A Joke Too Far

Colin Burrow

• Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift by Jason Scott-Warren
  Oxford, 273 pp, £45.00, August 2001, ISBN 0 19 924445 6

Reader, where are you sitting? Perhaps sunk in a sunlounger by the pool, or perched on a joggling seat on the Tube. Should anyone be reading this on a hard, cold seat in the privy, then they ought to be profoundly grateful to Elizabeth I’s godson Sir John Harington, who in his extraordinary pamphlet The Metamorphosis of Ajax (or ‘A Jakes’ – get it?) invented the flushing water closet. The s-bend was beyond Harington’s technological reach (his privy discharged via a valve directly into a vault beneath), but in a treatise replete with meticulous diagrams and measurements, he describes how to make a sloping basin which could be flushed and refilled with six inches of clean water, insulating the privy from the stench beneath. The invention was presented as a means of avoiding piles, pox and plague. Harington’s great innovation in domestic hygiene was so successful that James I is supposed to have brought him in as a troubleshooter to deal with the privies at Theobalds and Hampton Court.