At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

The Diary of a Country Parson. It became an international best seller, even though it was, as one critic noted, “little more than a chronicle of gluttony.”

Fittingly, the final entry of his diary recorded a meal.

The 1.6 percent of people who were British produced half the world’s coal and iron, controlled nearly two-thirds of its shipping, and engaged in one-third of all trade.

Suddenly, for the first time in history, there was in most people’s lives a lot of everything. Karl Marx, living in London, noted with a tone of wonder, and just a hint of helpless admiration, that it was possible to buy five hundred kinds of hammer in Britain.

All this reinforced the more or less universal conviction that Americans were little more than amiable backwoodsmen not yet ready for unsupervised outings on the world stage.

So when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder.

For many Europeans this was the first unsettling hint that those tobacco-chewing rustics across the water were quietly creating the next industrial colossus—a transformation so improbable that most wouldn’t believe it even as it was happening.

But even the most hotheaded proletarian, it seems, loved the Great Exhibition.

Altogether 6 million people attended in the five and a half months that the Great Exhibition was open. On the busiest day, October 7, almost 110,000 people were admitted. At one point, 92,000 were in the building at the same time—the largest number of people ever to be indoors in a single location to that time.

By the turn of the century, writes David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, “the best minds of a generation were outside the church rather than within.”

The important thought to hold on to is that for the first 99 percent of our history as beings we didn’t do much of anything but procreate and survive.

Vere Gordon Childe. He called it the Neolithic Revolution.

Almost certainly (well, we think almost certainly), it had something to do with some big changes in the weather.

After ten further centuries of biting cold, the world warmed rapidly again and has stayed comparatively warm ever since.

Almost everything we have done as advanced beings has been done in this brief spell of climatological glory.

The interesting thing about the Neolithic Revolution is that it happened all over the Earth, among people who could have no idea that others in distant p...

Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazo...

That all of these things happened all over, often without any possibility of shared contact, seems uncanny.

Dogs, for instance, were domesticated at much the same time in places as far apart as England, Siberia, and North America.

The Natufians built the first villages and founded Jericho, which became the world’s first true city.

A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today.

Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well—and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies. The three great domesticated crops of prehistory were rice, wheat, and maize, but all had significant drawbacks as staples. As the journalist John Lanchester explains: “Rice inhibits the activity of Vitamin A; wheat has a chemical that impedes the action of zinc and can lead to stunted growth; maize is deficient in essential amino acids and contains phytates, which prevent the absorption of iron.” The average height of people actually fell by almost six inches in the early days of farming in the Near East.

What killed the Orcadians was not dietary deficiency but disease. People living together are vastly more likely to spread illness from household to household, and the close exposure to animals through domestication meant that flu (from pigs or fowl), smallpox and measles (from cows and sheep), and anthrax (from horses and goats, among others) could become part of the human condition, too.

However they did it, the Mesoamericans created the world’s first fully engineered plant—a plant so thoroughly manipulated that it is now wholly dependent on us for its survival. Corn kernels do not spontaneously disengage from their cobs, so unless they are deliberately stripped and planted, no corn will grow.

When you drive past a field of corn today, every stalk in it is identical to every other—not just extremely similar, but eerily, molecularly identical. Replicants live in perfect harmony since none can outcompete any others. But they also have matching vulnerabilities.

Potatoes are from the nightshade family, which is of course notoriously toxic, and in their wild state they are full of poisonous glycoalkaloids—the same stuff, at lower doses, that puts the zip in caffeine and nicotine.

It is difficult to conceive the sense of indignity that the natives must have felt at finding themselves overrun by illiterate, unwashed pagans from the wooded fringes of Europe. Under the new regime they would give up nearly all their material advantages and not return to many of them for a thousand years.

That leaves only the Saxons, who were unquestionably a presence on the continent—the

We may know nothing of their beliefs, but we still pay homage to three of their gods—Tiw, Woden, and Thor—in the names of our three middle weekdays, and eternally commemorate Woden’s wife, Frig, every Friday. That’s quite a line of attachment.

The Romans had been in Britain for 367 years and the Celts for at least a thousand, yet

Britain, however, the Romans left barely five words and the Celts no more than twenty,

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted out to get at things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time—till the 1600s—before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers.

The floors were in effect a very large nest, much appreciated by insects and furtive rodents, and a perfect incubator for plague. Yet a deep pile of flooring was generally a sign of prestige. It was common among the French to say of a rich man that he was “waist deep in straw.”

generally about as simple as they could be. 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.

about 1300—and were designed not to be comfortable but to impute authority. Even now, of course, the person in charge of a meeting chairs it, and a person in charge of a company is the chairman of the board—a term that additionally, and a little oddly, recalls the dining habits of medieval peasants.

We “make a bed” today because in the Middle Ages that is essentially what you did—you rolled out a cloth sleeping pallet or heaped a pile of straw, found a cloak or blanket and fashioned whatever comfort you could.

The answer lies in dendrochronology—the scientific counting of tree rings. Tree rings give a very precise guide, each marking a year, and so all together form a kind of woody fingerprint.

you have a tree that lived from 1850 to 1910 and another that lived from 1890 to 1970, say, they should show overlapping patterns from 1890 to 1910, the period when they were both alive. By building up a library of ring sequences, you can go back a long way.

In practice you need a huge supply of tree-ring sequences to provide a reliable database, and you must make many ingenious statistical adjustments to get an accurate reading—and for this you need the magical theorem of the Reverend Thomas Bayes, mentioned in Chapter I.

The simple fact is that archaeological evidence shows mostly how buildings met the ground, not how they looked.

What made the difference eventually was the development of good bricks, which can deal with heat better over the long term than almost any rock can.

Because fireplaces were so inefficient, they were constantly enlarged. Some became so enormous that they were built with benches in them, letting people sit inside the fireplace, almost the only place in the house where they could be really warm.

For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra—the famous baker’s dozen.

For several decades, ice was America’s second biggest crop, measured by weight.

If securely insulated, ice could last a surprisingly long while. It could even survive the 16,000-mile, 130-day trip from Boston to Bombay—or at least about two-thirds of it could, enough to make the long trip profitable.

By the 1850s most ice sold in Britain was in fact Norwegian, though it has to be said that ice never really caught on with the British. Even now, it is still often dispensed there as if it were on prescription. The real market, it turned out, was in America itself.

At Delmonico’s, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors.

Where ice really came into its own was in the refrigeration of railway cars, which allowed the transport of meat and other perishables from coast to coast.