At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the East Coast in a refrigerated railway car.

Chicagoans came to stare at it as if it had arrived from a distant planet.

Lake Wenham now serves as a freshwater reservoir for Boston, so it is surrounded by a high chain-link fence and is closed to the public. A historical marker beside the road celebrates the town of Wenham’s tercentenary in 1935 but makes no mention of the ice trade that once made the lake famous.

Until almost the middle of the century instructions in cookbooks were always wonderfully imprecise, calling merely for “some flour” or “enough milk.”

Because Miss Acton’s poems weren’t selling, her publisher gently suggested she might try something more commercial, and in 1845, she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost always unwittingly, modeled.

Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain’s coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week.

The golden age of gluttony was actually the eighteenth century.

Although paintings of Anne always tactfully make her look no more than a little fleshy, like one of Rubens’s plump beauties, she was in fact jumbo-sized—“exceedingly gross and corpulent” in the candid words of her former best friend the Duchess of Marlborough.

A trapdoor had to be cut in the floor of her rooms at Windsor Castle through which she was lowered, jerkily and inelegantly, by means of pulleys and a hoist to the state rooms below.

When she died, she was buried in a coffin that was...

Many people considered the potato an unwholesome vegetable because its edible parts grew belowground rather than reaching nobly for the sun. Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.

The greatest part of the tragedy is that Ireland actually had plenty of food. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals, and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.

Households had servants the way modern people have appliances. Common laborers had servants. Sometimes servants had servants.

Servants were more than a help and convenience; they were a vital indicator of status.

People held on to their servants almost for dear life.

Karl Marx, living in chronic indebtedness in Soho and often barely able to put food on the table, employed a housekeeper and a personal secretary. The household was so crowded that the secretary—a man named Pieper—had to share a bed with Marx.

servitude was a big part of life for a great many people. By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London—those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five—were servants. Another one in three was a prostitute.

For women, however, seldom was it a job for life. Most left the profession by the age of thirty-five, usually to get married, and very few stayed in any one job for more than a year or so.

The bachelor Earl of Lonsdale lived alone but had forty-nine people to look after him.

The first Duke of Chandos kept a private orchestra for his mealtimes, though he managed to get extra value out of some of his musicians by making them do servants’ work as well; a violinist, for instance, was required to give his son his daily shave.

Guests brought their own servants, too, so at weekends it was not unusual for the number of people within a country house to swell by as many as 150.

To avoid such confusions, guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes containing personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridors to help find their way back to, or between, rooms.

Everything tended to be on a grand scale. The kitchen at Saltram, a house in Devon, had six hundred copper pots and pans, and that was pretty typical.

The average country house might have as many as six hundred towels, and similarly vast quant...

Writing in 1925, one retired servant recalled how early in his career he had had to light a fire, polish twenty pairs of boots, and clean and trim thirty-five lamps, all by the time the rest of the household began to stir.

The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognized you as one of our kin; only the pity that might be extended to a dog.”

Before the advent of indoor plumbing, water had to be carried to each bedroom and then taken away again once used.

As a rule, each active bedroom had to be visited and refreshed five times betwee...

A gallon of water weighs eight pounds, and a typical bath held forty-five gallons, all of which had to be heated in the kitchen and brought up in special cans—and there might be two dozen or more baths to fill of an evening.

Furniture, fire grates, drapes, mirrors, windows, marble, brass, glass, and silver—all had to be cleaned and polished regularly, usually with their own particular brand of homemade polish.

Knife cleaning was such a tedious and heavy process that a knife-cleaning machine—essentially a box with a handle to turn a stiff brush—became one of the very first labor-saving appliances. One was marketed as “The Servant’s Friend.” Doubtless it was.

Often groceries were brought in just two or three times a year, and stored in bulk.

If you needed to starch a collar or polish shoes, you had to concoct your own ingredients.

Starch had to be laboriously made from rice or potatoes. Even linens didn’t come in a finished state. One bought bolts of cloth and had them made up into tablecloths, sheets, shirts, towels, and so on.

Robert Kerr stated that the typical stately home had two hundred rooms (counting all storage spaces), of which almost exactly half were household offices—which is to say rooms devoted to servants and their tasks, or their bedrooms. When stables and other outbuildings were added in, the property was overwhelmingly in the servants’ control.

Lanhydrock House in Cornwall had a room exclusively for dealing with bedpans.

Buttery has nothing to do with butter. It refers to butts, as in butts of ale.

looking after the wine bottles is what butlers originally did.)

owners rarely set foot in the kitchen or servants’ area and, as Gardiner puts it, “knew only by report the conditions in which their servants lived.”

Strict protocol dictated into which parts of the house one might venture—which corridors and staircases one might use, which doors one might open—depending on whether one was a guest or close relative, governess or tutor, child or adult, aristocrat or commoner, male or female, upper house servant or lower house servant.

By the Edwardian period servants got off half a day per week and one full day per month—hardly munificent when you consider that that was all the time they had to shop for personal items, get their hair cut, visit family, court, relax, or otherwise enjoy a few hours of precious liberty.

“The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.” It was unquestionably a strange world.

the tenth Duke of Marlborough emerged from the bathroom in a state of helpless bewilderment because his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put the toothpaste on the brush for him, and the Duke was unaware that toothbrushes didn’t recharge automatically.

that the second footman in a household would always be called “Johnson,” say, thus sparing the family the tedium of having to learn a new name each time a footman retired or fell under the wheels of a carriage.

but often the butler was required to engage in some intentional sartorial gaucherie—wearing trousers that didn’t match his jacket, for instance—to ensure that his inferiority was instantly manifest.*

The senior servant within the household was the butler. His female counterpart was the housekeeper.

Footmen were originally just that—men who trotted on foot beside their master or mistress’s sedan chair or carriage, to look glorious and perform any necessary services en route.

Footmen did most of the public jobs in the household—answered the door, served at table, delivered messages—and so were often chosen for their height, bearing, and general dishiness,

Lady Ligonier wasn’t worth spilling blood over, a suspicion she confirmed almost immediately by running off with her footman.