MOP & PAIL

a room of one’s own had to be kept clean – by someone. Vanessa Bell at Charleston found the servant problem less agonising than her sister (being an employer in a more traditional, distant mould) – though as a bohemian it behoved her to try and break down some of the barriers. She tried to be kind, but Angelica Garnett recalled her mother talking to her servants ‘As though she were waving from a train at women working in the fields’. In the end, Nellie Boxall was eased out of the Woolfs’ life by modern conveniences. Monks’ House was equipped, by the money earned by Virginia’s novels, with electricity and a fridge. Nellie was no longer necessary. There need be no more the guilt-inducing sound of her lugging coal scuttles and boiling coppers. In 1934, she gave notice for the last time. Virginia wrote: ‘After eighteen years, I have at last got rid of an affectionate domestic tyrant.’ She never made another reference in writing to Nellie. With Nellie gone the Woolfs tried their hand, with some expectation of enjoyment, at housework. It was an eye-opener. ‘I’ve been washing up lunch – how servants preserve either sanity or propriety if that is nine-tenths of their lives – greasy ham – god knows!’ Virginia

VIRGINIAIRONSIDE A GRUBBY LOT

CLEAN: A HISTORYOFPERSONALHYGIENE ANDPURITY

★By Virginia Smith (Oxford University Press 457pp £16.99)

WHENI WASyoung we only had a bath once a week – the day, Friday, was known as ‘bath night’. In my greataunt’s house a line was drawn in the bath to show where the hot water had to stop – it was about four inches from the bottom. Everyone in England smelt – of sweat and of unwashed hair. But there are fashions in cleanliness and personal hygiene, as Virginia Smith points out in her immaculately researched book, Clean. No doubt in generations to come we will be just as amused by our obsessive attitudes to cleanliness in the twenty-first century as we are by those rules imposed by past generations. Nature has made us a pretty grubby lot. We shed

wrote. Not, as Light points out, that she had to do everything: there were still people to come in and ‘do the rough’ – the scrubbing, scouring and heaving that made housework labour. What makes this book subtle is Light’s refusal to oversimplify the bond between servants and their employers. She is alert to the complexities in the relationship – how dependency was often mutual and affectionate and how, despite the ambivalence and high-handedness of their attitudes towards class, the Bloomsbury set upheld their convictions against the dreaded narrowness of ‘respectability’. When one of the Selwood sisters, for example, had an illegitimate child, the baby was taken in by Vanessa Bell’s friend Faith Henderson and raised as one of her own children. Mrs Woolf and her Servants is a fascinating, beautifully written and meticulously researched book. Inevitably, it is Virginia Woolf’s voice that we hear most clearly, but the varied and individual characters of Nellie, Lottie, Sophie, Grace and all the other servants of Bloomsbury are for the first time given definition, and their stories told. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37

skin, hair and toenail clippings at the rate of between three to six ounces a day – that’s four tons in a lifetime. Around 80 per cent of the contents of a vacuum cleaner consists of human skin cells. And that’s not counting our obvious waste – excreta, sweat, various gases and chemicals, not to mention tears and bogeys. We don’t like it. Which is why close physical contact with other people’s bodily waste is seen as rather repulsive, and jobs like laundering, rubbish clearance and lavatory cleaning are given to the lowest human ranks. The book is filled with fascinating pieces of information. The Egyptians used hair oil, depilatories, hair disentangling cream, and had recipes for the treatment of grey hair, dandruff, lice and nits. There were salves of face paint for the lips and other unguents to cover up moles, blemishes, pimples and peeling. Teeth cleaners were used, and mouth, armpit and nose deodorants. In Homer’s world, to wash or bathe someone was a particular sign of respect; in the Odyssey, male guests were always washed on arrival (sometimes the whole body, eight times), while the young always washed the hands of their elders before eating. In England in 1693, John Locke recommended cold baths for decayed and weak constitutions, which resulted in misery for schoolboys for

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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