Meaning:
The common, lower classes; the hoi polloi.
Background:
This rather disparaging term was coined by the Victorian novelist and
playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He used it in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:
"He is certainly a man who bathes and `lives cleanly', (two especial
charges preferred against him by Messrs. the Great Unwashed)."
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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Compared with the Elizabethan and Victorian lower classes, peasants on the North
China Plain in the 70s had decent hygiene. They worked the land and animals and
still managed to keep their homes and gardens in order. A place for everything
and everything had its place. They were not dealt with the best hand in life.
They were remarkable.
Heroes in James Clavell's Shogun and Taipan, two novels of his Asian Saga
series, came from England's Great Unwashed with the whacky ideas that bathing
was risky and fresh air fatal to the sick. They quickly learned from the
Japanese and the Chinese to bath and never went back to their old ways.
