That’s Right, it’s a Post About Privies

It's much more fun to view the Regency era through rose-colored historical glasses, focusing on the flattering empire-waisted dresses, pretty bonnets, beautiful countryside, well-stocked elegant country house libraries, and of course the handsome men wearing handsome clothes. Better to ignore the position of women (as the property of either their fathers or their husbands), the fact that most of us would have been scrubbing away in the kitchen rather than sitting in the drawing-room, the lack of good medical or dental care, and of course all of those other less-savory details, am I right?

But in this post, I'm going to go there anyway! The topic of where to, um, go, came up in the comments of one of my posts a while back, and as I've captured quite a few photos over the years, I decided for this month's installment to go digging and show the various ways people went to the bathroom/restroom/toilet/water closet (the difference in terminology for this between the US and the UK never ceases to amuse me) back then.

In medieval times, the place for this would have been the garderobe, ironically a bit closer to what we have today than what followed it. This was a portion of a castle that hung over the side, and had a seat (or very often seats) with a hole in them. You, uh, went, and it would land on the ground below, where it was some unfortunate soul's responsibility to periodically clear it away.

A garderobe at the medieval portion of Dover Castle.

 For those in the Regency era still living in castles that were more than just castle in name only, these might still have been within old portions of the building, but they wouldn't have been in use. They'd been replaced by the outdoor privy, which might be more genteelly referred to as a cabinet d'aisance, and the chamber pot. Outdoor toilets don't tend to be something that survives from historic houses – perhaps, again, because they detract from the romance of history, and are less likely to be saved. But I have run across a few in my travels. See if you can spot this one at Mompesson House in Salisbury:

The garden at Mompesson House.

 Don't see it? We'll get a little closer...

Outdoor privy at Mompesson House.

 

 

 Presumably they've omitted the hole in the restoration to avoid some prankster trying to use it, or this is a hinged cover; I can't recall.

 

 Here's another, at Mount Vernon in Virginia, also located within the garden. It's a farther hike from the house than the one at Mompesson House, and shows that the old communal medieval setup has not at all gone away:

The privy at Mount Vernon.

 

Communal privy at Mount Vernon.
 

 This raises a lot of questions for me, particularly: just who would have been in here together? I have to assume that the sexes would not mix, and so presumably one would wait if someone of the opposite sex was in there. But is my assumption correct? Caricatures from the era do seem to bear it out.

I have to think, as well, that women would not have gone out there alone. Consider the Netherfield Ball, for example. All of those ladies and gentlemen were there for many hours, and I have to think most of them would have needed a visit outdoors at some point. I think the ladies would all have found at least one other person to go with, and they would then have gone in together if it was communal. For a lady, she could only have gone alone at risk to her reputation, to be out in the gardens in the dark by herself.

There was, of course, that other indoor option, the chamber pot (which I've once seen referred to as a voilder, and have picked up for use in my writing because, again...romance; who wants to be reminded of the existence of chamber pots in a romance novel?). Many historic houses show these in a sort of traditionally expected location under the bed, but in truth they were often cleverly hidden away in public rooms:

 

Hidden chamber pot in a parlour at Number One Royal Crescent in Bath.

Close up of the hidden chamber pot in Number One Royal Crescent.

The guide in this room indicated that anyone would have just used this chamber pot as needed when the family was sitting around in the morning, which I am a bit dubious of, both because I heard a few other inaccuracies going through the house, and because it doesn't quite jive with what I've heard and read about elsewhere. Perhaps in the time of wider Georgian skirts this could have been done discreetly, but during that era the more purpose-made bourdaloue would have been more likely to be used.

Based on everything else I've seen and heard, it's more likely that use of the chamber pot was also not done in a mixed-sex environment. The story that comes up most frequently is that of the gentlemen making use of the chamber pot within the dining room after the ladies had departed. You can see evidence of this in the Robert Adam-designed dining-room at Saltram:

 Dining-room at Saltram.

Hidden away in a beautiful cabinet like this one...

...are a pair of chamber pots.

The separation of the sexes after dining was something England was famous for during this time, and nobody quite knew how it had come about. One of the better explanations I've read is that it started when tea-drinking became popular, and began with the ladies departing to the drawing-room to prepare the tea. The gentlemen would at first join them when it was ready, but before long they got to talking about politics and drinking port and brandy for longer and longer periods of time, therefore delaying the tea preparation as well.

Yet I wonder if the cause was even simpler...did the sexes separate so they could each relieve themselves in these hidden chamber pots after a long dinner of eating and drinking?

They are also to be found within bedrooms, yet again hidden away in bedside tables or even stairs:

Bedside table with built-in pot at Number One Royal Crescent.

Bedstairs with a built-in pot, at Chatsworth.

Here's a rather pretty one, along with a basin, hidden away in a little closet in Jane and Cassandra Austen's bedroom at Chawton.

This chamber pot in a bedroom at Saltram was given a lid and matched with the decor, rather than being hidden away.

Poorer households, such as this one recreated at Buckler's Hard, would also use chamber pots, although they made no attempt to hide them. In Edinburgh's medieval skyscrapers, people of the city were infamous for crying "garde loo!" and dumping them into the street.

Round about now, you might be wondering about the water closet. They had been invented for centuries by now – indeed, Queen Elizabeth I had one – and Joseph Bramah had obtained a patent in 1778 for what might be called the first fully functional flush toilet.

 

Water closet at George III's Kew Palace.

Yet while some great houses installed them, they were by no means commonplace. Labor was cheap, and it was easy enough to pay servants to carry the chamber pots downstairs and dispose of them. Indeed the biggest development in great houses related to this was to build separate stairs so the wealthy did not need to meet servants carrying their nocturnal effusions on the stairs, rather than the widespread installation of water closets.

Part of the reason water closets didn't catch on was the lack of more modern plumbing – without sufficient plumbing to thoroughly carry away the waste they could be no more convenient than a chamber pot. Still, in the Regency era, when you consider the comfort of seating and the lack of residual, err, waste, I think the people who actually had it best were naval captains. In the great cabin of any naval ship of size, there is what's called a quarter gallery, a toilet very similar to the old medieval garderobes, except that it emptied into the water (something we now, of course, know to be an environmental problem). With an unlimited supply of seawater to regularly flush it out, I think it probably would have been my choice for that time:

Quarter gallery in HMS Victory.

Officers' "seat of ease" on HMS Victory.

Seamen did not have it quite so good: there are two seats in that box-looking structure on the left, the "head."

It was ultimately the need for sanitation in the Victorian era that led to the spread of the water closet; the rise of cholera (which may be linked to the year without a summer in 1816; more on that in future posts) meant that the olden days of dumping waste in streets and rivers could not continue. London was by necessity a pioneer in sanitation and plumbing, and English potter Thomas William Twyford invented the single piece ceramic toilet. Thomas Crapper commonly gets credit for inventing the flush toilet, but he was merely a major manufacturer.

An old Crapper toilet, in underground Seattle.

Interestingly, many water closets continued to look much like the old medieval garderobe, or that naval quarter gallery:

 

The water closet at Agatha Christie's Georgian house, Greenway.

And the chamber pot took a while to completely go away! Here is one in Winston Churchill's bedroom, at the World War II Cabinet War Rooms:

Winston Churchill's bedroom in the underground Cabinet War Rooms.

I hope you've enjoyed this look at one VERY behind-the-scenes aspect that would have been going on in Jane Austen's novels. Now let us return to those rose-colored glasses, and be grateful for our lovely modern flush toilets!