The author of this extraordinarily thorough history of hygiene admits to having a framed poster at home exhorting the reader to BE PUNCTUAL. BE REGULAR. BE CLEAN – but it’s unclear whether this decorative choice is driven by piety or irony. Clean is mostly silent on the subject of the writer’s own fixations. Instead, Smith, a former student of Roy Porter and an honorary fellow of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, gives us a breath-taking account of cleanliness from prehistory up to the present day: from the painstakingly manicured ancient Egyptians to us, the inventors of the antibacterial wet wipe.

Investigating the underpinnings of humanity’s urge to be clean, Smith argues that there is “a deep psychology of slime, dirt, and stickiness” shared by all human beings. “Close physical contact with other people’s body wastes is generally and universally thought to be rather repulsive,” she says; even Neolithic man had drop latrines and rubbish dumps (humans, apparently, can be divided into “washers” and “wipers”; most ancient people were definitely “wipers”). Like other social animals we delight in expelling dirt and keeping clean, Smith maintains – our primate cousins spend almost a fifth of their time grooming each other. Her book sets out to examine why all this should be so.

Her argument has three main strands. Cleanliness, she suggests, has a social function, to do with bonding and breeding and allowing us to marshal our pheromones so we give off the perfect level of muskiness (we can also use perfume to mimic this effect, which apparently works, even on animals: researchers trying to breed ocelots in captivity found that “a little dab of Obsession sent the cats into a sexual frenzy”). Being clean also makes pragmatic sense, protecting us from germs and disease. And then there’s the moral dimension. The business of cleanness has a symbolic function in every key religion, expressed in washing rituals (or not-washing rituals, in the case of some Christian ascetics) and a kaleidoscopic array of purity beliefs.

Smith’s subject is so huge – and her definition of cleanliness so inclusive – that tidying it into one book presents her with a challenge. She has opted for an accumulative rather than an analytical approach, sucking up heaps of fascinating anecdotes with the voracity of a vacuum cleaner. We learn, for instance, that dental hygiene was so poor in early modern Europe that portraits always showed the subject’s mouth firmly closed (the first open smile with gleaming white teeth in European art history was painted by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1787); that in 1949, British women washed their hair on average just once or twice a fortnight; and that black Americans currently make up 12% of the US population, but account for 25% of the total spend on cosmetics and toiletries.

People have long hijacked the notion of cleanliness to serve moral (or immoral) ends. Smith dwells on this trend only briefly, but finds innumerable historical examples of cleanliness as bossiness. John Locke, dourly quoting Juvenal’s aphorism of “a healthy mind in a healthy body”, proposed a regime of cold plunges in both summer and winter. French revolutionary zealots in 1793 went so far as to put hygiene on the statute book, making it both one of the rights of the healthy citizen and one of the duties of the all-embracing state.

With the birth of germ theory at the end of the 19th century, such moralistic proponents of cleanliness received a tremendous boost – now soap could save your life, too (in Britain, the soap tax, a huge disincentive to cleanliness, was eventually abolished by Gladstone in 1852). Unfortunately, much of the medical profession turned out not to be interested in hygiene. “Most doctors seem to despise the subject,” a 19th-century doctor commented sadly – a fact that is still true in some hospitals today.

Even before we forgot how to wash, keeping clean was hard. For many centuries, the cold bath and the strip wash were the only options for ordinary people. The arrival of the shower in the 18th century came as a shock. “I bore it better than I expected,” a middle-class American observed, “not having been wet all over at once for 28 years past.” The practical difficulties were eventually resolved, in the West at least: these days, even the bath-loving Romans would be impressed by our cleanliness.

In fact, by the conclusion of Smith’s capacious history, it is apparent that we are obsessed. We must have pure air, clean water, quality plumbing and Toilet Duck. We spend vast amounts on toiletries and cosmetics (£4.1 billion in 2001 in Britain alone), and seek ever more refined products to help us care for our bodies. But rather than criticise us for our obsession, Smith finds it all rather natural. She may carp about our “narcissism”, but she recognises the deep, primal need that cleanliness springs from: “‘Wellbeing’ is ultimately neither a fad nor a luxury,” she concludes, looking back to apes and their grooming rituals, “but a necessary mental and physical state.”

Toilet Training

The 20th century was the cleanest era on record in all industrialised countries. New theories about hygiene combined with the advent of washing machines and showers to transform attitudes to whiffs that our forebears took for granted. From America came the concept of BO – body odour – and the use of underarm deodorants, spread through an advertising campaign in the 1950s. The first ever television advertisement was for soap.

The benefits of new discoveries were not evenly shared, however. In Shoreditch in 1938, only 14% of families had baths and in some parts of Ireland in the 1960s, there were no toilets at all: as one of Smith’s interviewees recalls, it was “under a bush as often as not, using a dock leaf”. By the end of the century, such solutions had lost their charm. Japan developed the “smart toilet”, which not only weighs you but analyses your stools before telling you if you’ve had too much alcohol or protein. It can even prescribe a special diet, order it from the supermarket and have it delivered to your house, ready to be microwaved.

Odd as this may seem, it’s scarcely the weirdest example of the modern age’s obsession with inner and outer cleanliness. The comedian John Cleese has said that his mother did not like him to kiss her because “she thought it would spread germs”. And in the 1930s, the vogue for “bathing” babies in cleansing fresh air and sunlight was taken to its logical conclusion by the journalist John Gale, who kept his newborn daughter in an oversized parrot cage outside his window: “She was nicely sunburnt; she became apparently immune to frost .. . When there was snow or an east wind, we zipped her up in a sort of sack with armholes.” Aged one, she outgrew the cage, but it gave her “an admirable start”.

CLEAN: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity by Virginia Smith

Oxford UP £16.99 pp469

Buy the book here for the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

Read on... book:

Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne The other side of the coin – everything from foul breath to smelly streets

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