How to be a Victorian

1. Getting Up

It began with a shiver. Rich or poor, in city dwelling or farm labourer’s cottage, the first step out of bed was likely to leave you cold. The wealthier classes often had coal fireplaces and iron grates in their bedrooms, but these were rarely lit. Jane Carlyle, the wife of Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, lived in a fashionable London town house in the 1850s (see Plate 8). Despite her family’s income, fires were only prepared upstairs at desperate times, when bedrooms were used by the sick. Once, when a fire was indeed lit for her at a wealthy friend’s home, she described it as a ‘wanton luxury’, one that made her feel quite guilty about her own robust good health.

For Jane Carlyle, the day began at around 7.30 a.m., but her servant would have been up much earlier than that. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management recommends that a housemaid should begin her work at 6 a.m. in the summer and 6.30 or 7 a.m. in the winter, reflecting the amount of available daylight. Hannah Cullwick was a woman who worked in domestic service her entire life. For many years, she kept a diary recording her daily working routine. In her neat blue handwriting she writes that she usually woke at six, although if there was extra work to be done it could be much earlier. Spring cleaning, as the days lengthened, generally entailed a 5 a.m. start, but there was also the occasional lie-in. On Christmas Day in 1863 she stayed in bed until a luxurious eight o’clock. Each morning, she would light the fires, shake out the carpet, polish the dining-room furniture, eat her own breakfast, clean a pair of boots and scrub the front steps before her employer’s family woke up.

Dawn was the signal for most working people to rise, but many men had more fixed hours of waking. For those who had to keep very early hours and be punctual, such as factory workers, the services of a ‘knocker-upper’ were invaluable. Armed with a long cane and a lantern, a knocker-upper wandered the streets at all hours, tapping on the windowpanes of his clients. One of the reasons for his unusual profession was that clocks and watches were expensive items and few working-class people could afford their own. For the knocker-upper, however, a capital investment in a timepiece could provide the basis of a meagre livelihood. He worked through the night and into the early morning, each of his numerous customers paying a penny a month for his services. Such men could be found in industrial towns and cities across Britain from Portsmouth to Inverness, even extending to smaller market towns such as Baldock in Hertfordshire, where one of the three local breweries employed a man to wake their draymen at 3 a.m. With a population of only two thousand, Baldock still had a sufficient number of early-morning workers on the railway, in the brewing industry and at a host of small workshops to keep a knocker-upper in employment.

Fig. 1. The knocker-upper with the tools of his trade, circa 1900

Once you were up, to add warmth and comfort to an otherwise chilled start, at any hour, you would hope to step out on to a mat rather than the bare wooden floor. Aristocratic homes had handsome woven carpets in the best bedrooms, but even in the upper echelons of society the rooms of sons and daughters often had to make do with an old rug that had seen better service in a more prominent part of the house. Among the less wealthy, underfoot provision was scarce. If you were fortunate and lived in a textile-weaving district, such as parts of Yorkshire, rag rugs were a popular solution. These were very simple to produce but required a significant amount of material. Those living near a mill could afford some early-morning foot warmth due to the cheap supply of loom ends and spoilt goods available.

I have made a number of these rugs in different styles, following the two main techniques of the day, by using a metal hook to pull strips through a sacking backing, or by plaiting together strips of cloth into a single length that is then coiled into a spiral and sewn in place. A rug that is merely three foot long by two foot wide consumes the equivalent of three blankets in its construction. For most people during the period, without access to local offcuts, this would have been a luxury. Tiny foot-square rugs were therefore more of a possibility for working-class families, made from worn-out clothes and scraps of cloth left over from sewing projects. It is noticeable when compared with later examples from the Edwardian period and onwards that Victorian bedroom rugs are on the small side. But a simple square of cloth still made a great difference as the Victorian summoned up the courage to start the day.

In addition to an unlit fire and sparse carpeting, windows were often left open overnight in bedrooms, to allow cool currents of fresh air to circulate. This was largely a response to the regular warnings about stale and stifling homes that arose in the work of Dr Arnott, a respected scientist and member of the Royal Institution who was interested in a range of atmospheric phenomena and ‘sanitary’ matters. Somewhat garbled reports in the popular press of one of his experiments fuelled a Victorian paranoia about lack of oxygen in the home. One recorded that ‘a canary bird suspended near the top of a curtained bedstead on which people are sleeping [would] generally be found dead in the morning.’

Dr Arnott and others were concerned about the build-up of carbon dioxide – then usually referred to as carbonic acid – in poorly ventilated spaces. Of course it is true that people can asphyxiate in a sealed environment if there is insufficient oxygen present. But it was feared that there was a danger to human respiration in ordinary domestic environments equipped with coal fires and gas lamps, if not of actual suffocation, then of poisoning and ill health due to breathing too high a concentration of carbon dioxide. Bedrooms were especially worrisome, as people spent so long in them. Dr Pye Henry Chevasse, a physician who wrote health manuals for the layperson in the Victorian era, was willing to go so far as to state that it was ‘madness to sleep in a room without ventilation – it is inhaling poison; for the carbonic acid gas, the refuse of perspiration, which the lungs are constantly throwing off, is … deadly’. This was a powerful argument, and no medical authority during the rest of the century was willing to challenge it with confidence. Some, such as Dr Chaumont, sought to quantify the problem by allotting required oxygen levels: he recommended 4,000 cubic feet an hour per person for healthy living. But since that was the volume contained by a room ten feet high, ten feet wide and forty feet long, the average Victorian bedroom could not possibly supply that amount of oxygen to its occupants. Twenty-first-century analysis would simply say that Chevasse and his peers grossly underestimated the movement of air in and out of rooms and buildings.

Today, our own homes are very much more effectively sealed than any Victorian interior and yet we rarely find ourselves with problems of carbon-dioxide poisoning. Despite sealed double-glazing and the absence of chimneys, modern estimates suggest that the air within a house changes completely every two to three hours. Victorian advice, however, was not only to keep chimneys open even when not in use, but to keep a sash window open both at the top and the bottom to allow for a free flow of air through the room, regardless of the weather outside. In homes where there was no chimney, ventilators could be installed over the door to create a through draught when the windows were opened.

If, as a Victorian, you could not bear to open the windows, you could hope to improve the indoor air quality with a bowl of water. The popular guidelines of the day were to ‘set a pitcher of water in a room’ and in ‘a few hours’ it would have absorbed all the respired gases and the air would ‘become purer, and the water utterly filthy’. Another simple experiment to check how much carbonic acid was present was described in advice books and school textbooks. The Science of Home Life, a book designed for schoolgirls, instructed that ‘if we pour some clear lime water into a shallow dish or saucer, and leave it exposed to the air for an hour or so, we shall find a whitish crust or scum on the surface of the liquid. This proves that carbonic acid is present in the air.’ Sadly, neither of these experiments was remotely accurate, scientifically speaking. In the latter case, it was more likely that some of the water would evaporate and thus leave a scum of lime; in the former, the ‘filthiness’ of the water may have been an illusion of the mind. Either way, poor scientific method was being used to back up a popular idea.

Did people really leave their windows open all year round? Practice seems to have varied. According to some reports into the living conditions of the poor by a range of philanthropists, researchers and officials, clutches of children would huddle at night on bare mattresses beneath permanently open windows with only their day clothes and each other to keep them warm. Their parents were trying to do the right thing. They were frightened of poisoning their children, though by keeping the windows open they had no hope of providing warmth for them. Other reports, equally horrified, talk of large numbers of people sleeping packed together in rooms with the windows firmly sealed shut. For these people, the possibility of being warm influenced them more than talk of poisoned air. Henry Mayhew, a journalist for the Morning Chronicle newspaper, recalled in his interviews with the poor that ‘their breaths in the dead of night and in the unventilated chamber rose in one foul choking steam of stench.’

For the vast majority, unheated rooms with open windows made for a bracing start to the day. On leaving bed, people would perch precariously upon whatever the household could conjure up in the way of a rug. Then would come the ordeal of the morning ablutions.

THE STAND-UP WASH

For most of the Victorian period, the stand-up wash was the main form of personal hygiene and the start of most people’s daily routine. For men and upper- and middle-class women it happened as soon as they rose from their bed, still clothed in their long, voluminous nightshirt or nightdress. But the servants and those who had to clean out the grates, black the range and light the fires generally had to wait until they had finished the morning’s dirty jobs before they had their wash. Hannah Cullwick fitted her morning wash in just before she cooked the family breakfast, often making use of the kitchen facilities. ‘Wash’d me at the sink and laid the cloth for our breakfast,’ she recorded on 11 August 1863. But most stand-up washes happened in the bedroom, where all the utensils would be ready and waiting.

All a person needed was a bowl, a slop pail, a flannel, some soap and a single jugful of hot water brought up from the kitchen (see Plate 2). Cold water was also an option, and many people used it, hoping to improve their circulation. This had the advantage of immediacy, too, as a jug could be brought up to the room the night before and stood alongside the bowls and towels in readiness. Unfortunately, however, Victorian soap simply did not work in cold water – it neither dissolved nor lathered – and a hot-water wash with soap was generally recommended once a week in order to remove grease, even if you took a cold-water wash daily.

The stand-up wash is still a very efficient and eco-friendly technique if you happen to be staying somewhere with spartan facilities. With a single jug of water it is perfectly easy to wash and rinse the whole body. A little water is poured into the bowl and the flannel is dipped in and then wrung out. Some soap is applied and the scrubbing of the body can begin. When this first bowl of water begins to look murky it is emptied into the slop pail and freshly filled from the jug. And so it goes on until you are clean all over. Rather like scrubbing a floor, body washing could be done in sections, one bit scrubbed, rinsed and dried before moving on to the next. This allowed a person to remain mostly dressed throughout the operation: each area was undressed, washed and re-dressed before the next was exposed. You could wash in this way without becoming severely chilled in a January bedroom, and with a great degree of modesty if you had to share accommodation (as most people did). It was even possible to wash parts of yourself beneath an extant layer of clothing. A loose nightgown or nightshirt could be worn throughout if necessary, while still allowing access to all parts of the body with a flannel. Once the last drop of clean water was used finally to rinse out the cloth and washing bowl, the slop pail of dirty water was taken downstairs and disposed of.

Fig. 2. Morning ablutions at the wash stand, 1850.

From an affluent lady living in a stately home with the finest-quality hand-painted-porcelain toilet set to the agricultural labourer’s wife with her mismatched, cracked earthenware jug and bowl, the stand-up wash provided the quintessential Victorian hygiene experience for women. A woman would begin by heating a kettleful of water, or have a servant do this for her. For the wealthy, who would store plenty of coal in the cellar to fuel the fire, and perhaps employ a maid to carry the water, daily warm-water washing in a bowl was commonplace. For those with a houseful of children and no paid help, a kettleful of hot water each was pushing at the bounds of possibility, and washing came less often or was confined to a cold-water rinse. For the very poor, struggling in cramped, heavily overcrowded rooms and working punishingly long hours with little to eat, carrying jugs of water up and down stairways in a cold home was just one energy-sapping step too far.

Bathtubs were not the norm and, where they did exist, were normally used at the end of the day (we will examine them in detail towards the end of the book). They were largely used by men. Modesty played a large part in this. Men might have felt happy wandering along the corridor of a wealthy house in a bathrobe, but far fewer women did – they would have felt much too vulnerable and exposed. In the few working-class homes that employed a tin bath in front of the fire, men and children were its usual occupants. Even within a family setting, few women were willing to be naked in the kitchen, and even men preferred to bathe wearing a thin pair of cotton drawers in such semi-public surroundings.

Fig. 3. Advert of a girl with her wash bowl, a can of hot water and a bar of Sunlight soap, 1895.

The stand-up wash remained one of the most common forms of washing throughout the century, whether with hot or cold water, with or without soap. It provided a fast morning wash and could prepare a person for the day. That people washed with water at all, however, was a new development. Before the Victorian period, it had been believed that the pores of the skin allowed disease to enter and penetrate the body. While healthy sweating allowed poisons and effluvia to exit through the pores, it had been thought important to protect the skin from too much exposure to sources of infection; water opened the pores and was therefore best avoided. Disease was believed to be carried in evil miasmas (vapours) in the air, thickest and most dangerous where smell and damp were most evident. Walk through the stinking mists rising from tanners’ pits or stale dung heaps, past open sewers or the bleaching and dyeing works, and infection would be hanging in the air around you, threatening to enter your nose, mouth or skin. The sensible person would have avoided these areas when they could and carried scents to drive away the miasmas. They would also have kept their skin covered and sealed against such threats.

Victorian scientific developments concerning skin and its function introduced some radical theories. Experiments in sealing the pores were undertaken, famously with a horse. The poor animal was carefully varnished all over with several layers of shellac (the same solution that is used to varnish furniture) to ensure a complete seal, and died within hours. It was assumed that it had asphyxiated, thus ‘proving’ that the skin played an important role in respiration as well as perspiration. Twenty-first-century anatomical understanding would simply state that the sealing of the pores led to the animal overheating and dying of heatstroke, however, for most of the Victorian period, there was a serious, if erroneous, view that the pores of the skin were an important, though secondary, route for oxygen to enter the body. The older idea of poisons and waste products being expelled through the skin continued, yet at the same time Victorian science saw a pressing need to change the way people cared for their skin.

Previously, it had been good hygiene practice to keep the body well wrapped up, with the layer next to the skin consisting either of cotton or linen, which could be easily and thoroughly laundered. Shirts, drawers and stockings for men, and chemises and stockings for women, covered the whole body apart from the head and hands. Nightwear, which consisted of long shirts for men and ankle-length, long-sleeved nightdresses for women, with bed socks and nightcaps in the winter, provided a similar all-over layer in bed. The clean and healthy person changed this underwear layer as often as possible. Daily was good – several times a day better – for those with the time and stock of clothes, while among the less wealthy members of the population many changed from separate nightwear to daywear, which helped in the process. Constant clean underwear absorbed the sweat and dirt of the body and, each time you changed, the accumulated dirt was taken away. Dry rubbing of the body with a clean linen towel also helped to remove dirt, grease and sweat from the skin and gave the added benefit of stimulating the circulation, thus promoting a healthy glow and a general tonic to the whole system. These rubbing or body cloths could be easily laundered, ensuring that your skin could be kept clean and healthy without the dangers of water, which could cause a chill or open the pores to infection.

It works. I know, because I have tried it for extended periods. Your skin remains in good health and any body odour is kept at bay. A quick daily rub-down with a dry body cloth or a ‘flesh brush’ (a pad of suede leather on the back of a wooden brush) leaves the skin exfoliated, clean and comfortable. The longest I have been without washing with water is four months – and nobody noticed. I much prefer the cloth to the brush for this method of cleaning oneself. Naturally, you need to pay special attention to your armpits and the cloths are most effective when they are older, softer and more absorbent. Many modern writers and historians like to revel in the opinion that people were dreadfully malodorous in the past, before modern washing with water took hold. My own experience makes me sceptical about their claims.

It is true, though, that the Victorian belief that one’s skin could breathe led directly to the introduction of soap and warm water for washing. Medics were concerned that blocked pores were the danger and could lead to poisons building up within the body, causing debility, sluggishness and, ultimately, death. Water and soap could provide healthy, open-pored skin, which would, in theory, rush valuable oxygen to the blood, thus stimulating the whole body. It would also allow a free flow for toxins to exit the body, carrying away the harmful by-products of sickness and disease.

Victorian theories about washing and the skin led people to think carefully about their clothing and, particularly, their night clothing. The advice was to wear light, porous layers, and not to be bundled up too closely, even in the cold. Garments were marketed for their breathability, as were blankets. We have a few reminders of these items today in twenty-first-century fabrics such as Aertex for sportswear and cellular-weave cot blankets, which are light and warm but very permeable, to allow air to reach the skin. However, unlike these items, which equate breathability with comfort, many porous Victorian items of clothing were still very arduous to wear. The ‘health’ corsets of the late nineteenth century are a prime example. Marketed for their newly improved design, they were meant to assist with chest and breathing problems, but this did not mean freedom for the ribcage. No, the ‘sanitary’ and ‘health’ corsets of the 1890s were just as heavily boned and tightly laced as before; they just had additional holes in them, to allow the skin to ‘breathe’.

DEODORANTS AND BODY ODOUR

The morning wash was transforming the Victorian idea of smell, although commercial deodorant would not be available until the next century. As increasing numbers of Victorians, at least among the middle classes, began their day with soap and warm water, body odour took on a new dimension, one that divided the nation. William Thackeray, in his 1850 novel Pendennis, coined the phrase ‘the great unwashed’. It was quickly adopted to describe the working class and to distance their social betters from them. The middle and upper classes smelt quite differently – strongly of soap and, preferably, with not a trace of stale sweat. Based on animal fats and caustic soda, Victorian soap had its own unique, sharp smell which effectively masked most bodily odours. Later in the century, soaps perfumed with scents such as lavender, violet and rose became popular, and drew even more attention to an individual’s washing habits. These floral scents, which never completely obscured their soapy ingredients, provided a nasal badge of honour, one that the washed population could wear with pride.

Fig. 4. Disinfecting and medicated soaps carried a distinctive scent.

Despite undertaking more physical labour, which led to dirtier clothes and more pungent body odour, the working class were much more conservative about washing with water. They were not buying or reading the new health and home manuals that recommended the method. But, perhaps more importantly, both washing and laundry were much more of a challenge for them, as they had far fewer facilities for either activity.

Soap and hot water could be a substantial expense for those living on the poverty line, not to mention the cost of laundry equipment itself. At the outset of the Victorian period, a four-ounce bar of soap (roughly the same size as those currently sold in Britain) cost the same as a good joint of beef. A middle-class family following the new washing regime could use three or four such bars in a week, something that was well beyond the purse of many. Even at the end of the era, after a series of major technological advances had reduced the price several times, sufficient soap to wash the bodies and clothes of a working-class family still required 5 per cent of the weekly budget. And the additional cost meant that a built-in copper to boil water for laundry was by no means common in working-class houses. A wringer made a significant difference to the amount of labour involved in a large-scale clothes wash, but this, too, cost money and, even at the end of the century, the majority of the working classes had to manage without. It is hardly surprising then that the working classes had such a different smell to that of the wealthier.

Laundry, as we shall examine more closely later, formed a major part of this olfactory division. Clothes that held on to sweat and other emissions of the body were, naturally, ideal breeding places for bacteria and smells. On the other hand, wool was best at allowing the sweat to evaporate freely and effectively. Members of the twenty-first-century hiking and climbing fraternity are beginning to re-learn this Victorian lesson. Pure wool is once again making its mark, with ‘odourless’ socks and merino-wool base layers. Hi-tech man-made fibres cannot compete with traditional wool on these terms.

In those areas of one’s clothing that were tight, or where sweating was likely to be heaviest, it was advisable to have an extra layer of removable, easily washable clothing. For Victorian women, their tight-fitting bodices, sleeves and armpits were a particular problem. While vests and chemises could be cleaned, it was also wise to use dress protectors – small, detachable pads that were slipped into the armpits of the dress. These could be taken out and washed separately, and they prevented delicate or ornate garments from becoming ruined. You can still buy dress protectors in traditional haberdashery shops.

Dusting powders were another aid to achieve a desirable body smell. Based either upon starch or talcum powder, and with or without an added scent, these powders absorbed sweat and made it easier to remove. Such powders were a staple product on the shelves of apothecary’s and chemist’s shops. The most expensive came in round, ceramic pots, complete with a circle of sponge with which to apply the powder. Cheaper brands had a pierced lid that allowed the user to shake the powder directly on to the skin. For the truly cost-conscious customer, retailers sold plain powdered starch or talc by weight. A wipe under the arms and other ‘parts prone to smell’ with a cloth dipped in ammonia was a final routine for those who were still worried. Ammonia, which kills the bacteria that create body odour, was a very effective deodorant. Slightly less efficient was a wipe with vinegar. This killed the bacteria less aggressively than the ammonia but had the advantage of being less irritating to those with sensitive skin.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CLEANLINESS

Beyond preventing unsavoury smells, the Victorian personal-hygiene regime was about health. And health was undergoing perhaps its greatest revolution of all time.

The basic idea of germ theory had been circulating for a while, but the theory was not fully proven until Louis Pasteur demonstrated at the start of the 1860s that decay was caused by living organisms present in the air. His experiment was a simple one, with one sample exposed to the air and the other in a vacuum. The sample in the vacuum did not rot until air was admitted to the vessel. There could be no doubt thereafter that the tiny organisms visible under the microscope were the source of the decomposition. Decay and putrefaction were not the product of spontaneous generation, as had been previously thought, but a result of the action of living creatures. And living creatures could be killed – ideally, with an agent that would eradicate the ‘germs’ without harming the patient. Pasteur’s next breakthrough was in identifying carbolic acid as a substance that could be used to do just that.

As other people began to take up these ideas, more and more information about the micro-organisms they were discovering emerged. Perhaps the most celebrated advance from this new rush of research came from the work of Dr John Snow (one of the founding members of the Epidemiological Society of London), who identified the source of a cholera outbreak in 1854, successfully realizing that every case could be traced directly to a single infected water pump in Broad Street, Soho. The removal of the handle of the pump almost certainly saved hundreds of lives.

Miasma theory had held that bad air was the cause of all and any disease, but how that disease was expressed by the body could depend upon the person rather than the source of infection. According to the old theory, the same evil miasma could be expressed in one individual as a lung disease and in another as a stomach complaint, depending upon their constitution and circumstances. It was not until 1879, however, that the German physician Robert Koch was able to prove that specific bacteria caused specific diseases. By 1884, the bacterias responsible for typhoid, leprosy, diphtheria, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, gonorrhoea, malaria, pneumonia and tetanus had been isolated. This was a truly revolutionary shift in understanding, which had a huge impact upon the investigation and treatment of disease. From a cleanliness point of view, however, it changed both everything and nothing.

If germs were everywhere – in the air and the water and upon every surface – then cleanliness was more important than ever. The removal of dirt had always been seen as a way to protect your family from disease. But whereas, before, you were removing the causes of the evil miasma, now you were removing the germs themselves. All the old cleanliness routines were still entirely relevant and useful. Germ theory, like the older thinking, emphasized the usefulness of cleaning the privy, regularly emptying cesspits, sweeping the house, laundering clothes, scrubbing kitchens, washing up, and so forth. Housework was valuable in preserving health whichever theory you ascribed to. So, too, was community cleanliness: germs could be fought as effectively as miasmas by good town management of waste, by regular street cleaning, by prosecuting those who dumped waste in public areas. Personal hygiene also had value with both germ and miasma theories of disease. A clean body neither generated bad airs nor harboured germs.

If Hannah Cullwick’s morning wash still took place at the sink in the kitchen, after the widespread acceptance of germ theory she would have no longer worried about opening her pores with hot water and she would have been keen not just to wash her hands but to disinfect them. Carbolic acid remained one of the most popular disinfectants. Sold in liquid and powdered form at pharmacist’s shops, but also pre-mixed with soap, it offered a way of cleaning that went beyond looking and smelling pleasant. Its own sharp smell came to mean ‘clean’ in the new, sterile sense of the word. A maidservant who smelt of carbolic soap came to be one whom mistresses had faith in, one whom they were much more likely to employ. (Today, a very similar ‘coal tar’ soap is on sale if you want to get a measure of Victorian cleanliness, although the active ingredient now is tea-tree oil. Manufacturers do, however, make sure that the soap still has the smell of carbolic acid, which even now carries cultural overtones of sterile safety.)

TEETH-CLEANING

Fig. 5. Toothpaste advert, 1897.

With the body clean and sweet-smelling, many people were keen to move on to dental hygiene. Toothbrushes looked, in shape, much like those we are accustomed to today, although their handles were made of bone or wood and the bristles generally of horse- or pony-hair. The usual word for what we would call toothpaste was ‘dentifrice’. Many such pastes were prepared at home, the simplest no more than a little soot or salt. Commercial forms could be bought over the counter, however. Most dentifrices, whether home-made or bought at the chemist’s or pharmacist’s, were simply flavoured and often coloured abrasives – polishes, in effect. Here are three recipes taken from early editions of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine:

Camphorated dentifrice. Prepared chalk, one pound; camphor one or two drachms. The camphor must be finely powdered by moistening it with a little spirit of wine, and then intimately mixing it with the chalk.

Myrrh dentifrice. Powdered cuttlefish, one pound; powdered myrrh, two ounces.

American tooth powder. Coral, cuttlefish bone, dragons blood, of each eight drachms; burnt alum and red sanders, of each four drachms; orris root eight drachms; cloves and cinnamon of each half a drachm; rose pink, eight drachms. All to be powdered and mixed.

The powdered chalk and cuttlefish provided the polish, gently abrading the teeth. These are the two most common ingredients in all dentifrices, followed by soot and charcoal, which were equally effective but couldn’t be made up into such attractive pastes. Camphor (derived from a tree of the laurel family), myrrh and burnt alum (a naturally occurring mineral used in water purification, dyeing and deodorant) gave recipes a more ‘medicated’ taste. These would all have lingered in the mouth; the camphor and alum may well also have had a small antibacterial effect. The American tooth powder would have been a very strongly coloured product. The powdered coral, the dragon’s blood and the rose pink were all colouring agents complemented with spices to add flavour and to scent the breath.

The ingredients to make up these recipes were widely and easily available from pharmacist’s and chemist’s. All were traditional substances of long standing and most people were familiar with them. The chalk really was just chalk rock finely ground to a powder – the very same material that many people used to scrub out sinks and baths and which still to this day forms the abrasive base of many well-known brands of kitchen and bathroom cleaner. Powdered cuttlefish was made from the hard plate inside the fish’s body, sometimes found washed up on beaches. It is perhaps best known in Britain today as a dietary additive for budgerigars. Ground to a powder, it is both finer and softer than chalk. Powdered charcoal has about the same softness as cuttlefish but has the added benefit of acting as a deodorant: a breath freshener. Soot, however, is my personal favourite, the one that I would recommend as an alternative to modern toothpaste formulas. Despite its colour, soot is the softest of all the abrasives, helping to shift plaque and tartar without irritating or damaging either teeth or gums. It is safe to consume in occasional small quantities and, of course, it rinses cleanly and completely away.

Some of the other ingredients should be approached with more caution. Burnt alum is a caustic substance and even small amounts can cause soreness and irritation when used in such a sensitive environment as the mouth. It was well known in Victorian times as a cleaning and bleaching agent. Camphor was best known both then and now, domestically, in its role in deterring clothes moths. It’s a smell that, once smelt, is never forgotten. It’s not necessarily unpleasant, but it is distinctive. Rather like the overpowering ‘minty freshness’ of many brands of modern toothpaste, the smell of camphor provided a form of personal advertising, telling the world at large that you had brushed today. Dragon’s blood, despite its exotic-sounding name, was one of the less worrying ingredients, being simply the root of a plant that yields a bright-red dye still sometimes used as a food colourant. The presence of so many pink and red colouring agents is perhaps the most surprising element of the recipes, when the modern preference is for white toothpastes. Victorian taste required toothpaste to mimic the colour of healthy gums rather than the desired colour of teeth.

I am wary of trying Victorian medical recipes unless I have a full understanding of all the various ingredients, and I would suggest that you should be too. I have never used the American tooth powder quoted above, but my experiments with plain soot and cuttlefish powder have been happy ones. Small amounts of either ingredient dabbed on to a damp toothbrush seem to do a good job, and if, like me, you don’t much enjoy a toothpaste that fills your mouth with strong-tasting froth, it can offer a pleasant alternative.

SANITARY TOWELS

Fig. 6. One of the earliest adverts for sanitary towels, 1898.

For women of childbearing age there was one further element to the morning hygiene ritual. At the end of the century it was possible to walk into a shop and purchase sanitary towels over the counter. For those too embarrassed to do so, a mail-order service promised to deliver them in plain brown packets. Adverts for these products began to appear discreetly in magazines, relying heavily on medical imagery. Cheery nurses in crisp, starched uniforms held understated parcels as if they were wound dressings. In one of the needlework magazines at the turn of the century, an early advert bears the words ‘Southwell’s Sanitary Towels’ emblazoned on an unobtrusively held packet. However, in a later edition of the magazine, the same advert has been quietly altered so that a hand obscures much of the lettering, leaving only ‘Southwell’s S— Towels’ visible: even the word ‘sanitary’ was deemed too intimate for most people’s sensibilities. Commercially available products such as sanitary towels were a great innovation; no one before could have imagined that something so personal could be sourced outside the home. Printed information and instruction on the subject, however, was still scarce. Such things were not much spoken about, even among women, and certainly even less written about. One of the best practical descriptions was recorded at the very end of the century by an American writer, Dr Mary Allan. She suggested that a sanitary napkin should be suspended from the shoulders with a pair of braces. It would then be joined together at the front and at the back with a button sewn on to its ends. The napkin or pad therefore had buttonholes to allow it to be attached to the support straps. It should be made, she advised her readers, from a square of cotton nappy material sixteen inches square:

About three inches from one end, make on each side an incision four inches long. Fold this strip in the middle lengthwise, and sew together up to the incisions. This makes a band with a sort of pocket in the middle. Hem the cut edges. Fold the napkin over, four inches on each side, that is, as deep as the incisions. Then fold crosswise until you can enclose the whole in the pocket in the band. This makes a thick centre and thin ends by which to attach the napkin to the suspender.

The idea of suspending the sanitary pads from the shoulders seems to have been an unusual one. For, while literary references to their form are rare, there are numerous surviving Victorian sanitary towels and belts. Folded away in trousseaus and at the bottom of drawers, they have remained as a quiet reminder of the practicalities of femininity. These were usually suspended from a belt that went around the waist. Some of these belts were no more than a piece of tape; others were much more substantial, and shaped. Probably the most comfortable to wear were those that resembled the yoke portion of waist petticoats, similar to modern suspender belts, except that there were two straps front and back to support a single towel, rather than four to hold up a pair of stockings.

I have never seen any examples of Dr Allan’s cleverly folded napkins – thick in the middle and thin at the ends – although they do sound like an ingenious idea. Most of the surviving examples take the form of slim cotton bags, open at one end so that they can be stuffed with an absorbent material. They generally have a tape loop at each end to attach them to the belt. This cotton bag was laundered after use, but the absorbent material it contained need not have been. Anything could have been used for this. For many, it would have been a rag of some sort, which may have been thrown away after use, or, when resources were scarcer, laundered. Others may have been able to employ natural materials such as moss. Dr Mary Allan’s napkins have no bag at all; it is the napkin itself that is attached to the suspender, diagonally, by its corners, the rest of the material folded around to create the bulk. It is possible that this was common American practice, while those surviving examples that I have seen were used commonly in England.

I have used the belt-and-bag method myself. In terms of comfort and effectiveness, it is not much different from modern sanitary protection. Yes, Victorian sanitary towels can leak – but then so do the modern ones. Yes, they can feel wet and uncomfortable if you don’t change them often enough – but, again, so can the modern ones. However, they do differ from today’s equivalents in two obvious ways. Firstly, they are suspended. Knicker-wearing was a new phenomenon for women, gradually spreading throughout the population as the century progressed, but, even by 1900, when most, if not yet quite all, women had taken to them, they were not suitable for holding sanitary towels in place. The knickers of 1900 were a large pair of loosely fitting bloomers. They were not elasticated and had to be large and loose to permit movement, which meant that they could not hold anything against the body. Pre-1880 knickers had been even less suitable as a support for sanitary wear, as they were split-crotched, consisting of two legs joined only at the waistband. Sanitary pads required the belt to hold them in place. This method didn’t go out of use until the late 1970s.

The second main difference to today’s sanitary towels is the Victorian sanitary napkin’s recyclability. From my own experience, this is an unusual idea to adjust to. We are now so used to the concept of disposable sanitary protection that it can seem very unsavoury to be laundering such items. But they are certainly no less unpleasant to deal with than nappies. As with nappies, it is best to clean them in a bucket of cold, salty water with a lid. Just drop the soiled cotton and linen in a bucket and leave to soak. Most of the unwanted matter will wash off in the soak. All that is then left to do is to pour away the dirty water and rinse. They will be most of the way to being clean before you even have to touch them.

With basic hygiene attended to, it was time to put on some clothes.