Let’s Clear the Air About the Smells of Regency England

This story has a whole lot to do with poo — and not just the way Anthony treated Siena in Season 1.

Spoiler alert, Bridgerton fans — in Season 2, our favorite characters are getting soaking wet. More specifically, we see Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and the Sharmas take long baths in the kind of deep metal tubs that remodeling dreams are made of. It’s definitely a fantasy: Even if your family name was in Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage, a whole-body immersion in warm, clean water probably didn’t happen every day in Regency England. This reality had as much to do with cultural norms as the labor involved in preparing a bath before most houses had adequate plumbing. I’m so sorry to burst your olfactory bubble, but the real Bridgerton was only a chamber pot cover, screen or cupboard door away from the stench of human waste — and that’s just the start of the smells circulating in Regency England.

You know that moment in a hetero historical romance when men stay in the dining room and women trot off to the drawing room? That’s a halftime pee break during the game of love, necessary because most houses didn’t have indoor flush toilets in the early 19th century (only 6,000 or so flushing water closets had been installed in England by 1797). If the yard didn’t have a convenient or available privy, men might open a cabinet in the dining room and pull out a chamber pot. Women would likely use a chamber pot located in a small room on the ground floor or even do their business in the drawing room before the men rejoined them. When needing to go on the go, there was a portable female urinal called a bourdalou that could be easily tucked under their skirts. The occasional lack of drawers for women made it easy to pop a squat at a ball after too many ratafias; when drawers came into fashion in the early 1800s, they had an open crotch to facilitate easy loo breaks.

Servants emptied chamber pots into a slop pail and then dumped everything into the household’s cesspool. There would be at least one enormous vat of sewage under the backyard of a real 1814 Bridgerton house, which suddenly explains the need for all that perpetually blooming, fragrant wisteria out front. Poorly managed cesspits and sewers sometimes held so much explosive methane gas that a lamp or candle nearby could erupt in dangerous flames. It was illegal to dump human waste directly into London’s sewers before the 19th century, so a few times per year, “night soil” workers pulled up and carted away the household poo collection. In compact London neighborhoods, poorly managed cesspools would flood onto neighbors’ property. The tight smiles exchanged by the Bridgertons and Featheringtons suddenly make a lot more sense.

By 1815, London residents had successfully lobbied for the laws to be changed so that new water closets with flushing toilets could send their waste right into the city’s sewers. All that extra water and human waste had to go somewhere, and it ultimately ended up in the River Thames and even overflowed into Hyde Park’s Serpentine lake. The same lake represented repeatedly in Bridgerton as the site for fancy picnics, scheming and romantic boat rides was just months away from being flooded with human excrement. Flushing toilets became more common in the 1830s as the Thames crap crisis mounted, leading to cholera outbreaks and 1858’s “Great Stink.”

Deep pits of sticky black mud existed at the bottom of the Serpentine, a fact we know because working-class men and boys bathed there. If you’ve ever wondered why jobless aristocrats in romance novels keep surprisingly rigid Hyde Park visitation schedules, it’s likely because managing mamas don’t want their diamond daughters catching sight of the hundreds of naked males bathing in the lake. A letter to the editor in 1821 complained about rich ladies having to “run the gauntlet through a swarm of naked men and boys” bathing in the Thames, especially when taking a boat to Vauxhall Gardens — the same place Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) punched Nigel Berbrooke (Jamie Beamish) and formulated a ruse with Simon (Regé-Jean Page).

Earlier Europeans thought that cleanliness meant washed hands and faces as well as regularly cleaning and changing a person’s linen clothing — shifts for women and undershirts for men. Aristocratic people visited Turkish-style public baths called bagnios for a deep soak and cupping treatment from 1680 to about 1725, but some public baths became sites for sex work, and gentlewomen soon stayed away in droves. When Regency-era people did wash their skin, they tended to use a jug and basin for a sponge bath that targeted the more visible and odiferous parts of the body. In cases where people got fully wet, the water was often cold, since unheated water didn’t require as much labor or fuel, and cold water was believed to be better for the body and soul. Judgey proto-netizens thought the Duke of Wellington was odd for taking a daily cold bath, and the Lord Mayor of London’s 1812 request for a shower-bath in his residence was denied because his predecessors didn’t have such a luxury.

According to modern standards, people in 19th century England would give off some sort of personal odor. But they might not have smelled bad in quite the same way a modern person does after, say, a weeklong summer camping trip. Europe went through the Little Ice Age, which lowered temperatures, from roughly 1300 to 1850. What’s in and on the body can also change odor: Clothes were made of breathable natural fibers, people probably had different bacteria (one of the main causes of odor) living on their skin and most folks ate a whole lot less meat, which researchers have tied to better perceived body odor in lab settings.

That’s not to say that some figures weren’t roasted for their poor hygiene. Indifferent hygiene habits — and gleefully oversharing about them — appear to have deep roots among the rich. Caroline of Brunswick received lectures about properly washing herself and her undergarments because she was deemed funky. Madame de Sévigné, a 17th-century marquise of France, thought it would be cool to share with her daughter that courtiers like her never washed their feet. A rich Philadelphia woman in 1799 risked days of Twitter discourse by writing her body hadn’t been fully wet in 28 years.

What about preparing for romantic encounters that might include someone going Whistledown? Sources are limited, but an early-18th-century book recounts the story of a “Lady of the Town” (sex worker) visiting public baths so that she’d be “fit for the exercises of Love.” At the bagnio, she was treated with essences and herbs meant to “render her most Putescent parts, as sweet as a Calves Nostril.” While men bore far less cultural disgust directed at their bits, rakes with sexually transmitted illnesses such as William Byrd II were advised to take cold baths to treat gonorrhea and similar conditions. They could do this at the public bagnios, where the water tended to be changed just twice per day.

With the exception of the aforementioned ladies who put out press releases about their own filth, most people in the past wanted to do some sort of bodily cleansing. Due to Regency culture and infrastructure, washing up might mean a cold bath during a Little Ice Age, public swim in a fetid river or soak in reused bagnio water. Thankfully, Bridgerton is a fantasy where the private baths are plentiful and the only burning is the emotional kind.