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

The Cleaning Bible: Kim and Aggie’s Complete Guide to Modern household Management by Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie

HUMAN BEINGS ARE filthy animals. We sweat, we bleed, we dribble, we eat messy food, we moult and we “evacuate”, to use the old coinage. We harbour snot, lice, earwax. We also shed our skin at an alarming rate — not neatly, like a snake, but cell by cell. Did you know that 75 to 80 per cent of the dirt in vacuum cleaners consists of human skin? We are all walking dust.Then we die, creating yet more mess.

Like other animals, we have developed grooming rituals to deal with our filth. The modern mother bearing down on her child with an electric nit comb is not so different from a gorilla picking parasites off its young. As Virginia Smith writes in her lucid and wide-ranging history of cleanliness, tending oneself is a basic animal impulse because “it is grooming that saves the body from falling into disrepair”.

But being human beings, we can’t leave it at that. We have to complicate things. We don’t just attack real dirt, but imaginary pollutions, too. Not content with tending our bodies, we try to stop them from dying. The gorilla, from what one can tell, is happy with basic cleanliness — a level of grooming that will leave him or her sleek and admired by other gorillas. There is a social element — the most powerful gorillas are also the cleanest — but it doesn’t go much beyond that. As Smith writes: “Animals maintain social boundaries and distances, but they have no conception of a dirt demon.”

For human beings, though, cleaning has always been overlaid with religious and political connotations. Smith distinguishes “simple cleanliness” from hygiene on the one hand and purity on the other. Hygiene — from the goddess Hygieia — “derives from the Classical Greek word for wholesomeness and human healthiness, which then became a shorthand term for the Greek natural science of preserving and extending life”.

It was hygiene that made the Greeks develop complex dietetic regimens; that encouraged Renaissance humanists to take life-preserving cold baths; and that drove the Victorians to embrace sewers and cemeteries. Hygiene carries with it a scary notion of perfection, which reached its height in the Nazi cults of pure diet and naturism.

There is perfection, too, in the idea of purity and this is still harder to achieve, because the dirt in question is illusory. Smith describes brilliantly how the early religions all developed complex “dirt-avoidance” beliefs and practices — partly as a way of bonding social groups together and partly as “a type of metaphysical insurance policy, a defence against the physical cracks in the Universe”. To purify was to control the Universe. But once you start to see cleaning and tidying in this light, it is very easy to get trapped in a never-ending hamster wheel of purity rules. One man’s tidiness is another man’s OCD.

The Greek philosopher Theophrastus wrote a satire about a man so superstitious that “the danger of pollution is never far from his thoughts”, who spends so much time chewing laurel and doing elaborate ritual washing that he puts his entire life on hold.

He should have had television’s Kim and Aggie, those two goddesses of the cleaning arts, to sort him out. As Kim comments in their new Cleaning Bible: “‘Life is very short, and if there’s a wee bit of dust, what does it matter?”

Part of the reason this pair have been so successful is that they bring cleaning back to a simple, pragmatic level. This is the book for you if you want to know how to change a fuse, how to clean grouting ( a toothbrush, plus bicarb) and, my favourite chapter, how to remove a whole host of stains, from beetroot to Plasticine, which has actually inspired me to order some borax online. These two have no truck with cleaning for the sake of cleaning. “Do as you go,” Kim says, and don’t let it ruin your life.

Having said which, they also communicate particular satisfaction that cleaning can bring to the human race. “When the house needs to be cleaned,” Aggie says, “I feel anxious, irritable, annoyed and depressed. But when the work has been done, I’m transformed; I feel in control, liberated, unencumbered — as though my head’s in the right place and anything’s possible.”

Could a gorilla feel such joy? A clean house is the closest most of us filthy animals get to a state of religious grace.

Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity by Virginia Smith (Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-929779-5)

Buy the book here

The Cleaning Bible: Kim and Aggie’s Complete Guide to Modern household Management by Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie (Penguin, £9.99, ISBN 978-0-14102-700-5)

Buy the book here

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