Smelly history

Katherine Ashenbury (Profile, £12.99)

Today, most people - teenage boys excepted - regard daily washing as routine. But it hasn't always been so, of course. Elizabeth I famously washed once a month, whether she needed it or not. Whereas the aristocratic among her subjects regarded cleanliness as putting put fresh clothes over their unwashed bodies, and the rest didn't have either clean bodies or clean clothes.

Napoleon and Josephine were unusually fastidious for their time in that they both took a long, hot daily bath. They had that rarity - a bathroom - in all their establishments. Even in the first half of the 20th century, fewer than one in ten French people had a bathroom. Significantly, on returning from a campaign in 1796, Napoleon wrote to Josephine: "I will return to Paris tomorrow. Don't wash."

The history of cleanliness is a fascinating one, and one that Ashenbury chronicles to perfection in her excellent book. She peeks into the habits of peoples throughout the ages - clean and unclean, savoury and unsavoury, hot and cold, soaped and scraped, social and private - and the result is a glorious romp through the development of perceptions of cleanliness.

Baths were not always hot, of course. After exercise in the gymnasium, the Greeks used to scrape off their sweat and then wash in cold water. Incidentally, the word gymnasium' literally means the naked place', because Greek athletes exercised in the nude. I wonder what effect this would have on gym membership nowadays.

One of the most enduring debates in the history of cleanliness concerns the relative merits of hot and cold water.

It was the Romans who introduced hot water into gymnasiums, and thereby lies an interesting theory. Edward Gibbon, the historian, was convinced that hot baths were one of the main reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire.

Clean is full of interesting facts and peppered with anecdotes and quotes - "In Paris, the devout do not wash their bottoms," according to a journal in 1895. Charles Dickens, in contrast, was fastidious, and created an improvised shower, known as The Demon' for the ferocity of its water jet. There's a lovely, Heath Robinson-like drawing of the Bozerian Shower Bath, dated 1878, in which the person taking the shower has to pedal to activate the water.

Ashenbury concludes her book with current, contradictory thoughts on cleanliness - from the children's book published in 2006 which instructs children to play without touching each other so as to avoid germs, to the Hygiene Hypothesis, which states, in essence, that a certain amount of dirt is good for our immune systems.

Whether you're a bath or a shower person, a hot or a cold water person, rigorously clean or an advocate of a bit of dirt, I can guarantee that you will find this book totally engaging.