At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Consisting of nine houses, all still holding many of their original contents, the village dates from five thousand years ago. It is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, older than all but a handful of built structures on Earth. It is immensely rare and important. It is known as Skara Brae.

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.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

We are, in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer.

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.

Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire,

The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers “must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night”—giving an eighty-four-hour workweek.

In factories, workers were expected to be at their places from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Saturdays, but during the busiest periods of the year—what were known as “brisk times”—they could be kept at their machines from 3:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.—a nineteen-hour day. Until the Factory Act of 1833, children as young as seven were required to work as long as adults. In such circumstances, not surprisingly, people ate and slept when they could.

enclosure movement, in which small fields that had formerly supported many were converted into much larger enclosed fields that enriched a few, made farming immensely lucrative for those with large holdings—and soon in many areas that was almost the only kind of holding there was. Enclosure had been going on slowly for centuries, but it gathered pace between 1750 and 1830, when some six million acres of British farmland were enclosed. Enclosure was hard on the displaced peasant farmers, but it did leave them and their descendants conveniently available to move to towns and become the toiling masses of the new Industrial Revolution—which was also just beginning and was funded to a very large extent by the surplus wealth enjoyed by the ever-richer landowners.

vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it Koagulations vitamin for its role in blood clotting.

The vitamins are, in short, a disorderly bunch. It is almost impossible to define them in a way that comfortably embraces them all. A standard textbook definition is that a vitamin is “an organic molecule not made in the human body which is required in small amounts to sustain normal metabolism,” but in fact vitamin K is made in the body, by bacteria in the gut. Vitamin D, one of the most vital substances of all, is actually a hormone, and most of it comes to us not through diet but through the magical action of sunlight on skin.

Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

Who would guess that an ounce of cornflakes contains more salt than an ounce of salted peanuts?

Vasco da Gama was a breathtakingly vicious man. On one occasion he captured a Muslim ship carrying hundreds of men, women, and children, locked the passengers and crew in the hold, carried off everything of value, and then—gratuitously, appallingly—set the ship ablaze. Almost everywhere he went, Gama abused or slaughtered people he encountered, and so set a tone of distrust and brutish violence that would characterize and diminish the whole of the age of discovery.

Some took to using coffeehouses as their offices—as, most famously, at Lloyd’s Coffee House on Lombard Street, which gradually evolved into Lloyd’s insurance market.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

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.

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.

Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years.

Minerals in the clay give bricks their color, and the predominance of iron in most soil types accounts for the disproportionate weighting toward red. The classic London yellow stock bricks, as they are known, take their color from the presence of chalk in the soil. White bricks (which aren’t actually white at all, but a creamy yellow) have a high lime content.

Biltmore was Olmsted’s last project—and in fact one of his last rational acts. Very soon afterward he slid into a helpless and progressive dementia. He spent the last five years of his life at the McLean Asylum in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, it almost goes without saying, he had designed the grounds.

In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop. Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature—namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown, and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff onto it. In the western United States about 60 percent of all the water that comes out of taps for all purposes is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides—seventy million pounds of them a year—that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.

In America, Georgian became an unappealing label after independence (it wasn’t actually much liked before), so there Colonial was coined for buildings predating independence, and Federal for those built after.

It would be overstating matters to suggest that the exasperations of commerce were the cause of the American Revolution, but they were certainly a powerful component.

About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before.

By the late nineteenth century, 80 percent of English wallpapers contained arsenic, often in very significant quantities.

The absence of a good white paint would have been doubly noticeable in early New England, for the Puritans had no white paint and didn’t believe in painting anyway. (They thought it was showy.) So all those gleaming white churches we associate with New England towns are in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon.

If we were to be thrust back in time to Dickens’s London, one of the most startling differences to greet us would be the absence of black-painted surfaces. In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.

To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary. Educating them was not simply a waste of time and resources but dangerously bad for their delicate constitutions. In 1865, John Ruskin opined in an essay that women should be educated just enough to make themselves practically useful to their spouses, but no further. Even the American educator Catharine Beecher, who was by the standards of the age a radical feminist, argued passionately that women should be accorded full and equal educational rights, so long as it was recognized that they would need extra time to do their hair.

John Snow.

It is one of the most important documents in the history of statistics, public health, medicine, demographics, forensic science—one of the most important documents, in short, of the nineteenth century. No one listened, and the epidemics kept coming.

Joseph Bazalgette.

People who drank milk in America sometimes grew delirious and swiftly died—Abraham Lincoln’s mother was one such victim—but infected milk tasted and smelled no different from ordinary milk, and no one knew what the infectious agent was. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anyone finally deduce that it came from cows grazing on a plant called white snakeroot, which was harmless to the cows but made their milk toxic to drink.

Designed by the great George Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for the Albert Memorial, the Midland was intended to be the most magnificent hotel in the world when it opened in 1873. It cost the equivalent of $450 million in today’s money and was a wonder in almost every way. Unfortunately—in fact, amazingly—Scott provided just four bathrooms to be shared among six hundred bedrooms. Almost from the day of its opening, the hotel was a failure.

The boots were the greatest surprise of all. They looked like nothing so much as a pair of bird’s nests sitting on soles of stiffened bear skin, and seemed hopelessly ill-designed and insubstantial. Intrigued, a Czech foot and shoe expert named Vaclav Patek carefully fashioned a replica pair, using exactly the same design and materials, then tried them on a mountain walk. They were, he reported in some astonishment, “more comfortable and capable” than any modern boots he had ever worn. Their grip on slippery rock was better than modern rubber, and it was all but impossible to get blisters in them. They were, above all, exceedingly effective against cold.

Not to put too fine a point on it, people throughout the ancient world were very, very fond of hemp, and grew more of it than they needed for ropes or sails.

sumptuary laws,

When word got out that the withered and miserly Marquis of Queensberry, who lived nearby, was also in the habit of taking milk baths, milk sales in the district plummeted because it was rumored that he returned the milk for resale after he had immersed his crusty and decrepit skin in it.