At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

In 1851, when our story opens, there were 17,621 Anglican clergymen; a country rector, with only 250 or so souls in his care, enjoyed an average income of £500—as

Clergymen in the Church of England were of two types: rectors and vicars. The difference was a narrow one ecclesiastically but a broad one economically.

The role of country clergy was a remarkably loose one. Piety was not necessarily a requirement, or even an expectation. Ordination in the Church of England required a university degree, but most ministers read classics and didn’t study divinity at all, and so had no training in how to preach, provide inspiration or solace, or otherwise offer meaningful Christian support.

Though no one intended it, the effect was to create a class of well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their hands. In consequence many of them began, quite spontaneously, to do remarkable things.

The important thought to hold on to is that for the first 99 percent of our history as beings we didn’t do much of anything but procreate and survive.

It is remarkable to think that people thought of striped fabrics before they thought of doors and windows.

This became a time without history. Britain was no longer just at the end of the known world; now it was beyond it.

In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strewn with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,”

For much of the medieval period the largest source of animal protein for most people was smoked herring.

In even the best homes comfort was in short supply. It really is extraordinary how long it took people to achieve even the most elemental levels of comfort.

Throughout the Middle Ages, a good deal of every life was devoted simply to surviving. Famine was common. The medieval world was a world without reserves; when harvests were poor, as they were about one year in four on average, hunger was immediate.

The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.

It is true, however, that the person in charge of the royal privy was known as the groom of the stool, or stole, and over time advanced from being a cleaner of toilets to being the monarch’s trusted adviser.

Cheese she thought fit only for sedentary people—she didn’t say why—and then only “in very small quantities.”

The author of one mid-nineteenth-century manual recommended that paintings be cleaned annually with a mixture of “salt and stale urine,” though whose urine and how stale were left to the reader to determine.

The combination of open flames and combustible materials brought an element of alarm and excitement to every aspect of daily life in the pre-electric world.

Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition.

This was unfortunate, as the Marlboroughs were notoriously parsimonious. The duke was so cheap that he refused to dot his i’s when he wrote, to save on ink.

The term middle class wasn’t coined until 1745 (in a book on the Irish wool trade, of all things), but from that point onward the streets and coffeehouses of Britain abounded with confident, voluble, well-to-do people who answered to that description: bankers, lawyers, artists, publishers, designers, merchants, property developers, and others of generally creative spirit and high ambition.

At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.

Until well into the nineteenth century, the notion of a well-balanced diet had occurred to no one.

Ancient Britons, for instance, heated sticks on a beach, then doused them in the sea and scraped the salt off. Aztecs, by contrast, acquired salt by evaporating their own urine. These are not intuitive acts, to put it mildly.

Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.

It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence.

In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set off in five leaky ships, in a brave but seriously underfunded operation, to find a western route. What he discovered was that between the Americas and Asia was a greater emptiness than anyone had ever imagined Earth had room for: the Pacific Ocean.

Their provisions all but exhausted, they devised perhaps the least appetizing dish ever served: rat droppings mixed with wood shavings.

Altogether, disease and slaughter reduced the native population of Mesoamerica by an estimated 90 percent in the first century of European contact. In return, the natives gave Columbus’s men syphilis.*

Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it.

Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it became a fashion to identify cash-starved aristocrats and marry one’s daughters off to them.

After his costly failures with cement, Edison moved on to other ideas that mostly proved to be impractical or demonstrably harebrained.

Olmsted was convinced that all the ills of urban life were owing to bad air and a lack of exercise, producing “a premature failure of the vigor of the brain.”

Quiet walks and tranquil reflection were what was needed to restore health, energy, and even moral tone to a jaded citizenry. So Olmsted was absolutely against anything that was noisy, vigorous, or fun.

While guano was making life better for farmers, it had one very serious effect on city life: it killed the market in human waste.

Britain’s philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return.

A cheerful catchphrase of English factories became: “It’s good enough for America.”

Nearly everything about Levy made him an unusual owner of a Virginian estate, but then nearly everything about him was unusual anyway.

Even on the most conservative calculations, however, stairs rank as the second most common cause of accidental death, well behind car accidents, but far ahead of drownings, burns, and other similarly grim misfortunes.

An inescapable problem with stairs is that they have to convey people safely in both directions, whereas the mechanics of locomotion require different postures in each direction.

By the late nineteenth century, 80 percent of English wallpapers contained arsenic, often in very significant quantities.

If you are dying or unwell, exhausted, sexually dysfunctional, tearful, racked with anxiety, too depressed to face the world, or otherwise lacking in equanimity and joy, the bedroom is the place where you are most likely to be found.

When wood-shavings and sawdust make it into a top-ten list of bedding materials, you know you are looking at a rugged age.

Christianity was always curiously ill at ease with cleanliness anyway, and early on developed an odd tradition of equating holiness with dirtiness.

Throughout the medieval period, an almost surefire way to earn lasting honor was to take a vow not to wash.

In 1653, John Evelyn, the diarist, noted a tentative decision to wash his hair annually.

Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.

By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane.

Even so, as late as 1861 an English doctor could write a book called Baths and How to Take Them.

The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always—really, always—involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another.

The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described.