At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

For three years in the 1840s, Fortune traveled all around China, disguised as a native, collecting information on how tea was grown and processed.

but also introduced to the West many valuable plants, among them the fan palm, the kumquat, and several varieties of azaleas and chrysanthemums.

half a century, from a base of nothing in 1850, tea production in India rose to 140 million pounds a year.

When Thomas Jefferson put a dining room in Monticello, it was quite a dashing thing to do.

rather, by and large, a simple desire on the part of the mistress of the house to save her lovely new upholstered furniture from greasy desecration. Upholstered furniture, as we have lately seen, was expensive, and the last thing a proud owner wanted was to have anyone wiping fingers on it.

In 1611, he produced his magnum opus, Coryate’s Crudities, in which he gave much praise to the dinner fork, which he had first encountered in Italy. The same book was also notable for introducing English readers to the Swiss folk hero William Tell and to a new device called the umbrella.

Manufacturers experimented with additional numbers of tines—sometimes as many as six—before settling, late in the nineteenth century, on four as the number that people seemed to be most comfortable with.

Before the 1850s, nearly all the dishes of the meal were placed on the table at the outset.

but now a new practice came in known as service à la russe in which food was delivered to the table in courses. A lot of people hated the new practice because it meant everyone had to eat everything in the same order and at the same pace.

Dinners now sometimes dragged on for hours, putting a severe strain on many people’s sobriety and nearly everyone’s bladders.

The nineteenth century also became the age of the overdressed dining table. A diner at a formal gathering might sit down to as many as nine wineglasses just for the main courses—more

At one point, a single manufacturer offered no fewer than 146 different types of flatware for the table.

Dining hours were dictated to some extent by the onerous and often preposterous obligations of making and returning social calls.

The convention was to drop in on others between twelve and three each day. If someone called and left a card while you were out, etiquette dictated that you must return the call the next day.

One visitor to London in 1773 noted that in a single week he was invited to dinners that started successively at one, five, three, and “half after six, dinner on table at seven.”

Another factor that materially influenced dining times was theater hours.

Eventually, unable or unwilling to modify their personal habits any further, the beau monde stopped trying to get to the theater for the first act and took to sending a servant to hold their seats for them till they had finished dining. Generally they would show up—noisy, drunk, and disinclined to focus—for the later acts.

For a generation or so it was usual for a theatrical company to perform the first half of a play to an auditorium full of dozing servants who had no attachment to the proceedings and to perform the second half to a crowd of ill-mannered inebriates who had no idea what was going on.

As the distance between breakfast and dinner widened, it became necessary to create a smaller meal around the middle of the day, for which the word luncheon was appropriated.

New York’s prospects in 1783 were not promising. It had housed more Loyalists than any other city, so the war had had an unhappy effect on its standing within the new republic.

For farmers it was cheaper to ship their produce downriver to New Orleans, via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, then by sea around Florida and up the Atlantic seaboard to Charleston or one of the other eastern ports—a distance of three thousand miles or more—than it was to haul it three hundred miles overland across the mountains.

But in 1810, DeWitt Clinton,

He proposed building a canal across the state to Lake Erie,

With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one.

even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well over half a million.

Probably no manufactured product in history—certainly none of greater obscurity—has done more to change a city’s fortunes than Canvass White’s hydraulic cement.

The Erie Canal secured the economic primacy not only of New York within the United States but also, very possibly, of t...

Without the Erie Canal, Canada would have been ideally positioned to become the powerhouse of North America, with the St. Lawrence River serving as the conduit t...

So the great unsung Canvass White didn’t just make New York rich; more profoundly...

He was already forgotten by history and so poor that his wife could barely afford to bury him.

And that is probably the last time you will ever hear his name.

London. The environs of London did, however, hold huge reserves of iron-rich clay, and so the city rediscovered an ancient building material: brick. Bricks

As a home-produced building material, brick came into its own in the time of the Tudors.

Bricks had one great advantage: they could frequently be made on-site.

But bricks had drawbacks, too.

To create a decent brick, the brickmaker had to get every stage exactly right. He had first to mix carefully two or more types of clay to

And imperfect bricks were common. So bricks in medieval and Renaissance Britain had a high prestige value. They were novel and stylish and generally only appeared in the smartest and most important structures.

America played an indirect and unexpected role in brick’s falling fortunes.

The loss of tax revenue from the American colonies after the American War of Independence,

British government urgently needed funds, and in 1784 it introduc...

Manufacturers made bricks larger to reduce the impact of the tax, but these were so awkward to work with that the effect was to depress sales further. To counter this decline in revenue, the government raised the brick tax twice more, in 1794 and 1803. Brick went into a headlong r...

a kind of exterior plaster compounded from lime, water, and cement, from the Old German stukki, or “covering”—over the original brick surface. As the stucco dried, lines could be neatly incised to make it look like blocks of stone.

No one, other than perhaps the Luftwaffe, has done more to change the look of London than John Nash did over the next thirty years.

Brick might have been permanently marginalized as a domestic building material but for one important, unexpected consideration: pollution.

Coal was hard on practically everything—on clothes, paintings, plants, furniture, books, buildings, and respiratory systems.

Just two materials seemed to be impervious to the insult of corrosive acids. One was a remarkable artificial stone known as Coade stone (named after Eleanor Coade,

was practically indestructible and could be shaped into any kind of ornamental object—friezes,

The best known Coade object is the large lion on Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament,

Coade stone looks and feels exactly like worked stone, and weathers as hard as the hardest stone, but it isn’t stone at all. It is, surprisingly, a ceramic.

What can be said for certain is that Eleanor Coade was the daughter of a failed businessman from Exeter, who came to London in about 1760 and ran a successful business selling linens.