If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (19 page)

Even in aristocratic circles something of a lingering suspicion of plumbing and hot water persisted into the twentieth century. To keep
too
clean seemed somehow degenerate. ‘There is in the taste for sitting down in a bathtub a certain indolence and softness that ill suits a woman,’ wrote Countess Drohojowska in 1860, and the
Manual of Hygiene
of 1844 recommended that the private parts be washed no more than once a day. ‘We will content ourselves with observing that everything which goes beyond the boundaries of a healthy and necessary hygiene leads imperceptibly to unfortunate results,’ was all its authors had to add. James Lees-Milne stayed in a house without plumbing in 1947. Each day, an ‘old retainer brought into the room a red blanket which he spread before the empty hearth-grate. Then he brought a brass can of tepid water, enough to cover the bottom of the bath. The room must have been several degrees below zero. He might have been a ghost performing the customary function of a hundred years ago.’

This conservatism caused a culture clash when visitors from across the Atlantic arrived in Britain with much higher expectations of bathroom technology. The ‘dollar princesses’, American heiresses sent over to find themselves English noblemen for husbands in the 1890s, were horrified by the primitive bathing conditions they encountered in English country houses. But they were even more horrified by the prospect of failing to snag a duke. Afraid to return to America empty-handed, one of Edith Wharton’s characters said she’d ‘rather starve and freeze here than go back to all the warm houses and the hot baths’ at home.

The en-suite bathroom was first seen in the New World, and
from the 1920s onwards hotels in America often had a bathroom for each bedroom. The ascetic British were slow to follow and en suites were at first only to be found in the luxury hotels where an international clientele required them. The art deco bathrooms added to Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair in the 1920s, with their marble surfaces, eau de Nil colour schemes, mirrors, separate showers at head and at shoulder height (so as not to get your hair wet) and bells for maid or valet, are perfect examples. One can imagine a Hollywood star frolicking in a bubble bath in such a room, perhaps to the disapproval of the English dowagers next door.

The other innovation from America was the stand-up shower to be taken separately from, and in preference to, the bath (
plate 20
). Even within the US, the shower was a West Coast idea that worked its way east over time. Over-bath showerheads had appeared in Britain in Victorian plumbing catalogues (Charles Dickens favoured a model called ‘The Demon’), but in Europe such devices were seen as rather treacherous: certainly a pregnant woman should avoid their use, as ‘a shower bath gives too great a shock, and may induce miscarriage’. The European modernist houses of the 1930s, designed as rational ‘machines for living’, still had bathtubs in preference to showers, and even today few British flats are built without baths, despite their heavy claim upon ever-dwindling supplies of water.

So long was the en suite considered a little bit racy that bathrooms entered through the bedroom only became common in British homes in the 1980s. Terence Conran was a little ahead of the game as usual when he wrote in 1974 that ‘along with central heating and a good fitted kitchen, there is nothing like a bedroom/bathroom suite to bump up the value of your property’. But even then he still felt it necessary to justify spending money on a room used merely for washing oneself:

attitudes to bathrooms have been changing. These rooms are no longer limited by Puritan traditions according to which you used them only
for ablutions, if not cold baths, or groped your way through clouds of rolling steam and yards of pipes.

It was in this continued Puritan spirit that my mother took me, only a few years after Conran was writing, on a day out to marvel – but also to scoff a little – at the luxurious bathrooms for sale in Harrods.

So this vital room has a much shorter history than you might assume: a matter of decades, not centuries. The bathroom’s decorative journey from Victorian Pompeiian pomp via art-deco glitter reached an endpoint in the stripped-down, minimalist, designer bathrooms of the 1990s, where function and aesthetics were as one. ‘The best contemporary bathrooms are those that cloak fitness for purpose in a Spartan simplicity,’ proclaimed a guide to the most desirable trends of the 1990s. The bathrooms designed by John Pawson look like temples to serenity, while Philippe Starck transformed familiar bathroom fittings into sleek and eye-catching alien shapes. Their simplicity of form, though, did not preclude endless supplies of hot water and piped music, and an atmosphere of luxury.

By the end of the twentieth century, the bathroom had become only secondarily a place for washing. ‘Thinking in the bath’, a form of meditation, is now one of the bathroom’s intimate activities. As the only room in the modern home in which the user can turn a key against his or her family, the bathroom has quite a lot in common with the Stuart closet.

18 – Don’t Forget to Brush Your Teeth

A few grains of gunpowder … will remove every blemish and give your teeth an inconceivable whiteness.

The Gentleman’s Magazine
, 1764

Until the eighteenth century, there was no such thing as a dentist. The barber-surgeons of Tudor times did all the jobs about the body requiring blades, removing rotten teeth along with amputating limbs and cutting hair.

Tudor and Stuart people did indeed clean their teeth: with water, with powdered cuttlefish, with salt or rosemary rubbed on with cloths, twigs or sponges. But they also had sugar, and therefore cavities. (The aged Elizabeth I was a fearsome figure with ‘nose a little hooked, her lips narrow and her teeth black’.) Popular sweet treats included fiendish dental challenges such as ‘subtleties’, fabulous gilded edible sculptures of fortresses, beasts or even (as once served by Cardinal Wolsey) a model of St Paul’s Cathedral. Crafted in sugar and almond paste, they provided a severe ‘assault for valiant teeth’. Once decay set in and teeth were yanked out, rudimentary false teeth of ivory or bone were worn.

The late seventeenth century saw the development of a new branch of medicine: dentistry. Charles Allen’s book
The Operator for the Teeth
(1685) is the earliest dental treatise in
English. He emphasises the need to have healthy teeth for chewing, and regrets the pain caused by toothache. His eighteenth-century successors agreed that strong teeth were useful for eating, but they also exhibited a new and more refined set of values. Additionally, the Georgians wanted a fine set of teeth in order to be able to talk genteelly, and they wanted their snappers to
look
good: ‘the ornament of the mouth’. This is the century in which toothy smiles begin to appear in portraits for the first time.

There was still no sure way, though, of protecting your teeth from decay. One hardly believes in the powers of a ‘pleasant ODORIFEROUS TINCTURE’ advertised in the
Weekly Journal
in 1725, which promises to make even the ‘blackest and most foul teeth extremely white, clean and beautiful at one using’. A vinegar gargle against bad breath sounds rather more efficacious, less so a potion containing powdered cumin and white wine, said ‘to help a Stinking breath, which comes from the Stomach’.

Salt remained an enduringly popular toothpowder, as did bicarbonate of soda. The twigs of earlier times were gradually replaced by pig or horsehair bristle brushes. In 1721, Sir John Philipps begged his wife not to use the new toothbrushes: ‘using a brush to your teeth and gums (as you constantly do) will certainly prove in time extremely injurious to them both … I beg of ye for the future to use a sponge in its room.’

George Washington (1732–99), first president of the US, is celebrated for his false teeth made of hippopotamus ivory and cow tooth. During the Revolutionary Wars, the capture in 1781 of his letter requesting cleaning tools for his teeth alerted the British forces to his whereabouts – the tiniest details may determine the course of empires. And indeed most people requiring false teeth preferred not to advertise their need. Customers in search of the services of Mme Silvie, a Georgian dentist, were assured of her discretion: ‘Those who don’t choose to make their
grievances known by asking for the Artificial Teeth-maker may ask for the Gold Snuff-box and Tweezer-case Maker’ instead.
The Dental Journal
of 1880 describes the sad case of a lady who complained of a pain in her throat. She was too embarrassed to tell her doctor what he soon discovered for himself: that she had swallowed her top set of false teeth.

George Washington’s false teeth. The lower denture was carved from hippopotamus ivory

The new Georgian art of fixing up the mouth was part of the boom in unnecessary but charming additions to daily life designed to display your status, wealth and the fact that you had leisure time to squander – just like shopping trips, enormous feathered hats, ceramics and the other luxuries produced by the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately the wealthy eighteenth-century ladies who longed for a ‘fine mouth’ may well have rotted their own teeth through drinking the newly fashionable sugared tea. A country character in a book published in 1703 despises extravagant London ‘dames’: what ‘with drinking hot Liquors, and eating Sugar-Plums at Church, not one in ten has a Tooth left’. Another reason for the poor state of people’s teeth was the use of ‘vomits’ or emetics, an important component of medicine based on the concept of the four humours. A person making him- or herself sick on a regular basis will damage the
teeth by introducing strong stomach acids into the mouth.

One strange byway through the history of dentistry was a short-lived craze for live tooth transplantation, which took place in the comfort of your own home. The surgeon John Hunter (1728–93) was a pioneer of the new art of transplanting live organs from one body to another, and this included the teeth. A rich patient requiring teeth would buy from a pauper, and the transplantation from mouth to mouth would be carried out as quickly as possible with pliers and alcohol.

The practice came to an end in the nineteenth century for three reasons. Firstly, there were moral concerns about poor people selling their healthy teeth (just like the concerns over the sale of livers and kidneys today). Second was the very reasonable fear that diseases could be transmitted along with the teeth. And finally, the new porcelain false teeth, once they had become available, were so lovely and white and durable. Gradually porcelain replaced all the earlier materials, which had included ivory, mother-of-pearl, silver, agate and the teeth of walruses. But even porcelain falsies must have been extremely uncomfortable: an 1846 dental textbook admits that they were usually ‘too insecure in the mouth to admit of any attempt at complete mastication of the food without displacement’. Only the discovery, importation and growing use of Indian rubber would make them comfortable to wear.

Once false teeth that fitted reasonably snugly were available, they became an object of great desire. You could avoid pain and expensive dental treatments by having all your natural teeth whipped out at a young age. In 1918, T. S. Eliot overheard women in a pub discussing their teeth in connection with the return of their husbands from the First World War:

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set.

Still, the practice of live tooth transplantation took a long time to die out completely. In 1919, the Royal College of Surgeons’ examiner in dentistry was still able to write a text describing how exactly how to perform this arcane art. But by then dentistry had moved out of the home and into the specialised surgery, and beyond the boundary of our intimate history of the home.