Sawney’s seat: the social imaginary of the London bog-house c.1660–c.1800

Abstract

Contemporary culture often works with a toilet-training model of history. This popular version of the past dismisses the pre-modern privy as an epitome and symbol of the era’s supposed hygienic backwardness. Surveying court depositions, medical texts and scatological satires, this chapter challenges these assumptions. It reconstructs the ways in which access to such toilet facilities in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London shaped the use of public space in classed and gendered ways, analyses the ambiguous and provisional forms of privacy afforded by the house of office, and examines how the image of the privy offered satirists ways to discuss the transience of print culture and the public sphere.