At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Historically, vicars were stand-ins for rectors (the word is related to vicarious, indicating a surrogate role),

Ohhh, I never thought about the "vicar" in "vicarious" like that

Henceforth, instead of giving the local clergyman an agreed portion of his crop, the farmer would pay him a fixed annual sum based on the general worth of his land. This meant that the clergy were entitled to their allotted share even when the farmers had bad years, which in turn meant that clergymen had nothing but good ones. 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. Many didn’t even bother composing sermons but just bought a big book of prepared sermons and read one out once a week.

Ah. Capitalism (and feudalism, honestly). Why am I not surprised.

Most of us unconsciously acknowledge this fact by inviting arriving guests into our houses twice: once at the door when they are brought in from outside, and then again, after they have been divested of coats and hats, into the house proper with a hearty, more emphatic double cry of “Come in! Come in!”

This feels like an English thing - I don't think we do this as much in the States. And their hall is our entryway or foyer. Hall to me is the hallway.

(It is a corruption of boutellerie, the same word from which butler and bottle are derived; looking after the wine bottles is what butlers originally did.)

Ohhhh, a *bottler.* That makes sense.

Virginia Woolf’s diaries are almost obsessively preoccupied with her servants and the challenge of maintaining patience with them. Of one, she writes: “She is in a state of nature: untrained; uneducated … so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.” As a class they were as irritating as “kitchen flies.” Woolf’s contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay was rather more blunt: “The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.”

Rich people are gross.

the Carlyles were comparatively easy people to work for since they had no children and were reasonably patient and compassionate.

...were they?? The man banished his maid to an unheated storeroom at night.

Dickens claimed to have read the work five hundred times and credited it as the inspiration behind A Tale of Two Cities.

500! How, and why, and also this somehow explains a lot..

it was a painfully vivid reminder that masters could be as much at the mercy of servants as servants were of masters.

This seems to likely be VERY rarely the case.

Even in private, their relationship was a touch unorthodox, to say the least. At his bidding, she called him “massa” and blacked her skin to make herself look like a slave. The diaries, it transpires, were kept largely so that he could read about her getting dirty.

What, and this can't be emphasized enough, the FUCK

Using a flame made from a rich blend of oxygen and alcohol, Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away. The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but it was also taken up by theaters. The light not only was perfect and steady but also could be focused into a beam and cast onto selected performers—which is where the phrase in the limelight comes from. The downside was that the intense heat of limelight caused a lot of fires. In one decade in America, more than four hundred theaters burned down. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, nearly ten thousand people were killed in theater fires in Britain, according to a report published in 1899 by William Paul Gerhard, the leading fire authority of the day.

Yikes yikes yikes. Interesting origin of "in the limelight" though.

The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy,

Ohhhh

As many as two hundred workers died, though remarkably no one bothered, then or afterward, to make a formal count. Hundreds more were injured. Many of those trapped inside were hideously incinerated as fires spread from broken lamps.

"Remarkably"? Not really. Like you said, they were female Irish immigrant factory workers. Of course the powers that be didn't do a formal count. (Also, "hideously incinerated"? Jesus, the word choice here...)

And for that remarkable story, it is necessary to go back upstairs and into a new room.

...So instead of talking about the history of the cellar as a room in the home, we had an entire chapter covering the history of brick, iron and the Erie Canal. Where the hell is the editor. Is Bryson too big at this point to be told this makes no damn sense?

THE PASSAGE

...Like a hallway? WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THE EIFFEL TOWER NOW. I really might DNF this book at this point.

We might pause here for a moment to consider where we are and why. We are downstairs in the passage,

17 pages into the chapter? Yes, sure! (I opted to skim the stuff about the Eiffel Tower and steel and the Rockefeller family.)

How Aspdin invented his product has always been something of a mystery, because making it required certain precisely measured steps—namely, pulverizing limestone to a particular degree of fineness, mixing it with clay of a specific moistness, and baking the whole at temperatures much higher than would be found in a normal lime kiln. None of this was ever going to be hit upon by chance. What gave Aspdin the hunch to alter the constituents as he did and then to conclude that they would make a product that would set harder and smoother if heated to an extreme degree is a puzzle that cannot be answered, but somehow he did it and it made him rich.

Science? I'm gonna guess science.

For years he refused to accept that the future of motion pictures lay in projecting images on screens because he hated the thought that they could become visible to someone who had slipped into the viewing chamber without buying a ticket. For a long time he held out for the idea of keeping moving images securely inside hand-cranked peepshow boxes.

Damn, Edison would love Netflix's plans to ban password sharing then.

He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them.

... He'd also love Amazon, apparently.

Two or three times a week in winter we catch a mouse, nearly always in the same place, in this bleak, small room at the end of the house.

2 or 3 mice a week is an infestation, my dude.

which is why I thought this might be the appropriate place to consider some of the many living things that dwell with us.

"We have a lot of mice who die in our study, so that's why this chapter is about animals that appear and live in houses" ...Sure

(The name hanta comes from a river in Korea where the disease was first noted by Westerners during the Korean War.)

...The reasoning behind this feels incredibly racist somehow. Because they were in Korea when they discovered the disease from inhaling mouse droppings, they named it after the... Han river?

Before this, houses weren’t built to enjoy a view. They were the view.

Really? Never? I somehow doubt this.

That’s not bad for someone who was barely schooled. They were certainly not the words of a peasant.

Lmao what kind of classist nonsense... (also who said he couldn't be self educated? He sounds very competent.)

Bedding plants, too, became a huge industry.

Bedding plants= putting them in flowerbeds I assume? Maybe British people instinctually know what this means.

Apart from coming up with the initial idea, Budding himself had nothing more to do with lawn mowers, but he did go on to create another invention that proved of lasting benefit to humanity: the monkey wrench. But it was his lawn mower that forever changed the world beneath our feet.

What an awfully constructed paragraph

(Their relationship, I feel oddly bound to note, seems to have been entirely platonic. Trissino was a well-known ladies’ man, and his young mason was happily married and en route to becoming the father of five children. Trissino just liked Palladio a good deal. It seems that most people in Palladio’s life did.)

Because as we all know, gay men can't marry women and bi people dont exist. /s (Also why are you "oddly bound" to tell us they were platonic, lol. What a weird no-homo-like aside.)

(hence the expression “sleep tight”),

Sounds apocryphal. *looks this up* Hmmm yep, origin inconclusive

Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were required to share a bed at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1776, and passed a grumpy and largely sleepless night squabbling over whether to have the window open or not.

And There Was Only One Bed - Founding Fathers Edition

with his stick lightly taps the bottom of sixteen-year-old Margaret. “Here was all the trouble of the wooeing,” writes Aubrey with clear admiration.

....what the hell

Even the American educator Catharine Beecher, who was by the standards of the age a radical feminist, argued passionately that women should be accorded full and equal educational rights, so long as it was recognized that they would need extra time to do their hair.

Idk, in a society still upholding patriarchal beauty standards, this seems reasonable to me.

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 feces. It is one of the most important documents in the history of statistics, public health, medicine, demographics, forensic science—one of the most important documents, in short, of the nineteenth century. No one listened, and the epidemics kept coming.

This is so frustrating. And little has changed in that sense, almost 200 years later.

It is hard now to appreciate just how controversial and unwelcome Snow’s views were.

Lol, not in 2023 it isnt.

People who drank milk in America sometimes grew delirious and swiftly died—Abraham Lincoln’s mother was one such victim—but infected milk tasted and smelled no different from ordinary milk, and no one knew what the infectious agent was. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anyone finally deduce that it came from cows grazing on a plant called white snakeroot, which was harmless to the cows but made their milk toxic to drink.

And people just... Kept drinking milk? I wonder how rare this was.

A bath at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall was so big that a stepladder was needed to climb into it. Others, with showers built in, looked as if they were designed to wash a horse.

Idk, sounds like these would actually be deep enough for the water to cover your knees..

Such an assemblage of personal effects was unique. Some of the items were, as it were, really unique in that they had never been imagined, much less seen.

Terrible writing here. Why wasn't this edited better.

When he died in 1766, his skin, it was said, still bore the indelible sooty stains of the chimney sweep.

....are you for real. This feels apocryphal.

Gypsies

...is this not a term that many consider a slur

By the 1860s, London had an estimated one hundred thousand “street Arabs”

Uhhhh. This may have been what they called then but was it strictly necessary to reproduce it here?

On no account must the diet be superior or equal to the ordinary mode of subsistence of the labouring classes of the neighbourhood,” decreed the commissioners.)

Oh hey it's the same argument people still make about using food stamps to buy any food thay actually is enjoyable at all

By withholding affection to children when they were young, but also then endeavoring to control their behavior well into adulthood, Victorians were in the very odd position of simultaneously trying to suppress childhood and make it last forever.

Some Christian parents still do this, in America too! Ha

It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

Lol, yep, this is why we need therapy

His coral atolls theory, for one, required a passage of time far beyond any allowed by biblical timescales, a fact that infuriated the devout and volatile Captain FitzRoy.

Lol. Good.

It is almost impossible now to imagine how much Darwin’s theory unsettled the intellectual world, or how desperately many people wished it not to be so.

Oh, as an ex-Evangelical, it isn't difficult to imagine at all.

Philip Henry Gosse, produced a somewhat desperate alternative theory called “prochronism” in which he suggested that God had merely made the Earth look old, to give people of inquisitive minds more interesting things to wonder over. Even fossils, Gosse insisted, had been planted in the rocks by God during his busy week of Creation.

Looool there are still people peddling ideas like this, or there were when I was a kid at least.

At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly and other new taxes invented—the Undeveloped Land Duty, the Incremental Value Duty, the Super Tax—all of which fell disproportionately on those with a lot of land and plummy accents.

Uh yeah that's who *should* be disproportionately taxed

Very occasionally some good came of all the hardship.

Sorry I am cracking up at "hardship" here. Must be nice to have piles of famous paintings and fancy furniture from your estate to sell!

Altogether the curators, Marcus Binney and John Harris, counted 1,116 great houses lost in the previous century, but further research raised that number to 1,600 even before the exhibition was over, and the figure now is generally put at about 2,000—a painfully substantial number, bearing in mind that these were some of the handsomest, jauntiest, most striking, ambitious, influential, and patently cherishable residences ever erected on the planet.

Lol a little biased there aren't you? Forgive me if I'm not weeping for the wealthy British gentry.

Our Old Rectory was sold into private hands in 1978. (I don’t know for how much.)

You wrote an entire damn book about the place and there's really no way to find this out?

The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.

Comfort and happiness for a FEW, the rich and powerful. And those few are very unwilling to give any of it up to protect the planet. So yes, that is almost certainly our ultimate fate.

The name “bank holiday” was an odd one, and Lubbock never really explained why he elected to call it that instead of “national holiday” or “workers’ holiday” or something similarly descriptive. It is sometimes suggested that he meant the holiday only for bank workers, but that is not so. It was always intended for all.

...I mean I always assumed it was named that because it's a day that the banks are closed/on holiday, and thus you couldn't access them. Makes sense if he came from a banking family too, no?