The Universal Advertising Sheet, Part 5

Let’s see what interesting shreds of personal and social history we can read about, courtesy this week of the Monthly Compendium of Literary, Fashionable, and Domestic Advertisements from the August 1810 edition of La Belle Assemblée...

WIND-UP SHOWER BATHS

JOHN FELL, sole inventor of the PORTABLE WIND-UP SHOWER BATHS, respectfully informs the Public that he has ready for Sale, a number of the above universally approved Machines, at his Warehouse, 161, High Holborn, near Broad-street. This invention has received, as it is undoubtedly entitled to, unlimited Patronage. There is a Moveable Cylinder, so admirably contrived as to furnish the utmost facility in filling, and afterwards by gradually elevating it, to produce a shock in such proportion as the feelings, age, or habits of Bathers may require. It is, moreover, made to take to pieces, and pack up most conveniently.—Price from Five to Seven Guineas.—N.B. J.F. is Inventor and Vender of the Corking Machines so much in present use.

Showers weren’t so much used for getting clean as they were for a sort of do-it-yourself  health treatment, rather like sea-bathing was done for curative, not recreational, purposes. Interestingly, when I went to look for more information on Mr. Fell, I found mention in 1887 of a John Fell and Co., suppliers of bath and lavatory valves and beer machines and bar fittings—which covers both his shower baths and the Corking Machines mentioned in the ad. 

FORTU-NATE CLUBS

The Clubs met with great success in the last Lottery at HORNSBY and Co.’s, Cornhill; part of the 20,000 l. sold by them, was divided among Thirteen jolly Watermen of St. Catherine’s; besides Shares in the Borough, and many other places in the Metropolis; and also at Liverpool, Bath, Chester, Taunton, Leith, and Deal—Many Clubs are now forming from Gravesend to Richmond, and every other place in the Kingdom; and additional £20,000 in the present Lottery, to be drawn October the 19^th, creates a strong desire of adventuring.

Lotteries were quite the thing at this time, as Regina once posted about here...but I love the “Thirteen Jolly Watermen of St. Catherine’s” touch in this particular ad.

Entertainment,

Rational, Pleasing, and useful.

No. 14, Tavistock-street, Covent Garden.

THE CIRCULATING LIBRARY

Greatly Enlarged.

The Public are respectfully informed, that valuable and expensive Works, in every class of Literature, are daily added to this Library; which now consists of sixty thousand Volumes of modern Publications, really valuable, useful, and entertaining.

Catalogues and Cards of the terms may be had on application at the Library.

Books were expensive to purchase outright; a typical three-volume novel could run upward of several guineas for a heavily illustrated tome. Enter the subscription library, where for a fee books could be borrowed before the free public library became a fixture of philanthropic giving later in the century.  Even small towns and villages could often boast of at least one small one, and London and other cities were rife with them, and advertised their wares frequently...as we can see here.

Keep it Clean! Part 1

I may love to talk about the 19th century and sometimes dream a little about stepping into a time machine and visiting it, but there are a few facets of life in which I am firmly 21st century…and one of those is taking a nice hot shower every morning. How did our 19th century counterparts keep clean?

By the early 19th century, hundreds of years of aversion to getting wet had given way to the theory that bathing might actually be good for you. The health benefits of visiting places like Bath, where the Romans had built extensive public baths to take advantage of the natural hot mineral springs, were accepted and those who could afford it flocked to bathe in the public and private baths there. Sea-bathing also became a fashionable “cure” for everything from skin complaints to digestive problems. Eventually, keeping up the habit at home gradually caught on as cleanliness was accepted as a desirable—and healthful—quality.

If you were a young lady of fashion, how would you keep clean?

Unless your home had been recently built, it was unlikely it that it had a bathroom, at least in the way we define that word. Instead, the usual method of bathing was in a portable tub (often a hip bath, which we discussed here) set up by the fireplace in your bedroom on an oilcloth sheet in case of splashover and surrounded by screens to block drafts and provide privacy. Hardworking servants had to tote cans of hot water up from the kitchen to fill your bath for you. But taking a bath wasn't your only option; by this time a shower apparatus had been invented as well, though they were generally used with cold water which was poured into the top and released when the bather pulled a cord or chain to open the sluice. According to the wife of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, her husband had great moral courage but no physical courage, so whenever he took a cold shower-bath (as they were called), she always had to come and pull the chain for him!

In between baths, you could have a sponge-bath in your room; a standard piece of bedroom furniture was the washstand, which held a broad, deep basin which your maid would fill with warm water. It was easy to wash the upper body this way, and certainly much easier than dealing with the hip bath.

By mid-century more houses were being built with bathrooms located near the bedrooms; earlier bathrooms had often been built on the ground floor, with the bathtub doubling as a clothes-washing vessel. Advances in plumbing engineering took a while to catch up, though, and there was often insufficient pressure to get water to those upper floors…which meant those maids had to continue toting water, poor things!

Next week, in Part 2: soap and shampoo