Belief in English Cleanliness.
This is not the general English opinion. The English believe themselves to be a clean people. Foreigners are dirty, Englishmen are clean; that is one of the most obvious distinctions between them.
The Morning Sponge-bath.
Earlier Habits.
Present English Claim to Cleanliness.
The English upper classes are clean, but cleanliness of any high degree is a very modern virtue amongst them. It is an invention of the nineteenth century. I am just old enough to remember the time when the use of the morning sponge-bath became general amongst boys and young men of my own generation. Men and women born at the close of the eighteenth century did as French people do to-day; they took a warm bath occasionally for cleanliness,[54] and they took shower-baths when they were prescribed by the physician for health, and they bathed in summer seas for pleasure, but they did not wash themselves all over every morning. I remember an old gentleman, of good family and estate, arguing against this strange, newfangled custom, and maintaining that it was quite unnecessary to wash the skin in modern times, as the impurities were removed by linen. However, the new custom took deep root in England, because it became one of the signs of class. It was adopted as one of the habits of a gentleman, and afterwards spread rather lower, though it is not yet by any means universal. It is chiefly upon this habit that the present English claim to superior cleanliness is founded. In former times the English were proud of using more water than the French for ordinary ablutions, and they pretended to believe that the French were unacquainted with the use of soap, because they did not provide public pieces of soap in the bedchambers of their hotels.
The best Cleanser.
Hardihood above Cleanliness.
The cold sponge-bath is perhaps used in England more for health than for cleanliness, as a prolonged stay in a warm bath cleans much better, and the treatment by perspiration according to old Roman or modern oriental usage is incomparably the most effectual cleanser of all. It is characteristic of the English to have set hardihood above the ideal perfection of cleanliness, and to have avoided the luxurious and enervating bath in which the ancients took delight.
English Pride in Hardihood.