Bathing

One would have been well advised to stand upwind of anyone one was having a conversation with in the 19th century.

The only parts of the body that were at all frequently washed were the arms, neck, face, and hands. However, by the mid-19th century, house plans show that houses had begun to install special houses for baths.

In the middle class usually the whole family took part in one big bath on Saturday, mostly because of the nuisance it was to boil the water.

The poor however, bathed infrequently at best. The water supply system was not a public service. Instead, it was controlled by private companies who only turned the water on for a few hours a day until 1871.

This intermittent character of the water supply was one reason for the unsanitary conditions that prevailed with toilets. Some houses had 'earth closets', but there was no way to keep the fumes from backing up into the house.

Some dwellings, mostly those lived in by the poor, had backyard privies that were periodically emptied into cesspools. In some parts of London, the cesspools emptied directly into the Thames. The Thames still being the water supply for parts of the city, it is no wonder that this was one of the major contributors to the great epidemics of the period.