At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

The distinguishing feature of cholera was its quickness. The symptoms—violent diarrhea and vomiting, agonizing cramps, crushing headache—came on in an instant.

So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin.

For mother and child both, the most dangerous milestone was birth itself. When things went wrong, there was little any midwife or physician could do.

If children aren’t bitten by sows today, it is not because they are better supervised. It is because we don’t keep sows in the kitchen.

For most human beings, children and adults both, the dominant consideration in life until modern times was purely, unrelievedly economic.

A celebrated case was that of a Mary Davis, a woman of good background who in 1812, by chance, found her lost son sweeping a chimney at the inn where she was staying.

Before the 1844 Factory Act reduced the workday for children, most worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week.

He was a tireless, if slightly eccentric, experimenter. Once he spent three months trying to teach his dog to read.

It is almost impossible to conceive just how much radical day-to-day change people were exposed to in the nineteenth century, particularly in the second half.

We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet’s other citizens.