Unmentionable

No time to waste. Open your eyes. Awaken into your new life. You're in a sparsely decorated bedroom. The sheets are rough to the touch, the mattress hard, the air so chilly it shows your breath. And someone has left a pot of cold pee under your bed.

You've arrived, dear one. The year doesn't matter, nor the precise place; you don't have time to wonder at the details. You're expected downstairs. We must begin our lessons with haste.

So let's get you dressed, shall we? Pull off that surprisingly coarse linen nightdress and you'll be standing bare and shivering in your bedroom. Don't worry; you'll soon be wearing more layers than a five-year-old on a snow day.

Open your armoire and see if you can find some underwear. Back in the twenty-first century, you loved your underwear, didn't you? Whether you were sunk snug inside your granny panties, or rocking a sexy Saturday-night bra held together with only a scrap of red lace and pure sexual magnetism, they felt good. That which wobbled was bound comfortably and pleasantly presented; that which might leak or smudge was assured an extra layer of modesty.

I'd best break it to you early: you're going to be wearing a lot of things under your dress during your time here—but none of them will have a crotch. Your privates are going to be traveling unaccompanied today. Under miles of fabric, to be sure, but with a direct line of sight to the floor.

Ever wonder why the saucy, high-kicking can-can dance at the Moulin Rouge was so popular? It wasn't because the dancers were showing their stockings, or even their legs.

You have a bare bottom for good reasons. You will be wearing very heavy, long skirts that you'll never have cause to lift above your ankles. (Unless a good wind comes and flips your crinoline over your head. And if that happens you'll have to move to a new town and change your name.) So you risk no exposure. Why would you need a crotch? (Well, one reason periodically comes to mind, but we'll cover that in another chapter.)

To really understand how terrific it is to have nude nethers, we have to finish getting you dressed.

So put on your chemise. It's a lot like the nightgown you just took off, except lighter, wide-necked, and short-sleeved. It's actually quite pleasant. If you were back in the twenty-first century, you might wear it as a fun, simple sundress to a summer barbecue, or Shakespeare in the Park. However, if you do that here in the nineteenth century, you won't even have to worry about moving to a new town. You'll be safely tucked away in a sanitarium, where you will be strapped into frigid ice baths and given fantastic doses of opium until your hysteria abates. Remember, the center of a woman is her uterus. Her crazy, crazy uterus.

Now, even though we're leaving your lady parts free to sway in the breeze, we still need to cover your legs. The bottom part with stockings, of course, knitted and held up with garters. What covers the rest of your leg varies over the course of the century and could include pantaloons, bloomers, chemilets, pantalettes, leglets, or Turkish trousers. They're all basic upper-leg coverings worn under your chemise, tied at the waist. And until the end of the century, the legs don't connect to each other at the top. They're left split, with a slight overlap for modesty.

So, chemise, stockings, garters, and crotchless pantalettes. You are still practically naked. All your wobbly bits—there they are, just wobbling. That won't do.

Oh, how you'll miss your cherished bra collection on this journey. Work bras, sports bras, date-night bras, and the fraying, soft-cupped "I'm not leaving this couch until I've watched every single episode of Downton Abbey" bras. Brassieres won't become popular until the 1920s, and even then they'll be about as supportive as two kerchiefs tied together with wet paper. For now, dear, we're going to truss you up in your corset!

You've seen the X-rays of ribs grotesquely crushed by years of corset use, haven't you? Isn't it awful? Those horrid stays (the straight vertical strips that give the corset its power and shape) are made of unforgiving steel, or the nearly-as-unpleasant whalebone (actually whale baleen, but no matter). How are you going to breathe? How are you going to bend over? How are you going to move at all?

Once you are assisted into your corset (back-laced or front-hooked, sometimes both), you'll discover something. Corsets aren't that bad. They don't have to be tightened to the point of spleen displacement. They can function as legitimate support garments, holding up your bosoms, perhaps even putting off the inevitable day when they will lie exhausted and battle-worn against your belly, flapping like tired little beaver tails with every step you take.

For women are fleshy creatures, and many of us feel more comfortable when that flesh is secure. Corsets, like the Spanx and bras of the future, provide privacy. Privacy that women are willing to sacrifice a little comfort for. In the twenty-first century, if your bust was drooping and your bottom flat and wide enough to shoot pool on, you could arrange your clothing to keep that information to yourself. But now, dear traveler, you don't have the option of flowing blouses and jeans made of fabrics that were originally developed for astronauts. You have a corset. And it works pretty well.

As for breathing and bending over, there are smaller, shorter corsets that can provide a working woman some support while letting her scrub and sew her way to an early grave. (Your chemise is clean, by the way, because one of your maids spent an hour dunking it in near-boiling water and lye, until her hands cracked and burned, then wringing, hanging, ironing, and starching it. It isn't uncommon for even a small household to take two days to get the washing done.) A woman who is not of the working class doesn't have much reason to bend over in the nineteenth century. And if she does, a lady lowers herself, straight-backed, by bending her knees. She does not stick her posterior in the air like a common prairie dog.

Oh, look! Your maid has laid out your dress! This is precisely why you chose this travel destination. What a lovely frock. Such exquisite embroidery and hand-stitching. Such a voluminous skirt! No! Not yet. No touch. First, put on a loose shirt over the corset. Corset covers prevent everyone from seeing the outlines of your underpinnings.

Now, fetch the cage!

Cage crinoline, that is. You've happened to land midcentury (for now), during the hoop-skirt craze, where the simple flowing dresses of the Regency (think Jane Austen) have been replaced by the biggest, loudest bell-shaped silhouettes this side of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Yards upon yards of heavy wool have been used to construct your dress. To hold it up, you need to strap on your cage crinoline. It is precisely what it sounds like: a wire cage suspended from your hips or shoulders, over which your skirt will rest. These cages, which in their naked state are indistinguishable from something you trap wild dogs in, have a sensible use. Without one, you won't be able to walk.

The cage structure distributes the incredible weight of the fabric and holds the hem away from your feet so you won't trip. Well, you're probably going to trip anyway, because you're wearing forty pounds of clothing, your shoes are crazy pinchy, and there is an amazing amount of horse poop in the street. But it won't be because your dress is too close to your feet.

Now we add a petticoat or six, depending on how much ruffle you need to meet this year's fashion, and hurray! You're ready to have your maids tug your dress over your head and button you up. You look lovely, dear. Which makes me almost not want to tell you how uncomfortable and smelly your dress actually… you know what? We can just wait on that for a bit. You look lovely.

And now we return to the first question you asked yourself this morning as you looked through your undergarments: "Why don't any of the forty-seven pieces of clothing I'll be wearing have a crotch?" Well, let's do this.

Let me sneak you a pair of your old bikini cuts to wear under everything else. No one will know. In fact, wear them to the ball tonight! There you'll be, having a lovely time dancing, eating delicate bonbons, and trading even more delicate bons mots. You won't even care how thick the stench of body odor coated with heavy floral perfumes is. (Bathing, you will soon learn, is a huge pain in the butt in the nineteenth century. Thick perfume is so much easier.)

Now, run upstairs, squat over a chamber pot, pee really quick, and run back down to the party.

Yes. Hoist up that enormous poundage of wool, steel, and cotton with one arm and then pull down your underpants with the other. Go on.

You fell over, didn't you?

Yes. And by the time you're all buttoned and laced up again, everyone will suspect you left the party for some other more embarrassing reason, like kissing the stable boy, or diarrhea.

That is why your dainty bits aren't covered. Because even though no one in Victorian society will admit to it, a lady has to pee, and "closed drawers," as they will eventually come to be known (because you "draw" them up and down!), make that practically impossible for a fully dressed lady.

Crotches will come together slowly as the century winds down. First buttons will appear, and then finally crotches will be sewn up altogether. This will most likely be due to the extreme narrowing of skirts that becomes popular by the 1880s. Crinolines will bundle themselves up into bustles, which are a lot like crinolines—just for your rump instead. A lady will not only be able to raise her skirts, but she will once again fit into her outhouse, although that may not be necessary, as most upper-class families will install indoor plumbing around the 1890s.

Speaking of which, it's time to learn how to navigate your new potty options. I believe you'll find them far more creative and numerous than you'd ever want them to be.

2

Bowels into Buckets: Nature Is an Obscene Caller

I want you to look at your nineteenth-century shoes. We wouldn't call them shoes today.

They're boots, made of black leather and usually ascending halfway up the calf, fitting closely, with a hard wooden sole. Once you wedge your foot into them, they are fastened by means of tightly spaced buttons, which, if you are in the unfortunate position of ever having to dress yourself, are freakishly difficult to manipulate. So difficult that a special hook has been invented to make it possible. By modern standards these shoes should be placed next to the fuzzy handcuffs in the window of the kind of store that sells edible massage oil.

So why don't you see if you can find something a little less daunting to wear on your feet today? Oh, there's a darling pair! Delicate color, small and sweet. Your maid insists they are merely "house slippers," but they look like the closest thing to actual shoes available. What sort of slippers are made of kid leather and satin, anyway? They aren't even fluffy.

Now, out you go on the town, in your prim but chic little slip-on shoes!

Hello! Back so soon?

Oh, heavens. You descended your front steps and landed directly in a pig wallow of "mud," which you're pretty sure is 90 percent horse excrement? Oh, poor child! Deep down you know that's not just from horses. Come, now. Don't delude yourself, darling, it just makes this journey harder.

The nineteenth century is so, so dirty. Whether you're rich or poor, living on a farm or in the city, you are going to be ankle deep in filth wherever you go.

Filthiest. Century. Ever.

Some would argue that the nineteenth century was one of the filthiest times in all of Western history, particularly in any urban, developed area. Worse than when humans squatted in caves picking lice off each other. (By the way, you'll probably still have to do this on occasion. It's where the term "nit-picking" comes from. But, take heart, not in a cave, and to squat or not will be entirely at your discretion. So there's that!)

Ankle deep in filth, I said, but forgive me, I was inaccurate. You will wish the filth terminated at your ankles. Foulness is everywhere. Grime and rot cling to the very air, the buildings, the people; even the soap is made out of lard and poison.

There is no such thing as "fresh air" in the larger cities, unless the winds are blowing it in from other locations, usually at such an icy speed that the fresh air poses a greater threat than the miasma it displaced. There is no electricity and little available in the line of "clean burning" fuels (whale oil burns exceptionally well, but since you still possess a twenty-first-century conscience, you are a heartless monster if you use it). Yet every home and business needs energy, so you must burn something, like wood or coal. Burn for heat, burn for light, and burn for steam power. The result is the soot and smoke of hundreds of thousands of fires saturating the sky.

And these fires don't produce a charming campfire smell. Though if they did, it wouldn't matter because even that wouldn't come close to masking the other smells. Remember your street, stretching before you, filled to the horizon with sewage, rotting offal, and other garbage? Life requires people to perform actions that create waste. And like the smoke that hangs above your city, the more solid pollution is there because it has nowhere else to go.

Regarding the fetid road sludge we'll have to call mud: one of the reasons it is so bad is that most of those streets weren't engineered; they simply appeared as they were needed. Many American streets started out as deer trails, and deer aren't known for ecological foresight. Such streets lack all those little whispers of design and maintenance that would send runoff to gutters and ditches to be carried away. Instead the runoff forms pools and collects in holes of stagnated, polluted "water."

In summertime the mud won't be such a problem, unless it's a wet summer, and then, well, malaria. (A French surgeon will be awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the disease is caused by mosquitoes that congregate around stagnant water—but that won't be until 1907, much too late for you. So really watch out for mosquitoes.) In summer you will have dust, endless choking dust, kicked up by every horse and carriage that passes. Bup bup bup! No. Don't bother starting in about cobblestones. Yes, they exist, and they help somewhat with dust and sludge, but I am not setting you down in any of the places that have them because most places don't and frankly you've already been cut enough breaks on this journey.

Now back to general filth in your new romantic life. Some things contribute more heavily to the problem. Take the issue of sewage treatment.

There is no sewage treatment.

There are sometimes conduits that sort of feel like sewers. Streets and a few municipal pipes dump all matter of soggy refuse into these tunnels, and the tunnels in turn carry the awfulness far, far away.

Well, not so far.

Actually, to the nearest large body of water. Which is usually located right in the center of town. Like the Thames, the Seine, or the Hudson. By 1860, the Thames, for instance, was visited by thousands of tons of fecal matter every day from all the pipes and runoffs that emptied into it. Imagine the smell on a hot day. Then get over it quickly because the smell is nothing.

The smell isn't the problem. The problem is that these bodies of water and their thoroughly polluted water tables are also where urban residents get their drinking water. For much of the nineteenth century, doctors didn't even know what germs were and certainly didn't think deadly invisible animals could exist to a fatal capacity in water, like so many tiny rabid unicorns.

People died because of this. By the thousands they died, from cholera, dysentery, typhoid. Diseases that occur when your body desperately tries to flush unwelcome bacteria from its digestive tract, usually killing you by dehydration in the process. Especially when your loved ones try to soothe your thirst by giving you more poisoned water.

Dirty water didn't even enter people's minds as a source of illnesses. They believed that bad air caused disease, which at least was an improvement on the previous century's obsession with removing "bad blood" from dying patients by the half-gallon. And some Victorian doctors still do that, so pick your physician wisely. Actually, don't—don't go to physicians.

You know better, dear. You know that it would be wise during your visit to stick to coffee and alcoholic beverages, because their methods of preparation kill bacteria. Now let me tell you why you know that.

There was a man, beautifully named given his influence on our world: Dr. John Snow. He treated cholera victims daily, breathed the same contaminated air, but never got sick. He was breathing their air, but he wasn't drinking their water. He drew a map of all the cholera victims in a certain neighborhood of London and noticed that all the worst outbreaks were centered on one thing: a single well pump. A dirty one, contaminated by sewage. Even stranger, there was one place in that neighborhood that suffered no cholera at all. And that was the brewery, where employees were apparently allowed to imbibe their own stock as their main beverage of the day.

Dr. Snow retaught the world something it must once have known instinctually but had been forced to forget in order to survive overpopulation.

Do not poop next to where you drink.

And so midcentury, sanitation reform began in most major cities of the Western world. Better sewers, better garbage disposal. Cities began employing enormous task forces to keep their streets from being hell pits of disease and squalor. Which… ehh… helped?

But our twenty-first-century senses would still be assaulted. There were still limited disposal options for garbage, and endless smoke choking the air. Sanitation reform also couldn't change the fact that most people still needed to use outhouses, pit toilets, and latrines for their daily evacuations. Something you are going to have to get used to also.

The Lady's Toilette and Her Thunder Mug

I know you've come a long way, and no doubt one of your express intentions was to be in a place where people did not discuss their bodily functions in casual company. And now here you are again, listening to your (nineteenth-century version) mother complaining about how "her toilet" took an exceptionally long time today. You might as well have just stayed in the twenty-first century and endured the same discussions with her via cell phone.

But stout hearts, now. "Toilet" means something different here. We appropriated our word for the modern plumbing fixture from the French, who said it more like