At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

The Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker of Cornwall wrote poetry of distinction and was much admired by Longfellow and Tennyson, though he slightly alarmed his parishioners by wearing a pink fez and passing much of his life under the powerfully serene influence of opium.

Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand. In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.

The Adam brothers became a kind of architectural industry. They owned quarries, a timber business, brickworks, a company for making stucco, and much else. At one point they employed two thousand people. They designed not just houses but every object within them—furniture, fireplaces, carpets, beds, lamps, and all else down to incidental objects like doorknobs, bell pulls, and inkstands.

By 1900, the whole episode had been so effectively expunged from the record that W. G. Collingwood could, without a blush of embarrassment, write The Life of John Ruskin without hinting that Ruskin had ever been married, much less sent crashing from a room at the sight of female pubic hair.

How exactly “teeth” killed so many seems bound to remain forever a mystery.

Another early exponent was Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, one of the nineteenth century’s leading archaeologists, who not only desired cremation for himself but insisted upon it for his wife, despite her continued objections. “Damn it, woman, you shall burn,” he declared to her whenever she raised the matter.

Glaciers grind and churn with slow but brutal force, and any bodies within them are generally crushed to molecules. Very occasionally they are stretched to outlandish lengths, like characters flattened by a steamroller in a cartoon. If no oxygen gets to the body, it may undergo a process called saponification, in which the flesh transmutes into a waxy, foul-smelling substance called adipocere. Such bodies look eerily as if they have been carved from soap and lose nearly all meaningful definition.

Many climbing boys ended their short careers stooped and ruined by the age of eleven or twelve. Cancer of the scrotum seems to have been a particular occupational hazard.

Also much spoken of was the case of the sixth Duke of Somerset, known as “the Proud Duke,” who required his daughters always to stand in his presence and reportedly disinherited one of them when he awoke from a nap and caught the ungrateful wretch sitting.