A daily shower is money down the drain

When did it become an inalienable human right to have a shower every day? I ask the question because pretty clearly it wasn’t always so. Yes, the Romans had showers – of course they did (they probably had the internet, too, but archaeologists can’t see it). A potter about online will tell you that we got the first mechanical shower here (hand pumped) thanks to the ingenuity of a plumber from Ludgate Hill named William Feetham. That was in 1767, which means that by the time Jane Austen was getting ink on her fingers a shower was an option for some.

So the answer to my question is somewhere between 1767, when I expect a monthly bath was de rigueur for most of us, and around 1990, by which point it become common for Britons to take a daily shower and regard it as essential. We can probably pinpoint the shower’s emergence as a daily fact of life between the tearing of the shower curtain in Psycho in 1960 and Michael Douglas’s impressive displays of shower-related stamina with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct in 1992.