At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Rats are smart and often work cooperatively. At the former Gansevoort poultry market in Greenwich Village, New York, pest control authorities could not understand how rats were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace. In a similar manner workers at a packing plant discovered how sides of meat, hanging from hooks, were knocked to the floor and devoured night after night. An exterminator named Irving Billig watched and found that a swarm of rats formed a pyramid underneath a side of meat, and one rat scrambled to the top of the heap and leaped onto the meat from there. It then climbed to the top of the side of meat and gnawed its way through it around the hook until the meat dropped to the floor, at which point hundreds of waiting rats fell upon it.

An adult rat can survive on less than an ounce of food a day and as little as half an ounce of water. For pleasure they seem to enjoy gnawing on wires. Nobody knows why, because wires clearly are not nutritious and offer nothing in return except the very real prospect of a fatal shock. Still, rats can’t stop themselves. It is believed that as many as a quarter of all fires that can’t otherwise be explained may be attributed to rats chewing on wires.

When they are not eating, rats are likely to be having sex. Rats have a lot of sex—up to twenty times a day. If a male rat can’t find a female, he will happily—or at least willingly—find relief in a male. Female rats are robustly fecund. The average adult female Norway rat produces 35.7 offspring a year, in litters of 6 to 9 at a time. In the right conditions, however, a female rat can produce a new litter of up to 20 babies every three weeks. Theoretically, a pair of breeding rats could start a dynasty of 15,000 new rats in a year. That doesn’t happen in practice, because rats die a lot. Like a lot of other animals, they are more or less programmed by evolution to expire fairly easily. The annual mortality rate is 95 percent. A determined extermination campaign will normally reduce rat populations by 75 percent or so, but once the campaign stops the rat population will recover in six months or less. In short, an individual rat hasn’t got great prospects in life, but his family is effectively ineradicable.

Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung—or frass, as it is known to entomologists.

As Dr. John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Centre has put it: “If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.”

Like lice, bedbugs are making an unwelcome comeback. For most of the twentieth century they were virtually extinct in most of Europe and America thanks to the rise of modern insecticides, but in recent years they have been vigorously rebounding. No one is sure why. It may have something to do with more international travel—people bringing them home in their suitcases and so on—or that they are developing greater resistance to the things we spray at them. Whatever it is, they are suddenly being noticed again. “Some of the best hotels in New York have them,” the New York Times quoted one expert as saying in a report in 2005. The Times article went on to note that because most people have no experience of bedbugs and don’t know what to look out for, they are likely to discover they are infested only when they wake up and find themselves lying in a swarm of them.

If you had the right equipment and a peculiar measure of motivation, you could find numberless millions of dinky creatures living with you—vast tribes of isopods, pleopods, endopodites, myriapods, chilopods, pauropods, and other all-but-invisible specks. Some of these little creatures are practically ineradicable. An insect named Niptus hololeucus has been found living in cayenne pepper and in the cork stoppers of cyanide bottles. Some, like flour mites and cheese mites, dine with you pretty regularly.

so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. Dr. Gerba established some years ago that household germs are not always most numerous where you would expect them to be. In one famous survey he measured bacterial content in different rooms in various houses and found that typically the cleanest surface of all in the average house was the toilet seat. That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface. By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat.

The dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink, closely followed by the kitchen counter, and the filthiest object was the kitchen washcloth. Most kitchen cloths are drenched in bacteria, and using them to wipe counters (or plates or breadboards or greasy chins or any other surface) merely transfers microbes from one place to another, affording them new chances to breed and proliferate. The second most efficient way of spreading germs, Gerba found, is to flush a toilet with the lid up. That spews billions of microbes into the air. Many stay in the air, floating like tiny soap bubbles, waiting to be inhaled, for up to two hours; others settle on things like your toothbrush. That is, of course, yet another good reason for putting the lid down.

Almost certainly the most memorable finding of recent years with respect to microbes was when an enterprising middle school student in Florida compared the quality of water in the toilets at her local fast-food restaurants with the quality of the ice in the soft drinks, and found that in ...

As late as 1947, a medical correspondent for The New Yorker could write: “Mites are only infrequently found in this country and until recently were practically unknown in New York City.” Then, in the late 1940s, residents of an apartment complex called Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, began sickening in large numbers with flulike symptoms. The malady was known as “the Kew Gardens mystery fever” until an astute exterminator noticed that mice were also getting sick and discovered on close inspection that tiny mites living in their fur—the very mites that were supposed not to exist in America in large numbers—were transmitting rickettsialpox, a kind of spotted fever, to apartment dwellers.

Isnt this the same Kew Gardens of Bystander Effect fame?

A seba bat—a tiny bat in South America—will eat as many as sixty thousand tiny seeds per night. The seed distribution of a single colony of seba bats—about four hundred bats—can produce nine million seedlings of new fruit trees a year. Without the bats, those fruit trees wouldn’t happen. Bats are also critical to the survival in the wild of avocados, balsa, bananas, breadfruit, cashews, cloves, dates, figs, guavas, mangoes, peaches, and saguaro cactus, among others.

The world has far more bats than most people realize. In fact, about a quarter of all mammal species—some eleven hundred in all—are bats. They range in size from tiny bumblebee bats, which really are no bigger than bumblebees and therefore are the smallest of all mammals, up to the magnificent flying foxes of Australia and south Asia, which can have wingspans of six feet.

In America, bats were persecuted by health officials for years because of inflated—and at times irrational—concerns that they carried rabies. The story began in October 1951 when an anonymous woman in west Texas, the wife of a cotton planter, came across a bat in the road outside her house. She thought it was dead, but when she bent to look at it, it leaped up and bit her on the arm. This was highly unusual. American bats are all insectivores and none had ever been known to bite a human. She and her husband disinfected and dressed the wound—it was just a small wound—and didn’t think anything more of it. Three weeks later the woman was admitted to a hospital in Dallas in a delirious condition. She was “wildly agitated,” and unable to speak or swallow. Her eyes were filled with terror. She was beyond help. Rabies can be successfully treated, but only if the treatment is immediate. Once symptoms start, it’s too late. After four days of unutterable distress, the woman slipped into a coma and died.

Finally, on New Year’s Day 1956, a public health official in Texas, Dr. George C. Menzies, entered a hospital in Austin with rabies symptoms. Menzies had been studying caves in central Texas for evidence of rabies-bearing bats, but hadn’t been bitten or otherwise exposed to rabies as far as anyone knew. Yet somehow he became infected, and after just two days’ care he died in the usual hideous manner, in discomfort and terror, his eyes like saucers. The case was widely reported and resulted in a kind of vengeful hysteria. Officials at the highest levels concluded that extermination was an urgent and necessary step. Bats became the most friendless creatures in America. Years of steady persecution followed, and bat populations in many places suffered shocking depredations. In one case, the largest bat colony in the world, at Eagle Creek, Arizona, experienced a population fall from thirty million to three thousand in a matter of years.

fact, as Tuttle pointed out, “more people die of food poisoning at church picnics annually than have died in all history from contact with bats.”

in 1873, when farmers in the western United States and across the plains of Canada experienced a devastating visitation unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. From out of nowhere there came swarms of Rocky Mountain locusts—great chirring masses of motion and appetite that blotted out the sun and devoured everything in their path. Wherever the swarms landed, the effects were appalling. They stripped clean fields and orchards. They ate laundry off lines and wool off the backs of living sheep. They ate leather and canvas and even the handles of wooden tools. One amazed witness reported them landing in such numbers that they put out a good-sized fire. It was, according to most witnesses, like experiencing the end of the world. The noise was deafening. One swarm was estimated as being 1,800 miles long and perhaps 110 miles wide. It took five days to pass. It is thought to have contained at least 10 billion individual insects, but other estimates have put the figure as high as 12.5 trillion, with a massed weight of 27.5 million tons. It was almost certainly the largest gathering of living things ever seen on Earth. Nothing would deflect them. When two swarms met, they would push through each other and emerge in unbroken ranks on the other side.

The grounds of stately homes weren’t so much parks as exercises in geometry.

To maximize important prospects, Vanbrugh introduced another inspired feature—the folly, a building designed with no other purpose in mind than to complete a view and provide a happy spot for the wandering eye to settle. His Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard was the first of its type. To this he added the most ingenious and transformative innovation of all: the ha-ha. A ha-ha is a sunken fence, a kind of palisade designed to separate the private part of an estate from its working parts without the visual intrusion of a conventional fence or hedge. It was an idea adapted from French military fortifications (where Vanbrugh would have first encountered them during his years of imprisonment). Because they were unseen until the last instant, people tended to discover them with a startled cry of “Ha-ha!”—and hence, so it is said, the name. The ha-ha wasn’t simply a practical device for keeping cows off the lawn, but an entirely new way of perceiving the world. Grounds, garden, parkland, estate—all became part of a continuous whole.

Brown also seems to have been just a very nice man. In one of his few surviving letters, he tells his wife how, separated from her by business, he passed the day in imaginary conversation with her, “which has every charm except your dear company, which will ever be the sincere and the principal delight, my dear Biddy, of your affectionate husband.” That’s not bad for someone who was barely schooled. They were certainly not the words of a peasant.

Mrs. Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions—working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts.

The book appeared to assume that the reader had scarcely ever been outdoors, much less laid hands on a gardening tool. Here, for instance, is Mrs. Loudon explaining what a spade does: The operation of digging, as performed by a gardener, consists of thrusting the iron part of the spade, which acts as a wedge, perpendicularly into the ground by the application of the foot, and then using the long handle as a lever, to raise up the loosened earth and turn it over.

Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Château Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world’s most expensive bottle of wine into the world’s most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway.

On even the most modest properties, a good, well-cut lawn became the ideal. For one thing, it was a way of announcing to the world that the householder was prosperous enough that he didn’t need to use the space to grow vegetables for his dinner table.

For many people today, gardening is about lawns and almost nothing else. In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop. Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature—namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown, and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff onto it. In the western United States about 60 percent of all the water that comes out of taps for all purposes is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides—seventy million pounds of them a year—that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.

In the autumn of 1769, on a hilltop in the piedmont of Virginia, on what was then the very edge of the civilized world, a young man began building his dream home. It would consume more than fifty years of his life and nearly all his resources, and he would never see it finished. His name was Thomas Jefferson. The house was Monticello.

Jefferson, at the time he began Monticello, had never been anywhere larger than Williamsburg, the colonial capital, where he had attended the College of William and Mary, and Williamsburg, with some two thousand people, was hardly a metropolis. Although he later traveled to Italy, he never saw the Villa Capra and would almost certainly have been astounded by it because the Villa Capra is enormous compared with Monticello. Though they look very similar in illustrations, Palladio’s version is built on a scale that makes Monticello seem almost cottagelike. Partly this is because Monticello’s service areas—the dependencies, as they were known—are built into the slope of the hill and are invisible from the house and garden. A lot of Monticello is essentially underground.

The Monticello visitors see today is a house Jefferson never saw but only dreamed of. It was never finished in his lifetime, or even in really good shape. For fifty-four years Jefferson inhabited a building site. “Putting up and pulling down is one of my favorite amusements,” he remarked cheerfully, and it was just as well, for he never stopped tinkering and messing. Because the work was so protracted, some parts of Monticello were actively deteriorating while others were still abuilding.

As an architect, Jefferson was fastidious to the point of weirdness. Some of his plans specified measurements to seven decimal points. Self showed me one measuring a strangely precise 1.8991666 inches. “Nobody, even now, could measure anything to that degree of accuracy,” he said. “You are talking millionths of an inch. I suspect it was just a kind of intellectual exercise. There isn’t anything else it could be really.”

When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books—the number that John Harvard left at his death—was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after him.

Washington didn’t get to spend a lot of time enjoying Mount Vernon; even when he was at home, he didn’t get much peace. One of the conventions of the age was to feed and put up any respectable-looking person who presented himself at the door. Washington was plagued with guests—he had 677 of them in one year—and many of those stayed for more than one night.

In the summer of 1814, the British burned down America’s Capitol (an act of vandalism so infuriating to Jefferson that he wanted to send American agents to London to set fire to landmarks there), and with it went the Congressional Library. Jefferson immediately, and generously, offered his own library to the nation “on whatever terms the Congress might think proper.” Jefferson thought he had about 10,000 books, but when a delegation from the federal government came to survey the collection, they found that the number was in fact 6,487. Worse, when they had a look at the books, they weren’t at all sure they wanted them. Many, they felt, were of no use to Congress, as they covered topics like architecture, wine making, cooking, philosophy, and art. About a quarter were in foreign languages, “which cannot be read,” the delegation noted grimly, while a good many more were of an “immoral and irreligious nature.” In the end, the congressmen allotted Jefferson $23,900 for the library—considerably less than half its value—and rather grudgingly took it away. Jefferson, as might have been expected, immediately embarked on building a new library, and had accumulated about a thousand new books by the time of his death the following decade.

Congress may not have been especially grateful for this windfall, but the purchase gave the infant United States the most sophisticated governmental library in the world and completely redefined such a library’s role. Government libraries previously had been mere reference rooms, designed for strictly utilitarian purposes, but this was to be a comprehensive, universal collection—an entirely different concept. Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 115 million books and related items. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s part of it didn’t last long. Thirty-six years after the Jefferson library was purchased, early on a Christmas Eve morning, one of the chimneys in the Capitol library caught fire. Because it was early and a holiday, no one was around to notice the fire or check its spread. By the time the blaze was discovered and brought under control, most of the collection was destroyed, including Jefferson’s precious copy of I quattro libri. The year of the fire, it almost goes without saying, was 1851.

We now come to the most dangerous part of the house—in fact, one of the most hazardous environments anywhere: the stairs. No one knows exactly how dangerous the stairs are, because records are curiously deficient. Most countries keep records of deaths and injuries sustained in falls, but not of what caused the falls in the first place. So in the United States, for instance, it is known that about twelve thousand people a year hit the ground and never get up again, but whether that is because they have fallen from a tree, a roof, or off the back porch is unknown.

John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated 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. When you consider how much falls cost society in lost working hours and the strains placed on health systems, it is curious that they are not studied more attentively. Huge amounts of money and bureaucratic time are invested in fire prevention, fire research, fire codes, and fire insurance, but almost none is spent on the understanding or prevention of falls.

Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses.

Eighty-four percent of people who die in stair falls at home are sixty-five or older. This is not so much because the elderly are more careless on stairs, but just because they don’t get up so well afterward. Children, happily, only very rarely die in falls on stairs, though households with young children in them have by far the highest rates of injuries, partly because of high levels of stair usage and partly because of the startling things children leave on steps. Unmarried people are more likely to fall than married people, and previously married people fall more than both of those. People in good shape fall more often than people in bad shape, largely because they do a lot more bounding and don’t descend as carefully and with as many rest stops as the tubby or infirm.

The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. About four persons in ten inju...

People fall in different ways in different countries. Someone in Japan, for instance, is far more likely to be hurt in a stair fall in an office, department store, or railway station than is anyone in the United States. This is not because the Japanese are more reckless stair users, but simply because Americans don’t much use stairs in public environments. They rely on the ease and safety of elevators and escalators. American stair injuries overwhelmingly happen in the home—almost the only place where many Americans submit themselves to regular stair use. For t...

When we fall on stairs, we tend to blame ourselves and generally attribute the fall to carelessness or inattentiveness. In fact, design substantially influences the likelihood of whether you will fall, and how hurt you will feel when you have stopped bouncing. Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and la...

He notes how at one New York City railroad station (he doesn’t say which) the stair edges had been given a nonslip covering with a pattern that made it difficult to discern the stair edge. In six weeks, more than fourteen hundred people—a truly astonishing number—fell down these stairs, at which point the problem was fixed.

One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects—an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did. One of those made seriously ill by white lead was James McNeill Whistler, who used a lot of it in creating the life-sized painting The White Girl.

The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process that turns copper domes and statues green—just quicker and more commercial—and it made “the delicatest Grass-green in the world,” as one eighteenth-century admirer enthused. A room painted in verdigris always produced an appreciative “ah” in visitors.

When paints became popular, people wanted them to be as vivid as they could possibly be made. The restrained colors that we associate with the Georgian period in Britain, or the colonial period in America, are a consequence of fading, not decorative restraint. In 1979, when Mount Vernon began a program of repainting the interiors in faithful colors, “people came and just yelled at us,” Dennis Pogue, the curator, told me with a grin. “They told us we were making Mount Vernon garish. They were right—we were. But that’s just because that’s the way it was. It was hard for a lot of people to accept that what we were doing was faithful restoration. “Even now paint charts for colonial-style paints virtually always show the colors from the period as muted. In fact, colors were actually nearly always quite deep and sometimes even startling. The richer a color you could get, the more you tended to be admired. For one thing, rich colors generally denoted expense, since you needed a lot of pigment to make them. Also, you need to remember that often these colors were seen by candlelight, so they needed to be more forceful to have any kind of impact in muted light.”

If we looked closely, however, we would be surprised to note that two very basic colors didn’t exist at all in Mr. Marsham’s day: a good white and a good black. The brightest white available was a rather dull off-white, and although whites improved through the nineteenth century, it wasn’t until the 1940s, with the addition of titanium dioxide to paints, that really strong, lasting whites became available. The absence of a good white paint would have been doubly noticeable in early New England, for the Puritans had no white paint and didn’t believe in painting anyway. (They thought it was showy.) So all those gleaming white churches we associate with New England towns are in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon.

Also missing from the painter’s palette was a strong black. Permanent black paint, distilled from tar and pitch, wasn’t popularly available until the late nineteenth century. So all the glossy black front doors, railings, gates, lampposts, gutters, downpipes, and other fittings that are such an elemental feature of London’s streets today are actually quite recent. If we were to be thrust back in time to Dickens’s London, one of the most startling differences to greet us would be the absence of black-painted surfaces. In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.

Although lead’s dangers have been well known for a long time, it continued to be used in many products well into the twentieth century. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was often stored in lead-lined tanks. Lead was sprayed onto fruit as a pesticide. Lead was even used in the manufacture of toothpaste tubes. It was banned from domestic paints in the United States in 1978. Although lead has been removed from most consumer products, it continues to build up in the atmosphere because of industrial applications. The average person of today has about 625 times more lead in his system than someone of fifty years ago.

“The water given out in respiration,” explained Shirley Forster Murphy in Our Homes, and How to Make Them Healthy (1883), “is loaded with animal impurities; it condenses on the inner walls of buildings, and trickles down in foetid streams, and … sinks into the walls,” causing damage of a grave but unspecified nature. Why it didn’t cause this damage when it was in one’s body in the first place was never explained or evidently considered. It was enough to know that breathing at night was a degenerate practice.

Twin beds were advocated for married couples, not only to avoid the shameful thrill of accidental contact but also to reduce the mingling of personal impurities. As one medical authority grimly explained: “The air which surrounds the body under the bed clothing is exceedingly impure, being impregnated with the poisonous substances which have escaped through the pores of the skin.” Up to 40 percent of deaths in America, one doctor estimated, arose from chronic exposure to unwholesome air while sleeping.

Beds were hard work, too. Turning and plumping mattresses was a regular chore—and a heavy one, too. A typical feather bed contained forty pounds of feathers. Pillows and bolsters added about as much again, and all of these had to be emptied out from time to time to let the feathers air, for otherwise they began to stink. Many people kept flocks of geese, which they plucked for fresh bedding perhaps three times a year (a job that must have been as tiresome for the servants as it was for the geese). A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fis...