At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Eventually cupboards were incorporated into rather more ornate dressers, which have nothing to do with clothing but rather with the preparation, or dressing, of food.

The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders

and why an honest person—someone who keeps his hands visible at all times—is said to be aboveboard.

Fish days were abandoned after the break with Rome, but were restored by Elizabeth in the interests of supporting the British fishing fleet.

In the whole of Britain, as far as can be told, just one door survives from the Anglo-Saxon period—a battered oak door in an outer vestibule at Westminster Abbey, which escaped attention until the summer of 2005, when it was

realized that it was 950 years old and thus the oldest known door in the country.

Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton.

By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London—those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five—were servants.

The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed.

Whale oil was an American speciality, both to produce and to consume.

America had more than 650 whaling ships, roughly three times as many as all the rest of the world put together.

No human being in modern times has been richer.

People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music.

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.

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.

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, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage.

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas.

Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.

It was in fact iron’s shortcomings that in large part allowed the Erie Canal to remain successful as long as it did.

He was very popular in England—for many years there was a Doré Gallery in Mayfair that dealt exclusively in his works—and is best remembered now for his dark drawings of London life, particularly for the scenes of squalor along the back streets.

Eiffel was not a vain man, but in his next big project he made sure no one would fail to appreciate his role in its construction by creating something that was nothing but skeleton.

Many people loathed it, especially artists and intellectuals.

With a value of $1.4 billion, it was worth more than all the land in the United States west of the Mississippi and twice the size of the federal government if measured by annual revenue.

The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent ever granted.

Brass beds became popular in the nineteenth century not because brass was suddenly thought a stylish metal for bedsteads, but because it gave no harbor to bedbugs.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, London had just 218 acres of burial grounds. People were packed into them in densities almost beyond imagining. When the poet William Blake died in 1827, he was buried, at Bunhill Fields, on top of three others; later, four more were placed on top of him.

St. Marylebone Parish Church packed an estimated one hundred thousand bodies into a burial ground of just over an acre.

Only people of fashion and rank (plus a smattering of impudently bold courtesans from time to time) were allowed into the big London parks until well into the nineteenth century.

But it is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist. It

That was the option chosen for Central Park in New York, which until the end of the nineteenth century was home to a roaming flock of two hundred sheep superintended by a shepherd who lived in the building that was until recently the Tavern on the Green.

In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop.

There had never been a house like it. This was, almost literally, the last house in the world. Before it lay an unexplored continent. Behind it was all the known world. Perhaps nothing says more about Jefferson and his house than that it faces away from that old world and into the unknown emptiness of the new.

Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.