At Home: A Short History of Private Life

This had 100,000 objects on display, including a knife with 1,851 blades. It also started the fashion of flushing toilets in the home. The profits it raised created The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Natural History Museum and The Science Museum.

These were people requesting political rights for the working class, eg universal male suffrage, paid MPs, and the abolition of rotten boroughs, where voting was rigged. They presented various petitions to parliament including one signed by 5.7 million people. Parliament rejected them all.

Before 1850 people ate à la francais (all the food presented on the table at the same time), after 1850 they began eating à la russe (food served in separate courses. ) Cutlery care was tedious, for instance knives had to be cleaned, covered in fat to prevent rusting, and then covered in paper. This then had to be done in reverse order when laying the table. The variety of food available for the rich was extraordinary, Mrs Beeten provided 135 recipes for sauces alone. Eliza Acton brought out the first cookbook that stipulated ingredient quantities and levels of heat needed to cook specific things. ( Mrs Beeten by the way was a rubbish cook, except when she stole recipes from Eliza Acton's book, which she often did....)

Disgusting. There had been far too many bodies to dispose of properly for far too long, "People were packed in burial grounds at densities almost past imagining.....they grew so full that it was almost impossible to turn a spade of soil without bringing up some decaying limb or other organic relic. Mourners in cities almost never attended at graveside to witness a burial itself. The experience was simply too upsetting, and widely held to be dangerous in addition."

A magistrate's report of conditions at a factory in northern England in 1810 revealed that apprentices were kept at their machines from 5.50 in the morning to 9.10 at night, with a single short break for dinner. Others were expected to work 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and from seven to two on Saturdays.

Servitude was a big part of life for a great many people. By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London – those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five – were servants. Another one in three was a prostitute. For many, that was about all the choice there was.

As a formal profession, architecture was actually very late developing. Compulsory examinations were not introduced until 1882 in Britain and architecture wasn't offered anywhere as a full-time academic discipline until 1895. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, domestic architecture was getting a lot of respect and attention. Bryson discussed the rise and fall of Robert Adam, remembered less nowadays for his architecture, and more for the wedding cake interiors that he created in so many British country houses.

To the unending exasperation of the Chinese authorities, Britain became particularly skilled at persuading Chinese citizens to become opium addicts – university courses in the history of marketing really ought to begin with British opium sales – so much so that by 1838 Britain was selling almost five million pounds of opium to China every year. Unfortunately, this still wasn't enough to offset the huge costs of importing tea from China.

In 1843 an entirely new phenomenon – the municipal park – opened at Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. It was built on 125 acres of wasteland, it was an instant success and a much acclaimed marvel. Parks already existed at this time, but they were not like parks as we know them today. For one thing, they tended to be exclusive. Only people of fashion and rank (plus a smattering of impudently bold courtesans from time to time) were allowed into the big London parks until well into the nineteenth century. There was a tacit understanding', as it is always termed, that parks were not for people of the lower or even middle classes, however those rankings were defined. Some parks didn't even bother to make it tacit. Regent's Park charged an admission fee until 1835 expressly to discourage common people from cluttering the paths and lowering the tone. Many of the new industrial cities had almost no parks anyway. This was an age in which people were routinely transported to Australia for poaching, and any form of trespass, however innocent or slight, was bound to be regarded as nefarious. So the idea of a park built by a city for the free use of all its citizenry, whatever their station in life, was almost indescribably exciting.

John Snow was born in 1813, and was one of the leading anaesthetists of his day. He spent a great deal of time trying to understand where diseases came from. He particularly wondered why cholera devastated some neighbourhoods while sparing others. Most people believed it was caused by 'bad airs'.

Snow's lasting achievement was not just to understand the cause of cholera but to collect the evidence in a scientifically rigorous manner. He made the most careful maps showing the exact distributions of where cholera victims lived.

Snow announced his findings in a pamphlet of 1849, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, which demonstrated a clear link between cholera and water contaminated with human faeces. It is one of the most important documents in the history of statistics, public health, demographics and forensic science – one of the most important documents, in short, of the nineteenth century. No one listened and the epidemics kept coming.

Authorities continued to reject them. It is hard now to appreciate just how radical and unwelcome Snow's views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with ‘pestilent vapours, miasmas and loathsome abominations of every kind.' Snow never got to see this or any of his ideas vindicated. He died suddenly of a stroke in the midst of the Great Stink of London.

Poor parents habitually produced large broods, as a sort of pension policy, hoping that enough offspring would survive to support them in their dotage. By the second half of the nineteenth century, one-third of families in England had eight or more children, another third had five to seven, and a final third (the wealthier third overwhelmingly) had four or fewer. In poorer districts it was a rare household that could adequately feed everyone, so malnutrition at some level was more or less endemic. At least 15 per cent of children, it is thought, had the bowed legs and pelvic distortions of rickets, and these unfortunates were overwhelmingly found among the poorest of the poor. One doctor in mid-Victorian London published a list of the things he had seen tiny infants fed – jellied calves-feet, hard muffins soaked in oil, gristly meat they could not chew. Toddlers sometimes survived on what fell on the floor or they could otherwise scavenge. By the time they were seven or eight, many children were sent out on to the streets to fend for themselves. By the 1860s, London had an estimated one hundred thousand 'street Arabs' who had no education, no skills, no purpose and no future.

Barnardo was a young Irishman who came to London in the early 1860s and was so horrified by conditions faced by helpless youths that he set up an organization formally called the National Incorporated Association for the Reclamation of Destitute Waif Children, though everyone came to know it as Dr Barnardo's.

"His intention was to qualify as a doctor and undertake missionary work in China. He never got to China. In fact, he never qualified as a doctor. Instead he began to take a missionary interest in homeless young boys (and eventually girls as well). With borrowed money, he opened his first home in Stepney, in east London. Barnardo was a brilliant publicist and developed an immensely successful campaign based around striking before-and-after photographs of the children he rescued. The ‘before’ photos showed grubby (and often scantily clad) waifs of sullen mien, while the ‘after’ photographs showed them scrubbed, alert and radiant with the joy of Christian salvation. The campaigns were so successful that soon Barnardo was expanding his interests in many directions, opening infirmaries, homes for deaf and dumb children, homes for homeless bootblacks, and much more. The slogan emblazoned along the façade of the Stepney home was ‘No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission’. It was an unusually noble sentiment, and many people hated Barnardo for it.

Barnardo's boundless ambition brought him into conflict with a fellow missionary, Frederick Charrington." He saw the Mile End Road as his personal fiefdom, so when Barnardo announced his intention to open a temperance café there, Charrington took umbrage and embarked on a relentless campaign of character assassination.

Unfortunately for Barnardo, an uncomfortably large proportion of this was true. Barnardo was something of a liar and made matters worse by responding with clumsy lies now. When it was alleged that he was misrepresenting himself as a doctor – a fairly serious offence under the Medical Act of 1858 – Barnardo produced a diploma from a German university, but it was shown almost at once to be a poor forgery. It was also proven that he had faked many before-and-after photographs of children he had rescued, making them look much more destitute than in fact they were. Many of the staged photographs depicted the children in artfully torn clothing that exposed alluring quantities of flesh, which many now interpreted as basely appealing to prurient interests. Even Barnardo's most faithful supporters found their loyalties strained.

Apart from concerns about his character and probity, many worried about his levels of debt. One of the bedrock principles of the Plymouth Brethren was a devotion to thrift, yet Barnardo borrowed freely and repeatedly in order to keep opening more missions. In the end, Barnardo was found guilty of faking photographs and of claiming wrongly to be a doctor, but exonerated on all the more serious charges.

Ironically, life in a Barnardo home was scarcely more attractive than life in the dreaded workhouses.

At the height of the agricultural crisis, the British government under the Liberals did an odd thing. It invented a tax designed to punish a class of people who were already suffering severely ... The class was large landowners. The tax was death duties. Life was about to change utterly for thousands of people. The designer of the new tax was Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, the chancellor of the exchequer, a man who seems not to have been liked much by anyone at any point in his life, including his own family. Death duties in Harcourt's time were a comparatively modest 8 per cent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions who didn't have to pay them, that they were raised again and again until by the eve of the Second World War they stood at 60 per cent – a level that would make even the richest eyes water. At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly and other new taxes invented – an Undeveloped Land Duty, an Incremental Value Duty, a Super Tax – all of which fell disproportionately on those with a lot of land and plummy accents.

For the upper classes the twentieth century became, in the words of David Cannadine, a time ‘of encircling gloom’. Most lived within a semi-permanent state of crisis. When things got really bad – when a roof needed replacing or a tax demand hit the mat – disaster could generally be staved off by selling heirlooms. Paintings, tapestries, jewels, books, porcelain, silver plate, rare stamps, whatever would attract a reasonable price poured out of English stately homes and into museums or the hands of foreigners.

For many hundreds of country houses there was no salvation.In 1974, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London staged a celebrated exhibition, ‘The Destruction of the Country House which it surveyed the enormous loss of stately homes in the previous century.... The figure now is generally put at about 2,000.