At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Wherever people were, were rats. An American named Eliza Ann Summers reported in 1867 how she and her sister took armloads of shoes to bed each night to throw at the rats that ran across the floor. Susanna Augusta Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, said that she never forgot, or indeed ever quite got over, the experience of rats scuttling across her childhood bed.

For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned. In William Shakespeare’s day a decent canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. Because they were such treasured items, the best bed was often kept downstairs, sometimes in the living room, where it could be better shown off to visitors or seen through an open window by passersby. Generally, such beds were notionally reserved for really important visitors but in practice were hardly used, a fact that adds some perspective to the famous clause in Shakespeare’s will in which he left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne. This has often been construed as an insult, when in fact the second-best bed was almost certainly the marital one and therefore the one with the most tender associations. Why Shakespeare singled out that particular bed for mention is a separate mystery, since Anne would in the normal course of things have inherited all the household beds, but it was by no means the certain snub that some interpretations have made it.

Privacy was a much different concept in former times. In inns, sharing beds remained common into the nineteenth century, and diaries frequently contain entries lamenting how the author was disappointed to find a late-arriving stranger clambering into bed with him. 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.

Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed. The records make clear that King Henry V’s steward and chamber...

Self-abuse was of course out of the question at all times. The well-known consequences of masturbation covered virtually every undesirable condition known to medical science, not excluding insanity and premature death. Self-polluters—“poor creeping tremulous, pale, spindle-shanked wretched creatures who crawl upon the earth,” as one chronicler described them—were to be pitied. “Every act of self-pollution is an earthquake—a blast—a deadly paralytic stroke,” declared one expert. Case studies vividly drove home the risks. A medical man named Samuel Tissot described how one of his patients drooled continuously, dripped watery blood from his nose, and “defecated in his bed without noticing it.” It was those last three words that were particularly crushing.

The ancient Greeks were devoted bathers. They loved to get naked—gymnasium means “the naked place”—and work up a healthful sweat, and it was their habit to conclude their daily workouts with a communal bath. But these were primarily hygienic plunges. For them bathing was a brisk business, something to be gotten over quickly. Really serious bathing—languorous bathing—starts with Rome. Nobody has ever bathed with as much devotion and precision as the Romans did.