This object, a humble chamber pot, is neither hidden nor in plain sight at Dalnavert Museum; visitors who look closely at the contents of the Cook’s room will find it under a wash table that holds a wash basin and jug. This white porcelain pot has a matching lid and both the lid and the pot have handles for gripping. The surface of the pot is smooth with some wide ridges across the body; similar ridges shape the surface of the lid. A sizable object that would need to be carried with both hands, the pot has a height of roughly eight inches and a diameter of approximately five inches. Decorating the pot’s surface are illustrations of pale blue daisies. Somewhat marring the floral illustrations are irregular large patches of gilt. This gilt is also present on the lid’s rim and the top’s handle. Although not as elegant as the daisies, the gilt adds a layer of visual texture. This chamber pot is unlikely to attract much attention, but its design reflects the Victorian era’s interest in making everyday objects beautiful, even when the object in question is a portable toilet.

To properly understand an object, it is necessary not only to understand its function but also to understand the web of values, associations, and historical contexts that surround the object. If we are to put the chamber pot in its proper place in Victorian society, it is necessary to understand the chamber pot’s history and the values that emerge from that history. Catherine Addison has proposed that chamber pots are “quintessentially bourgeois items,”¹ but this classification may be too narrow. The chamber pot was not born in “bourgeois society,” and, according to archaeologist Jodi Magness, in Roman Antiquity, people would use latrines and cesspits, and, when these were not available, would defecate “in public spaces or [...] chamber pots inside houses.”² Having a very long history of use, the chamber pot is not a static object that belongs narrowly in either the category of “middle class” or “working class.” Who uses or does not use a chamber pot depends on the era, the space, and social norms, not to mention their access to technological developments. According to historian Judith Flanders, the first proper flush English lavatories “came into widespread popular consciousness with the Great Exhibition of 1851.”³ Despite this, as Flanders explains, “Many people continued to live without indoor sanitation—not only among the lower middle classes, but even many of the prosperous.”⁴ Historical developments in material culture are often uneven, so it is not surprising that indoor plumbing was adopted unevenly in nineteenth-century England. Returning to Addison’s suggestion that the chamber pot was a “bourgeois item,” we might also consider Addison’s argument that without chamber pots or other lavatories, “we are unable to live what we regard as civilized lives.”⁵ Again, ideas of what constitutes a “civilized” life are historically contingent. Today, those with the privileges of modern toilets may no longer see the chamber pot as particularly civilized. Similarly, as Robert E. Kravetz reminds us, chamber pots are still in use in different parts of the world.⁶ Of course, modern bedpans, used in medical settings and care homes, serve the same function as a chamber pot. Though it has a long history and might be viewed as an obsolete item, humans continue to make use of this object in their daily lives.

There is something unnerving about the appealing aesthetics of chamber pots when considered in light of the pot’s function. A useful term for understanding the unease we might have regarding chamber pots is philosopher Julia Kristeva’s term “abjection.” Alice Jardine, in her book At the Risk of Thinking, explains abjection is experienced when the “boundary between subject and object is unstable, with the result that the subject… is defensively drawn to clarity, purity, identity, and definition, which in turn means that it is obsessively fearful of what it experiences as unclear, impure, other, mixed, unclean, or foreign.”⁷ This desire to “purify” may explain the aesthetic dimensions of chamber pots. The beautiful or elegant designs may alleviate the anxiety that a person feels when encountering their own urine and feces, or that of other people in their household. It seems odd to decorate a portable toilet, and although Victorians valued beautiful domestic objects, the decorative qualities of some chamber pots seem excessive. Additionally, according to Kravetz, the chamber pots of the very wealthy rich were particularly excessive, made of “solid silver and [...] enameled and encrusted with precious stones.”⁸ Not all chamber pots are designed to be beautiful. Suzi Wright, writing for the Wellcome Collection Museum, addresses the humorous aesthetics of some chamber pots. She notes, for example, how “Victorians loved to design amusing chamber pots, and some contained the face of Victorian politicians such as Gladstone and Disraeli.”⁹ It seems that humor can, not unlike the beautification of a pot, have a similar “purifying” effect, turning something that might be viewed as dirty or shameful into something funny. Whether beautiful or comedic, the decoration of chamber pot’s appears to offload or minimize the anxiety humans experience when encountering the waste produced by our bodies.

I think chamber pots and our reactions to them tell us something fundamental about repression and anxiety: namely, that we cannot fully be at peace with the chamber pot, because of their contradictory qualities. Leona J. Skelton proposes that one of the most prominent images of chamber pots in the popular imagination is of “urban dwellers throwing their rubbish, dirty water and the contents of their chamber pots out of windows and doors down into the streets below, day after day.”¹⁰ This image is significant because it evokes contradictory responses: evoking horror and disgust but also having comic or humorous potential. Similarly, chamber pots have contradictory roles in society. Chamber pots are objects of comfort but also sources of anxiety. They are objects that contain waste that we perceive as filth, but they are also objects of beauty. Our feelings about chamber pots are, in short, full of contradictions.