Shakespearean Chamber Pot
This is not the chamber pot of William Shakespeare, it isn't The Bard's own thunder mug. However, this is an English chamber pot from approximately 1600, during Shakespeare's life, and it is very much like what he used. This one was brought from England to the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia.
This would be just the thing to keep in your bedroom, sitting on the floor right next to or below your bed. Then you could save, well, whatever, overnight in the pot. And then fling the contents out the window in the morning.
Look out below!
Europeans were amazed when they first came to Central and South America and found huge cities without open sewage running down all the streets.
Back home in Europe, the streets were basically open sewers. Pedestrians were regularly hit by chamber pot contents being thrown out of overhead windows.
This chamber pot was in a special exhibit at the Folger Library in Washington DC, just behind the Library of Congress and within a block of the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. The Folger is dedicated to Shakespeare, his works, and the world he inhabited. Chamber pots and all. Here you see a somewhat unusual picture of the Folger on a snowy day.
They didn't have an English chamber pot from England, as chamber pots weren't the sort of family treasure that you carefully kept. This one was found in an archaeological excavation at Jamestown.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
