At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

He lived in an enormous house in Rochester, New York, with his mother, but kept many servants, including a house organist, who woke him—and presumably quite a lot of the rest of Rochester—with a dawn recital on a giant Aeolian organ.

Rather more extreme was John M. Longyear, of Marquette, Michigan, who, upon discovering that the Duluth, Mesabi & Iron Range Railroad had

won the right to lay tracks to carry iron ore right past his house, had the entire property dismantled and packed up—“house, shrubs, trees, fountains, ornamental waters, hedges and drives, gatekeeper’s lodge, porte-cochere, greenhouses, and stables,” in the words of one admiring biographer—and had the whole transferred to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he replicated his previous tranquil existence down to the last flower bulb, but without trains running past his windows.

By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over...

For pure commitment to spending, it would be hard to beat Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury—Queen Eva, as she was known. As an economi...

spent half a million dollars taking a party of friends on a hunting trip simply to kill enough alligators to make...

Addison Mizner grew increasingly stout and eccentric. He was often seen shopping in Palm Beach in his dressing gown and pajamas. He died of a heart attack in 1933.

The Wall Street crash of 1929 brought an end to most of the more notable excesses of the day.

Wherever there are humans there are mice. No other creatures live in more environments than the two of us do.

normal adult can squeeze through an opening just three-eighths of an inch wide, a gap so very tight that you would almost certainly bet good money that no grown mouse could possibly squeeze through it.

Mice and other rodents consume about a tenth of America’s annual grain crop—an astonishing proportion.

Because of the impossibility of achieving perfection in storage, hygiene regulations in most places allow up to two fecal pellets per pint of grain—a thought to bear in mind the next time you look at a loaf of whole grain bread.

Mice are notable vectors of disease. Hantavirus diseases, a family of respiratory and renal disorders that are always disagreeable and often lethal, are particula...

Mice have also been implicated in occurrences of salmonellosis, leptospirosis, tularemia, plague, hepatitis, Q fever, and murine typhus, among many others. In short, there are very good reasons for not wanting mice in your house.

Almost everything that could be said of mice applies equally, but with multiples, to their cousins the rats.

According to Clinton, one of the oldest of all urban legends, that rats come into homes by way of toilets, is in fact true.

“On several occasions,” Clinton reported, “rats were found alive in covered toilet bowls.”

Once in a domestic environment, most rats show little fear “and will even deliberately approach and make contact with motionless persons.”

Rats have very sharp teeth and can become aggressive if cornered, biting “savagely and blindly, in the manner of mad dogs,” in the words of one rat authority. A

Poisons are often designed around the curious fact that rats cannot regurgitate, so they will retain poisons that other animals—pet dogs and cats, for instance—would quickly throw up.

For pleasure they seem to enjoy gnawing on wires.

Nobody knows why, because wires clearly are not nutritious and offer nothing in return except the very real prospect of a fatal shock. Still, rats can’t stop themselves. It is believed that as many as a quarter of all fires that can’t otherwise be explained may be attributed to rats chewing on wires.

happen in practice, because rats die a lot. Like a lot of other animals, they are more or less programmed by evolution to expire fairly easily. The annual mortality rate is 95 percent.

cows, and other animals scattered about. Fleas much prefer the blood of furry creatures to the blood of humans, and generally turn to us only when nothing better is available. For that reason, modern epidemiologists in places where plague is still common—notably parts of Africa and Asia—generally avoid culling rats and other rodents too enthusiastically during outbreaks.

is commonly written that there is one rat for every human being in a typical city, but studies have shown that to be an exaggeration. The actual figure is more like one rat for every three dozen people.

It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung—or frass, as it is known to entomologists.

Bed mites weren’t discovered at all until 1965, even though millions of them exist in every bed.

Hardly anybody likes bats, which is truly unfortunate because bats do much more good than harm. They eat enormous quantities of insects, to the benefit of crops and people alike.

Without bats there would be a lot more midges in Scotland, chiggers in North America, and fevers in the tropics. Forest trees would be chewed to pieces. Crops would need more pesticides. The natural world would become a very stressed place.

The world has far more bats than most people realize. In fact, about a quarter of all mammal species—some eleven hundred in all—are bats.

They range in size from tiny bumblebee bats, which really are no bigger than bumblebees and therefore are the smallest of all mammals, up to the magnificent flying foxes of Australia and south Asia, which can have wingspans of six feet.

In 1877, the swarms were much reduced and the locusts within them seemed curiously lethargic. The next year they didn’t come at all. The Rocky Mountain locust (its formal name was Melanoplus spretus) didn’t just retreat but vanished altogether. It was a miracle. The last living specimen was found in Canada in 1902. None has been seen since.

These, it turned out, were the very places where new waves of incoming farmers were transforming the land through ploughing and irrigation—actions that killed the locusts and their pupae as they slept.

Had the locusts continued to thrive, the world would have been a very different place. Global agriculture and commerce, the peopling of the West, and ultimately the fate of our Old Rectory, as well as almost everything else beyond, connected to, and in between, would have been profoundly reshaped in ways we can scarcely imagine.

Had agriculture collapsed sufficiently to produce widespread hardship and hunger, there might well have been an overwhelming rush to socialism.