The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between contaminated water
and disease, baptismal ideas had long fostered associations of hygiene and piety. The
predilection for public bathing during Roman times continued long into the Middle Ages.
Although John Wesley had pithily declared, ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’ in the eighteenth
century, it was not until the following century that his words would help to transform the habits
of the upper classes of Britain and North America. Invariably, these notions were translated
into ideas of moral hygiene. A polarity was established between the clean and the unclean,
the refined and the coarse, the disciplined and the disorderly. Through the provision of clean,
piped water and flushing of wastes, the sanitary engineer therefore, facilitated acts of physical
and moral purification and civilisation.