in his garden as late as 1798, his wife Elizabeth put off trying it out for over a year, “not having been wett all over at once, for 28 years past,” she explained.

By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough. In 1701, Sir John Floyer began to make a case for cold bathing as a cure for any number of maladies. His theory was that plunging a body into chilly water produced a sensation of “Terror and Surprize” which invigorated dulled and jaded senses.

Benjamin Franklin tried another tack. During his years in London, he developed the custom of taking “air baths,” basking naked in front of an open upstairs window. This can’t have got him any cleaner, but it seems to have done him no harm and it must at least have given the neighbors something to talk about. Also strangely popular was “dry washing”—rubbing oneself with a brush to open the pores and possibly dislodge lice. Many people believed that linen had special qualities that absorbed dirt from the skin. As Katherine Ashenburg has put it, “they ‘washed’ by changing their shirts.” Most, however, fought dirt and odor by either covering it with cosmetics and perfumes or just ignoring it. Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.

But then suddenly water became fashionable, though still only in a medicinal sense. In 1702, Queen Anne went to Bath for treatment of her gout, which boosted its curative reputation and prestige very considerably, though Anne’s problems really had nothing to do with water and everything to do with overeating. Soon spa towns were cropping up all over—Harrogate, Cheltenham, Llandridod Wells in Wales. But coastal towns claimed that the really curative waters were those of the sea—though, curiously, only within the immediate vicinity of their own particular communities. Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast guaranteed that its waters provided a balm against “Apoplexy, Epilepsie, Catalepsie, Vertigo, Jaunders, Hypochondriack Melancholy and Windiness.”

The most celebrated pioneer of water cures was Dr. Richard Russell, who in 1750 wrote, in Latin, a book on the curative properties of seawater, translated four years later as A Dissertation Concerning the Use of Sea-Water in Diseases of the Glands. Russell’s book recommended seawater as an efficacious treatment for any number of disorders, from gout and rheumatism to congestion of the brain. Sufferers had not only to immerse themselves in seawater but also to drink it in copious volumes. Russell set up practice in the fishing village of Brighthelmstone on the Sussex coast and became so successful that the town grew and grew and transmogrified into Brighton, the most fashionable coastal resort in the world in its day. Russell has been called “the inventor of the sea.”

Many in the early days bathed naked (and often caused much outrage among those inclined to take a good long look, sometimes with the aid of a telescope) while the more modest draped themselves liberally, and sometimes dangerously, in heavy robes. The real outrage came when the poorer elements started to turn up; they often stripped off on the beach “in promiscuous numbers” and then shuffled into the water for what was, for most of them, effectively their one bath of the year. For purposes of modesty bathing machines were invented. These were simply wagons that could be wheeled into the water, with doors and steps that allowed the client to enter the water safely and discreetly. A big part of the beneficial effects of sea bathing wasn’t the immersion so much as the vigorous rubbing down with dry flannels afterward.

Brighton’s future was permanently assured when in September 1783, just as the American Revolution ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the Prince of Wales visited the resort for the first time. He hoped to find some relief from swollen glands in his throat, and did. He liked Brighton so much that he immediately built his exotic Pavilion there. The prince installed a private bath that was filled with seawater so that he didn’t have to expose himself to the gaze of the common people when he took his treatments.

George III, similarly seeking privacy, went to Weymouth, a sleepy port farther west in Dorset on the south coast, but was dismayed to find thousands of well-wishers on the beach waiting to observe his first dip. When he entered the water, draped in a voluminous gown of blue serge, a band hidden in a neighboring bathing machine struck up “God Save the King.” Still, the king loved his trips to Weymouth and went almost annually until his growing madness made it impossible for him to submit his troubled brain to public gaze.

The novelist and doctor Tobias Smollett, who suffered from respiratory difficulties, took the practice to the Mediterranean. He went swimming daily in Nice, to the astonishment of the locals. “They thought it very strange, that a man seemingly consumptive should plunge into the sea, especially when the weather was so cold; and some of the doctors prognosticated immediate death,” one contemporary wrote. In fact, the practice caught on and Smollett’s book Travels Through France and Italy (1766) did a great deal to create the Riviera.

It didn’t take long for charlatans to realize that good money could be made in the bathing game. One of the most successful was James Graham (1745–1794). A self-proclaimed physician, unqualified by anything beyond his own bravura, Graham became hugely successful in Bath and London in the second half of the eighteenth century. He used magnets, batteries, and other thrumming apparatus to cure patients of any number of disorders, but especially those responsible for sexual unhappiness, such as impotence and frigidity. He took medicinal bathing to a higher, enticingly erotic level, offering his clients milk baths, friction baths, and mudbaths—or Earth Baths, as he called them—all provided in a theatrical setting involving music, classical statuary, perfumed air, and scantily clad hostesses, one of whom was said to be Emma Lyon, the future Lady Hamilton and mistress of Lord Nelson. For those whose problems failed to respond to these enticing ministrations, Graham provided an enormous, powerfully electrified “Celestial Bed” at a cost of £50 a night. The mattress was filled with rose leaves and spices.

Unfortunately, Graham grew carried away with his success and took to making boasts that even his most devoted adherents found insupportable. He titled one lecture “How to Live for Many Weeks, Months or Years Without Eating Anything Whatever,” and in another he guaranteed his listeners a healthful life to the age of 150. As his claims grew more reckless, his business faltered and then went into steep decline. In 1782, his goods were seized to pay his debts and that was the end of James Graham’s career.

Graham is always portrayed now as a ludicrous quack, and in large part of course he was, but it is also worth remembering that many of his beliefs—cold baths, plain food, hard beds, windows opened wide to fill bedrooms with healthful frosty air, and above all an abiding horror of masturbation—became cherished fixtures of English life that lasted well beyond his brief spell of celestial importance.

• • •

As people adjusted to the idea that they might safely get wet from time to time, long-standing theories about personal hygiene were abruptly reversed. Now instead of it being bad to have pink skin and open pores, the belief took hold that the skin was in fact a marvelous ventilator—that carbon dioxide and other toxic inhalations were expelled through the skin, and that if pores were blocked by dust and other ancient accretions natural toxins would become trapped within and would dangerously accumulate. That’s why dirty people—the Great Unwashed of Thackeray—were so often sick. Their clogged pores were killing them. In one graphic demonstration, a doctor showed how a horse, painted all over in tar, grew swiftly enfeebled and piteously expired. (In fact, the problem for the horse wasn’t respiration but temperature regulation, though the point was, from the horse’s perspective, obviously academic.)

Washing for the sake merely of being clean and smelling nice was remarkably slow in coming, however. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, coined the phrase “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” in a sermon in 1778, he meant clean clothes, not a clean body. With respect to bodily cleanliness, he recommended only “frequent shaving and foot washing.” When the young Karl Marx went off to college in the 1830s, his fretting mother gave him strict instructions regarding hygiene and particularly enjoined him to have “a weekly scrub with sponge and soap.” By the time of the Great Exhibition, things were clearly turning. The exhibition itself featured more than seven hundred soaps and perfumes, which must have reflected some level of demand, and two years later cleanliness received another timely boost when the government finally abolished the long-standing soap tax. Even so, as late as 1861 an English doctor could write a book called Baths and How to Take Them.

What really got the Victorians to turn to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing. The Victorians had a kind of instinct for self-torment, and water became a perfect way to make that manifest. Many diaries record how people had to break the ice in their washbasins in order to ablute in the morning, and the Reverend Francis Kilvert noted with pleasure how jagged ice clung to the side of his bath and pricked his skin as he merrily bathed on Christmas morning 1870. Showers, too, had great scope for punishment, and were often designed to be as powerful as possible. One early type of shower was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.

II

Perhaps no other word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than toilet. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of toile, a word still used to describe a type of linen. Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on the dressing table (whence toiletries). Then it became the dressing table itself, then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory itself. Which explains why toilet water in English can describe something you would gladly daub on your face or, simultaneously and more basically, water in a toilet.

Garderobe, a word now extinct, went through a similar but slightly more compacted transformation. A combination of guard and robe, it first signified a storeroom, then any private room, then (briefly) a bedchamber, and finally a privy. However, the last thing privies often were was private. The Romans were particularly attached to the combining of evacuation and conversation. Their public latrines generally had twenty seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus. (To answer an inevitable question, a channel of water ran across the floor in front of each row of seats; users dipped sponges attached to sticks into the water for purposes of wiping.) Being comfortable with strangers lasted far into modern times. Hampton Court contained a “Great House of Ease” that could accommodate fourteen users at once. Charles II always took two attendants with him when he went into the lavatory. Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, has a lovingly preserved privy with two seats side by side.

The English for a long time were particularly noted for their unconcern about lavatorial privacy. Giacomo Casanova, the Italian adventurer, remarked on a visit to London how frequently he saw someone “ease his sluices” in full public view along roadsides or against buildings. Pepys notes in his diary how his wife squatted in the road “to do her business.”

Water closet dates from 1755 and originally signified the place where royal enemas were administered. The French from 1770 called an indoor toilet un lieu à l’anglaise, or “an English place,” which would seem a potential explanation for where the English word loo comes from. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson installed three indoor privies—probably the first in America—which incorporated air vents to take the odor away. By Jeffersonian standards (or actually any standards), they weren’t technologically advanced: the waste simply fell into a collecting pot, which was emptied by slaves.

The Reverend Henry Moule, a vicar in Dorset, invented the earth closet in the mid-nineteenth century. The earth closet was essentially a commode that incorporated a storage tank filled with dry earth that, with the pull of a handle, released a measured dose of soil into the receptacle, masking the smell and sight of one’s leavings. Earth closets were much appreciated for a time, particularly in rural areas, but were swiftly overtaken by flushing toilets, which didn’t just cover one’s waste, but whisked it away in a torrent of water. Or at least they did when they worked well, which wasn’t always, or even often, in the early days.

Most people continued to use chamber pots, which they kept in a cupboard in their bedrooms or closet, and which were known (for entirely obscure reasons) as jordans. Foreign visitors were frequently appalled by the English habit of keeping chamber pots in cupboards or sideboards in the dining room, which the men would pull out and use as soon as the women had withdrawn. Some rooms came supplied with a “necessary chair” in the corner as well. A French visitor to Philadelphia, Moreau de Saint-Méry, noted with astonishment how one man removed the flowers from a vase and peed in it. Another French visitor at about the same time reported asking for a chamber pot for his bedroom and being told just to go out the window like everyone else. When he insisted on being provided with something in which to do his business, his bemused host brought him a kettle, but firmly reminded him that she would need it back in the morning in time for breakfast.

The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always—really, always—involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another. There were as many complaints about the lavatorial customs of the French as the French made of others. One that had been around for centuries was that in France there was “much pissing in chimnies.” The French were also commonly accused of relieving themselves on staircases, “a practice which was still to be found at Versailles in the eighteenth century,” writes Mark Girouard in Life in the French Country House. It was the boast of Versailles that it had one hundred bathrooms and three hundred commodes, but they were oddly underused, and in 1715 an edict reassured residents and visitors that henceforth the corridors would be cleared of feces weekly.

Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected, and the contents often seeped into neighboring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: “Going down into my cellar … I put my foot into a great heap of turds … by which I found that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.”

The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described. They worked in teams of three or four. One man—the most junior, we may assume—was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and the third and fourth carried the buckets to a waiting cart. Nightsoil work was dangerous as well as disagreeable. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions, since they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 related the case of one nightsoil man who went into a privy vault in a London tavern and was overcome almost at once by the foul air. “He call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face,” one witness reported. A colleague who rushed to the man’s aid was similarly overcome. Two more men went to the vault but could not get in because of the foul air, though they did manage to open the door a little, releasing the worst of the gases. By the time rescuers were able to haul the two men out, one was dead and the other was beyond help.

Because nightsoil men charged hefty fees, cesspits in poorer districts were seldom emptied and frequently overflowed—not surprisingly given the pressures put on the average inner-city cesspit. Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In St. Giles, the worst of London’s rookeries—scene of William Hogarth’s famous engraving Gin Lane—fifty-four thousand people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, eleven hundred people lived in twenty-seven houses along one alley; that is more than forty people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found sixty-three people living in a single house. The house had nine beds—one for every seven occupants. A new word, of unknown provenance, sprang into being to describe such neighborhoods: slums. Charles Dickens was one of the first to use it, in a letter of 1851.

Such masses of humanity naturally produced enormous volumes of waste—far more than any system of cesspits could cope with. In one fairly typical report an inspector recorded visiting two houses in St. Giles where the cellars were filled with human waste to a depth of three feet. Outside, the inspector continued, the yard was six inches deep in excrement. Bricks had been stacked like stepping-stones to let the occupants cross the yard.

At Leeds in the 1830s, a survey of the poorer districts found that many streets were “floating with sewage”; one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for fifteen years. In Liverpool, as many as one-sixth of the populace lived in dark cellars, where wastes could all too easily seep in. And of course human waste was only a small part of the enormous heaps of filth that were generated in the crowded and rapidly industrializing cities. In London, the Thames absorbed anything that wasn’t wanted: condemned meat, offal, dead cats and dogs, food waste, industrial waste, human feces, and much more. Animals were marched daily to Smithfield Market to be turned into beefsteaks and mutton chops; they deposited forty thousand tons of dung en route in a typical year. That was, of course, on top of all the waste of dogs, horses, geese, ducks, chickens, and rutting pigs that were kept domestically. Gluemakers, tanners, dyers, tallow chandlers—indeed, chemical enterprises of all sorts—all added their by-products to the sea of daily sludge. Much of this rotting detritus ultimately found its way into the Thames, where the hope was that the tide would carry it out to sea. But of course tides run in both directions, and the tide that carried waste out toward sea brought a good deal of it back when it turned. The river was a perpetual “flood of liquid manure,” as one observer put it. Smollett, writing in Humphry Clinker, said that “human excrement is the least offensive part,” for the river also contained “all the drugs, minerals and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers.” The Thames grew so noxious that when a tunnel being dug at Rotherhithe sprang a leak, the first matter through the breach was not river water but concentrated gases, which were ignited by the miners’ lamps, putting the miners in the absurdly desperate position of trying to outrun incoming waters and clouds of burning air.

The streams that fed into the Thames were often even worse than the Thames itself. The River Fleet was in 1831 “almost motionless with solidifying filth.” Even the Serpentine in Hyde Park became so progressively putrid that park users stayed upwind of it. In the 1860s, a layer of sewage fifteen feet deep was dredged from the bottom.

Into this morass came something that proved, unexpectedly, to be a disaster: the flush toilet. Flush toilets of a type had been around for some time. The very first was built by John Harington, godson to Queen Elizabeth. When Harington demonstrated his invention to her in 1597, she expressed great delight and had one immediately installed in Richmond Palace. But it was a novelty well ahead of its time, and almost two hundred years passed before Joseph Bramah, a cabinetmaker and locksmith, patented the first modern flush toilet in 1778. It caught on in a modest way. Many others followed. In America in 1801, at the White House—or President’s House, as it was then called—Thomas Jefferson improved on the indoor privies he had installed at Monticello by installing three of the first flushing toilets to be found in the new nation. They were powered by rainwater cisterns in the attic.

But early toilets often didn’t work well. Sometimes they backfired, filling the room with even more of what the horrified owner had very much hoped to be rid of. Until the development of the U-bend and water trap—which create that little reservoir of water that returns to the bottom of the bowl after each flush—every toilet bowl acted as a conduit to the smells of cesspit and sewer. The backwaft of odors, particularly in hot weather, could be unbearable.

This problem was resolved by one of the great and surely most extraordinarily appropriate names in hygiene history, Thomas Crapper (1837–1910), who was born into a poor family in Yorkshire and reputedly walked to London at the age of eleven. There he became an apprentice plumber in Chelsea. Crapper invented the classic and, in Britain, still familiar toilet with an elevated cistern activated by the pull of a chain. Called the Marlboro Silent Water Waste Preventer, it was clean, leak-proof, odor-free, and wonderfully reliable, and its manufacture made Crapper very rich and so famous that it is often assumed that he gave his name to the slang term crap and its many derivatives. In fact, crap in the lavatorial sense is very ancient, and crapper for a toilet is an Americanism not recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 1922. Crapper’s name, it seems, was just a happy coincidence.

The breakthrough event for flush toilets was the Great Exhibition, where they became one of the featured attractions. More than eight hundred thousand people patiently endured long queues to experience the flush toilets—a novelty for most of them—and were so enchanted by the noise and cleansing swirl of water that they rushed to have them installed in their own homes. Perhaps no expensive consumer item in history has taken off more quickly. By the mid-1850s, some two hundred thousand of them were working away in London.

The problem was that London’s sewers were designed only to drain off rain water and couldn’t cope with a steady deluge of solid waste. The sewers filled up with a dense, gloopy sludge that wouldn’t wash away. People known as flushermen were employed to find blockages and clear them. Other sewery professions included toshers and mudlarks, who delved through muck, in sewers and along fetid riverbanks, for lost jewelry or the odd silver spoon. Toshers made a good living, all things considered, but it was dangerous work. The air in the sewers could be lethal. Since the sewer network was vast and unrecorded, reports abounded of toshers getting lost and failing to find their way out. Many were rumored to have been attacked and devoured by armies of rats.

Murderous epidemics were routine in the lightly sanitized, pre-antibiotic world. The cholera outbreak of 1832 left an estimated sixty thousand Britons dead. It was followed by a devastating influenza epidemic in 1837–38 and further cholera outbreaks in 1848, 1854, and 1867. Between and amid these attacks on the nation’s tranquillity came deadly bursts of typhoid fever, rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and smallpox, among many others. Typhoid fever alone killed fifteen hundred people or more a year from 1850 to 1870. Whooping cough killed about ten thousand children a year from 1840 to 1910. Measles killed even more. There were, in short, an awful lot of ways to die in the nineteenth century.

Cholera wasn’t terribly feared at first, for the decidedly unworthy reason that it was thought primarily to affect poor people. It was accepted wisdom almost everywhere in the nineteenth century that the poor were poor because they were born to be. Although a few impoverished people might generously be described as undeserving, most were by nature “improvident, reckless and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratification,” as one government report crisply summarized it. Even Friedrich Engels, a far more sympathetic observer than most, could write in The Condition of the Working Class in England: “The facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness.”

So when in 1832 people in the crowded inner cities began to drop in large numbers from a brand-new disease from India called cholera, it was generally viewed as just one of those unfortunate things that befell the poor from time to time. Cholera became known as “the poor man’s plague.” In New York City, more than 40 percent of the victims were poor Irish immigrants. Blacks were disproportionately affected, too. The state medical commission in New York actually declared that the disease was confined to the dissolute poor and “arises entirely from their habits of life.”

But then cholera began to strike down people in well-to-do neighborhoods, too, and very quickly the terror became general. People had not been so unnerved by a disease since the Black Death. The distinguishing feature of cholera was its quickness. The symptoms—violent diarrhea and vomiting, agonizing cramps, crushing headache—came on in an instant. The mortality rate was 50 percent, and sometimes higher, but it was the swiftness of it—the fearful, headlong transition from complete wellness to sudden agony, delirium, and death—that people found terrifying. To see a loved one well at breakfast and dead by suppertime was a horrifying experience.

Other diseases actually wrecked more lives. Those who survived cholera generally recovered completely, unlike scarlet fever victims (who were often left deaf or brain-damaged) or smallpox sufferers (who could be horribly disfigured). Yet it was cholera that became a national obsession. Between 1845 and 1856, over seven hundred books on cholera were published in English. What particularly troubled people was that they didn’t know what caused it or how to escape it. “What is cholera?” The Lancet wrote in 1853. “Is it a fungus, an insect, a miasma, an electrical disturbance, a deficiency of ozone, a morbid off-scouring of the intestinal canal? We know nothing.”

The most common belief was that cholera and other terrible diseases arose from impure air. Anything that was wasted or foul—sewage, corpses in graveyards, decomposing vegetation, human exhalations—was thought to be disease-producing and potentially lethal. “Malarious aromata rampage invisible through every street,” wrote one chronicler, a touch colorfully, at midcentury. “Atmospheric poison and pungent factor and gaseous filth cry aloud and spare not, and the wayfaring man inhales at every breath a pair of lungs full of vaporized decomposing gutter mud and rottenness.” Liverpool’s chief medical officer in 1844 calculated with confident precision the actual extent of the damage, reporting to Parliament: “By the mere action of the lungs of the inhabitants of Liverpool a stratum of air sufficient to cover the entire surface of the town to a depth of three feet is daily rendered unfit for the purposes of respiration.”

The most devoted and influential believer in miasma theory was Edwin Chadwick, a secretary of the Poor Law Commission and author of A Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, which became a somewhat improbable best seller in 1842. Chadwick’s fundamental belief was that if you got rid of smells, you got rid of disease. “All smell is disease,” he explained to a parliamentary inquiry. His wish was to clean up poor neighborhoods and the habitations within them, not to make conditions more agreeable for the inhabitants, but simply to get rid of the smells.

Chadwick was an intense and cheerless figure, much given to petty jealousies and arguments over position. A lawyer by training, he spent most of his life working on various royal commissions: on making improvements to the poor laws; on conditions in factories; on levels of sanitation in cities; on preventing avoidable deaths; on reorganizing the registration of births, deaths, and marriages. Almost no one liked him. His work on the poor law of 1834, which introduced a national system of workhouses that were almost penal in their nature, made him widely despised among working people—“the most unpopular single individual in the whole United Kingdom,” according to one biographer. Even his family seems not to have had any great affection for him. Chadwick’s mother had died when he was small, and his father remarried and started a second family in the west of England. Eventually, this second family emigrated to Brooklyn and relations between the American branch and Edwin Chadwick appear to have ceased.

One of the children of the second marriage was Henry Chadwick, whose career path went in a different direction altogether. He became a sportswriter and an energetic early promoter of organized baseball. Indeed, Henry Chadwick is sometimes described as the father of the modern game. He devised the scorecard, box score, batting average, earned run average, and many of the other statistical intricacies on which baseball enthusiasts dote. The reason that a baseball box score and cricket summary are so strikingly similar is that he modeled the former on the latter. It was Henry Chadwick who decided, oddly and endearingly, that the symbol for a strikeout should be a K because it is the last letter of the word struck. (He had already used S’s for so many actions on the field that he felt he needed to enlist another letter for striking out.)*

The miasma theory had just one serious flaw: it was entirely without foundation. Unfortunately only one man saw this, and he couldn’t get others to see it with him. His name was John Snow.

Snow was born in York in 1813 in modest circumstances—his father was a common laborer—and however much that might have colored his life socially, it served him well in terms of insightfulness and compassion, for almost uniquely among medical authorities he did not blame the poor for their own diseases, but saw that their conditions of living left them vulnerable to influences beyond their control. No one had ever brought that kind of open-mindedness to the study of epidemiology before.

Snow studied medicine in Newcastle, but settled in London. There he became one of the leading anesthesiologists of his day, at a time when anesthesia was still an unnervingly unproven field. Rarely has the word practice been more apposite with respect to a doctor’s endeavors. Even now anesthesia is a delicate business, but in the early days when dosages were based on little more than hunches and hopeful assumptions, coma, death, and other dire consequences were all too common. In 1853, Snow was called in to administer chloroform to Queen Victoria as she underwent labor in her eighth pregnancy. The use of chloroform was highly unexpected because it was not only new—it had been discovered, by a doctor in Edinburgh, just six years before—but also decidedly dangerous. Many people had died under its application already. To use it merely to help the queen cope with the pain of childbirth would be, in the view of most medical men, wildly incautious. The Lancet reported the matter as a worrying rumor and professed itself astonished that any qualified medical man would take such risks with the royal personage in any circumstance less than a crisis. Yet Snow seems to have had no hesitation in applying chloroform then or later, even though he was vividly and continually reminded of the risks of anesthetics in his practice. In April 1857, for instance, he killed a patient by experimenting on him with a new type of anesthetic, amylene, and misguessing what was the tolerable dosage. Exactly one week later he was applying chloroform to the queen again.

When not helping people lose consciousness before surgery, Snow spent a great deal of time trying to understand where diseases came from. He particularly wondered why cholera devastated some neighborhoods while sparing others. In Southwark, the rate of cholera deaths was six times higher than in next-door Lambeth. If cholera was caused by bad airs, then why would people in contiguous boroughs, breathing the same air, have such discrepant rates of infection? Besides, if cholera was spread by smell, then those who dealt most directly with bad odors—toshers, flushermen, nightsoil handlers, and others whose livelihood was human waste—ought to be the most frequent victims. But they weren’t. After the 1848 outbreak, Snow couldn’t find a single flusherman who had died of cholera.

Snow’s lasting achievement was not just to understand the cause of cholera but also to collect the evidence in a scientifically rigorous manner. He made the most careful maps showing the exact distributions of where cholera victims lived. These made intriguing patterns. For instance, Bethlehem Hospital, the famous lunatic asylum, had not a single victim, while people on facing streets in every direction were felled in alarming numbers. The difference was that the hospital had its own water supply, from a well on the grounds, while people outside took their water from public wells. In the same way, the people of Lambeth drank water that was piped in from clean sources outside the city, whereas those in neighboring Southwark took their water directly from the polluted Thames.

Snow announced his findings in a pamphlet of 1849, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, which demonstrated a clear link between cholera and water contaminated with human feces. It is one of the most important documents in the history of statistics, public health, medicine, demographics, forensic science—one of the most important documents, in short, of the nineteenth century. No one listened, and the epidemics kept coming.

In 1854, a particularly virulent outbreak hit Soho. In a single small neighborhood around Broad Street, more than five hundred people died in ten days, making it, as Snow noted, probably the most devastating occurrence of sudden mortality in history, worse even than the great plague. The toll would have been much higher except that so many people fled the district.

The patterns of deaths presented some puzzling anomalies. One of the victims died in Hampstead and another in Islington—both miles away. Snow hiked out to where the outlying victims lived and interviewed relatives and neighbors. It turned out that the Hampstead victim was a fan of Broad Street water—she liked it so much that she had it delivered regularly to her house—and had taken a draft shortly before becoming ill. The Islington victim was her niece, who had come to visit and had drunk some water, too.

Snow managed to persuade the parish council to remove the handle from a water pump on Broad Street, after which cholera deaths in the neighborhood vanished—or so it is commonly reported. In fact, the epidemic was already subsiding by the time the handle was removed, largely because so many people had fled, thinking the very air was poisonous.

Despite the accumulated evidence, Snow’s conclusions were still rejected. When Snow appeared before a parliamentary select committee, the chairman, Sir Benjamin Hall, found it impossible to credit his findings. In a dumbfounded tone, Hall asked Snow: “Are the Committee to understand, taking the case of bone-boilers, that no matter how offensive to the sense of smell of effluvia that comes from the bone-boiling establishments may be, yet you consider that it is not prejudicial in any way to the health of the inhabitants of the district?”

“That is my opinion,” replied Snow, but unfortunately his manner, always diffident, was less forthright than his conclusions, and authorities continued to reject them.

It is hard now to appreciate just how controversial and unwelcome Snow’s views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with “pestilent vapors, miasms and loathsome abominations of every kind,” and make themselves rich by poisoning their neighbors. “After careful enquiry,” the parliamentary inquiry concluded, “we see no reason to adopt this belief.”

Finally, the inevitable happened. In the summer of 1858, London suffered a heat wave combined with a drought in which waste accumulated but didn’t get washed away. Temperatures soared into the nineties and stayed there—an unusual condition for London. The result was “the Great Stink,” as the Times dubbed it. The Thames grew so noxious that almost no one could bear to be near it. “Whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it,” wrote one newspaper. The drapes of the new Houses of Parliament were drawn tight and doused in a solution of chloride of lime to mitigate the lethal smells, but the result was something like panic. Parliament had to be suspended. Some members, according to Stephen Halliday in The Great Stink of London, tried to venture into the library, overlooking the river, “but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.”

Snow never got to see this or any of his ideas vindicated. He died suddenly of a stroke in the midst of the Great Stink, not knowing that one day he would be considered a hero. He was just forty-five years old. At the time, his death was hardly noted.

Happily, another heroic figure was about to stride onto the scene—Joseph Bazalgette. By chance, Bazalgette worked in offices around the corner from Snow, though the two men never met as far as is known. Bazalgette was a very small man, short and featherlight, but compensated for his jockeylike stature with a spectacular curling mustache that reached literally from ear to ear. Like that other great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bazalgette’s antecedents were French, though the family had been settled in England for thirty-five years by the time Joseph was born in 1819. His father was a Royal Naval commander, and Bazalgette grew up in an atmosphere of privilege, educated by private tutors and given every advantage in life.

Disqualified from a military career by his elfin stature, he trained as a railway engineer, but in 1849, aged thirty, he joined the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, where he soon rose to the position of chief engineer. Sanitation has never had a greater champion. Nothing concerning sewage and waste disposal escaped his scrutiny. Troubled that there were almost no public lavatories in London, he devised a plan to place public toilets at critical spots throughout the city. By collecting urine and selling it as an industrial product (stale urine was vital to the processing of alum, for one thing), he calculated that each urinal could produce £48 of income a year, a very handsome return. That plan was never adopted, but it did instill the general conviction that where sewers were concerned Joseph Bazalgette was the man to turn to.

After the Great Stink it became clear that London’s sewage system needed to be rebuilt, and Bazalgette was handed the job. The challenge was formidable. Bazalgette had to insert into an immensely busy city some twelve hundred miles of tunnels, which would last indefinitely, carry away every particle of waste generated by three million people, and be able to handle future growth of unknowable dimensions. He would have to acquire land, negotiate rights of way, procure and distribute materials, and direct hordes of laborers. The scale of every aspect of the job was exhausting merely to contemplate. The tunnels required 318 million bricks and necessitated the digging up and redistributing of 3.5 million cubic yards of earth. All this was to be done on a budget of just £3 million.

Bazalgette brilliantly exceeded every expectation. In the process of building the new sewer system he transformed three and a half miles of riverfront through the creation of the Chelsea, Albert, and Victoria embankments (which is where a lot of that displaced earth went). These new embankments not only provided space for a mighty intercepting sewer—a kind of sewer superhighway—but also left ample room for a new Underground line and ducts for gas and other utilities below and a new relief road above. Altogether he reclaimed fifty-two acres of land, over which he scattered parks and promenades. An incidental feature of the embankments was that they narrowed the river and made it flow faster, improving its ability to cleanse itself. It would be hard to name an engineering project anywhere that offered a wider array of improvements—to public health, transportation, traffic management, recreation, river management—with a single scheme. This is the system that still drains London. Outside of the city’s parks, the embankments remain among the most agreeable environments in the city.

Because of the limits on his funds, Bazalgette could afford to take the sewage only as far as the eastern edge of the metropolis, to a place called Barking Reach. There mighty outfall pipes disgorged 150 million gallons of raw, lumpy, potently malodorous sewage into the Thames each day. Barking was still twenty miles from the open sea, as the dismayed and unfortunate people all along those twenty miles never stopped pointing out, but the tides were vigorous enough to haul most of the discharge safely (if not always odorlessly) out to sea, and ensured that there were never again any sewage-related epidemics in London.

The new sewage outfalls did, however, have an unfortunate role in the greatest tragedy ever experienced on the Thames. In September 1878, a pleasure boat named the Princess Alice, packed to overflowing with day-trippers, was returning to London after a day at the seaside, when it collided with another ship at Barking at the very place and moment when the two giant outfall pipes surged into action. The Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes. Nearly eight hundred people drowned in a choking sludge of raw sewage. Even those who could swim found it nearly impossible to make headway through the glutinous filth. For days afterward bodies bobbed to the surface. Many, the Times reported, were so bloated with gaseous bacteria that they wouldn’t fit into normal coffins.

Construction of a sewage tunnel near Old Ford in Bow, East London (photo credit 16.1)

In 1876, Robert Koch, then an unknown country doctor in Germany, identified the microbe, Bacillus anthracis, responsible for anthrax. Seven years later, he identified Vibrio cholerae, another bacillus, as the cause of cholera. At long last there was proof that individual microorganisms caused specific diseases. It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people. Edwin Chadwick never did believe that, and continued throughout his life to suggest ways of eliminating odors as the most effective method for keeping people healthy. One of his last and more singular proposals was to build across London a series of towers modeled on the new Eiffel Tower in Paris. In Chadwick’s vision, the towers would act as mighty ventilators, pulling in fresh, healthful air from the heights and pumping it back out at ground level. He went to his grave in the summer of 1890 implacably convinced that the cause of epidemics was atmospheric vapors.

Bazalgette, meanwhile, moved on to other projects. He built some of London’s handsomest bridges—at Hammersmith, Battersea, and Putney—and drove through the heart of London several bold new streets designed to alleviate congestion, including Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. Late in life he was knighted, but he never really received the fame he deserved. Sewer engineers seldom do. He is commemorated with a modest statue on the Victoria Embankment beside the Thames. He died a few months after Edwin Chadwick.

III

In America, the situation was more complicated than in England. Travelers to North America were often struck by the fact that epidemics tended to be rarer and milder there. There was a good reason for this: American communities were generally cleaner. This was not so much because Americans were more fastidious in their habits as because their communities were more open and spacious, creating less chance for contamination and cross-infection. At the same time, however, people in the New World had several additional diseases to contend with, and some of them were completely mystifying. One such was “the milk sick.” People who drank milk in America sometimes grew delirious and swiftly died—Abraham Lincoln’s mother was one such victim—but infected milk tasted and smelled no different from ordinary milk, and no one knew what the infectious agent was. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anyone finally deduce that it came from cows grazing on a plant called white snakeroot, which was harmless to the cows but made their milk toxic to drink.

Even more lethal and widely feared was yellow fever. A viral disease, it was called yellow fever because the skin of victims often turned sallow. The real symptoms, however, were high fever and black vomit. Yellow fever came into America aboard slave ships from Africa. The first case was in Barbados in 1647. It was a horrible disease. A doctor who got it said it felt “as if three or four hooks were fastened onto the globe of each eye and some person, standing behind me, was dragging them forcibly from their orbits back into the head.” Nobody knew what its cause was, but there was a general feeling—more instinct than intellectual certainty—that putrid water was at the root of things.

In the 1790s, a heroic English immigrant named Benjamin Latrobe began a long campaign to clean up water supplies. Latrobe was in America only because of a personal misfortune. He had been a successful architect and engineer in England when, in 1793, his wife died in childbirth. Devastated, he decided to emigrate to America, his mother’s native country, to try to rebuild his life. For a time he was the only formally trained architect and engineer in the country, and as such he landed many important commissions, from the Bank of Pennsylvania building in Philadelphia to the new Capitol Building in Washington.

His principal preoccupation, however, was with the belief that dirty water was killing thousands of people unnecessarily. After a devastating outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, Latrobe persuaded the authorities to fill in the city swamps and bring in clean, fresh water from outside the city boundaries. The changes had a miraculous effect, and yellow fever never came back to Philadelphia with anything like the same force again. Latrobe took his efforts elsewhere and, ironically, while working in New Orleans in 1820, he contracted yellow fever himself and died.

Where cities failed to improve water supplies, heavy penalties were paid. Until about 1800, all Manhattan’s fresh water came from a single filthy pool—little more than a “common sewer,” in the words of one contemporary—in lower Manhattan known as the Collect Pond. But matters grew much worse as the population soared after the building of the Erie Canal. By the 1830s, it was estimated that a hundred tons of excrement were added to the city’s cesspits each day, often with contaminating effects on nearby wells. Water in New York was generally, and often visibly, polluted and undrinkable. New York in 1832 not only had a cholera epidemic, but also a yellow fever epidemic. Together they claimed more than four times as many victims as in Philadelphia with its cleaner water supplies. The dual outbreak acted as a spur to New York in much the way the Great Stink motivated London, and in 1837 work started on the Croton Aqueduct, which when finished in 1842 finally began to deliver clean, safe water to the city.

But where America was really ahead of the rest of the world was in the provision of private bathrooms. Here the main driver was not homeowners, but hotels. The very first hotel in the world to offer a bath for every bedroom was the Mount Vernon Hotel in the resort community of Cape May, New Jersey. This was in 1853 and was so far ahead of its time that over half a century passed before any other hotels offered such extravagance. Increasingly, however, bathrooms—albeit shared and down the corridor rather than private and in one’s room—became standard in hotels, first in the United States and then increasingly in Europe, and hoteliers who failed to heed this trend paid a hefty price.

Nowhere was that more memorably demonstrated than at the vast and otherwise glorious Midland Hotel at St. Pancras Station in London. Designed by the great George Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for the Albert Memorial, the Midland was intended to be the most magnificent hotel in the world when it opened in 1873. It cost the equivalent of $450 million in today’s money and was a wonder in almost every way. Unfortunately—in fact, amazingly—Scott provided just four bathrooms to be shared among six hundred bedrooms. Almost from the day of its opening, the hotel was a failure.

In private homes the provision of bathrooms was more hit-or-miss. Until quite late in the nineteenth century, many houses had plumbing to their kitchen and perhaps to a downstairs toilet, but lacked a proper bathroom because there wasn’t enough pressure in the pipes to get water upstairs. In Europe, even when pressure allowed, the rich proved unexpectedly reluctant to bring bathrooms into their lives. “Bathrooms are for servants,” sniffed one English aristocrat. Or as the Duc de Doudeauville in France responded loftily when asked if he would be installing plumbing in his new house: “I am not building a hotel.” Americans, by contrast, were much more attached to the satisfactions of hot water and flushing toilets. When the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst bought St. Donat’s, a Welsh castle, the first thing he did was install thirty-two bathrooms.

Bathrooms were not at first decorated any more than you would decorate a boiler room, so they tended to be starkly utilitarian. In existing houses, baths had to be fit in wherever they could. Usually they took the place of a bedroom, but sometimes were jimmied into alcoves or other odd corners. In the rectory at Whatfield in Suffolk, the bath was simply put behind a screen in the downstairs front hall. Baths, toilets, and basins tended to be of exceedingly variable sizes. A bath at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall was so big that a stepladder was needed to climb into it. Others, with showers built in, looked as if they were designed to wash a horse.

Technological problems slowed the take-up of bathrooms, too. Casting a one-piece bath that was neither too thick nor too heavy was a surprisingly challenging proposition. It was easier in some ways to build a cast-iron bridge than a cast-iron bath. There was also the problem of giving the bath a finish that wouldn’t chip, stain, graze into hairline cracks, or simply wear away. Hot water proved to be a formidably corrosive medium. Zinc, copper, and cast-iron baths looked splendid when new but wouldn’t keep a finish. It wasn’t until the invention of porcelain enamels, about 1910, that baths became durable and attractive. The process involved spraying a mix of powder onto cast iron and baking it repeatedly till it acquired a porcelain-like gleam. Porcelain enamel is in fact neither porcelain nor enamel, but a vitreous coating—in essence a type of glass. Enamel bath surfaces would be quite transparent if whiteners or other tints weren’t added to the glazing compound.

At last the world had baths that looked good and stayed looking good for a long time. But they were still extremely expensive. A bath alone could easily cost $200 in 1910—a price well beyond the range of most households. But as manufacturers improved the processes of mass manufacture, prices fell: by 1940, an American could buy an entire bath suite—sink, bath, and toilet—for $70, a price nearly everyone could afford.

Elsewhere, however, baths remained luxuries. In Europe a big part of the problem was a lack of space in which to put bathrooms. In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath. In Britain the journalist Katharine Whitehorn recalled that as recently as the late 1950s she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman’s Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms, as not enough British homes had them, and such articles would only promote envy.

As for our Old Rectory, it had no bathroom in 1851, which is of course no surprise. However, the architect, the endlessly fascinating Edward Tull, did include a water closet—quite a novelty in 1851. Even more novel was where he elected to place it: on the landing of the main staircase, behind a thin partition. Apart from putting the water closet in an odd and rather inconvenient place, the partition would have had the effect of closing off the stair window, leaving the staircase veiled in permanent darkness.

The absence of any outlet pipes on the drawings of the house exterior suggests that Tull may not entirely have thought all this through. The point is, in any case, academic as the water closet was never built.

* There is slightly more to this. James Chadwick, the father of Edwin and Henry, had earlier in his life been a teacher in Manchester, where he taught science to John Dalton, who is generally credited with the discovery of the atom. Then, as a radical journalist, James Chadwick had gone to Paris, where he had lived for a time with Thomas Paine. So although he was a man of no particular importance himself, he served as a direct link between Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, the discovery of the atom, the sewage of London, and the beginnings of professional baseball.