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You know, it's a difficult question...and it's really hard to give a really well-informed answer! I mean, how would you go about assessing exactly how often people bathed or showered today? Would you do a survey? Try and catch people in the shower? Compare the number of bathrooms available per head of population?

The sad truth is that nobody did surveys of this kind back then, so any answer you get is going to have to be based upon guesswork. So here's some guesses ;-)

I really do believe that people like to be clean, if at all possible, and that they washed themselves as often they thought necessary..the question is what did they think was "necessary" and how clean was "clean", isn't it?

Here's some ideas to start.

Baths did exist, if only for the very rich. So did manufactured soap exist, and there was quite a big trade in it. People who didn't have accss to bathrooms, still had the option of "strip-washing", i.e. using a bowl and cloth and washing themselves in parts. They certainly seemed to have washed their hands an faces reasonably regularly, if they could.

Here's the other part. Did fleas, lice and ticks exist? Of course they did. It's really hard to adequately assess exactly how many people had them and how many didn't, though. All I can tell you is that JA wrote an amusing letter with a reference to fleas on her niece. It was obviously meant as a joke, which suggests to me that for her, and for the niece, fleas were not a problem, but they might have been for others!

Have you found the archives, yet? There's plenty of information about this subject in there. Just go to the top of the board and click on the link next to the chatting ladies.There's some great conversations on this topic in there!