At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

whatever happens in the world—whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over—eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment—they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

The role of country clergy was a remarkably loose one. Piety was not necessarily a requirement, or even an expectation. Ordination in the Church of England required a university degree, but most ministers read classics and didn’t study divinity at all, and so had no training in how to preach, provide inspiration or solace, or otherwise offer meaningful Christian support. Many didn’t even bother composing sermons but just bought a big book of prepared sermons and read one out once a week.

Chartism was a popular movement named for the People’s Charter of 1837, which sought a range of political reforms—all fairly modest in retrospect—from the abolition of rotten and pocket boroughs* to the adoption of universal male suffrage. Over the space of a decade or so, Chartists presented a series of petitions to Parliament, one of them over six miles long and said to be signed by 5.7 million people. Parliament was impressed but rejected them all anyway, for the people’s own good. Universal suffrage, it was commonly agreed, was a dangerous notion—“utterly incompatible with the existence of civilization,” as the historian and member of Parliament Thomas Babington Macaulay put it. In London, matters came to a head in 1848 when the Chartists announced a mass rally on Kennington Common, south of the Thames. The fear was that they would work themselves into a froth of indignation, swarm over Westminster Bridge, and seize Parliament. Government buildings throughout the city were fortified in readiness. Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, blocked the windows of the Foreign Office with bound volumes of the Times. At the British Museum men were stationed on the roof with a supply of bricks to rain down on the heads of anyone who tried to take the building. Cannons were placed outside the Bank of England, and employees at a range of state institutions were issued with swords and ancient, doubtfully maintained muskets, many of them at least as dangerous to their users as to a...

In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.

It is remarkable to think that people thought of striped fabrics before they thought of doors and windows.

Even after wood or tile floors began to grow common in superior homes, at about the time of William Shakespeare, carpets were too precious to be placed underfoot. They were hung on the walls or laid over tables. Often, however, they were kept in chests and brought out only to impress special visitors.

The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders and why an honest person—someone who keeps his hands visible at all times—is said to be aboveboard.

Almost nothing, it seems, escaped the devious wiles of food adulterers. Sugar and other expensive ingredients were often stretched with gypsum, plaster of paris, sand, dust, and other forms of daft, as such additives were collectively known. Butter reportedly was bulked out with tallow and lard. A tea drinker, according to various authorities, might unwittingly take in anything from sawdust to powdered sheep’s dung. One closely inspected shipment, Judith Flanders reports in The Victorian House, proved to be only slightly more than half tea; the rest was made up of sand and dirt. Sulphuric acid was added to vinegar for extra sharpness, chalk to milk, turpentine to gin. Arsenite of copper was used to make vegetables greener or to make jellies glisten. Lead chromate gave bakery products a golden glow and brought radiance to mustard. Lead acetate was added to drinks as a sweetener, and red lead somehow made Gloucester cheese lovelier to behold, if not safer to eat.

Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra—the famous baker’s dozen.

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.

Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.

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.

Servants were sometimes required to adopt a new name, so 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.

Not since the Middle Ages had Britain been so dark, and the consequences were noisy and profound. To avoid striking the curb or anything parked along it, cars took to straddling the middle white lines, which was fine until they encountered another vehicle doing likewise from the opposite direction. Pedestrians found themselves in constant peril as every sidewalk became an obstacle course of unseen lampposts, trees, and street furniture. Trams, known with respect as “the silent peril,” were especially unnerving. “During the first four months of the war,” Juliet Gardiner relates in Wartime, “a total of 4,133 people were killed on Britain’s roads”—a 100 percent increase over the year before. Nearly three-quarters of the victims were pedestrians. Without dropping a single bomb, the Luftwaffe was already killing six hundred people a month, as the British Medical Journal drily observed.

It made reading, card playing, and even conversing more agreeable. Diners could see the condition of their food; they could find their way around delicate fish bones and know how much salt came out the hole. One could drop a needle and find it before daylight. Book titles became discernible on their shelves. People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

Thomas Jefferson complained that he had to stop writing one evening because the ink had frozen in his inkwell. A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn’t get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 degrees Fahrenheit.

To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew),

The Drummond light, or calcium light as it was also called, was based on a phenomenon that had been known about for a long time—that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a really hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light. Using a flame made from a rich blend of oxygen and alcohol, Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away. The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but it was also taken up by theaters. The light not only was perfect and steady but also could be focused into a beam and cast onto selected performers—which is where the phrase in the limelight comes from.

The state of New York had just one important advantage—an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and were such an obstruction to trade and communications that many people believed that the pioneers living beyond the mountains would eventually, of practical necessity, form a separate nation. 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.

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.

At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub.

All the Champagne region was wiped out but for two tiny vineyards outside Reims, which for some reason successfully resisted infection and still produce champagne grapes from their original roots—the only French champagnes that do.

The brightest white available was a rather dull off-white, and although whites improved through the nineteenth century, it wasn’t until the 1940s, with the addition of titanium dioxide to paints, that really strong, lasting whites became available. 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.

By the time Europeans began to visit the New World in large numbers, they had grown so habitually malodorous that the Indians nearly always remarked on how bad they smelled. Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.

Perhaps no other word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than toilet. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of toile, a word still used to describe a type of linen. Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on the dressing table (whence toiletries). Then it became the dressing table itself, then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory itself. Which explains why toilet water in English can describe something you would gladly daub on your face or, simultaneously and more basically, water in a toilet.

Foreign visitors were frequently appalled by the English habit of keeping chamber pots in cupboards or sideboards in the dining room, which the men would pull out and use as soon as the women had withdrawn. Some rooms came supplied with a “necessary chair” in the corner as well. A French visitor to Philadelphia, Moreau de Saint-Méry, noted with astonishment how one man removed the flowers from a vase and peed in it. Another French visitor at about the same time reported asking for a chamber pot for his bedroom and being told just to go out the window like everyone else. When he insisted on being provided with something in which to do his business, his bemused host brought him a kettle, but firmly reminded him that she would need it back in the morning in time for breakfast.

This problem was resolved by one of the great and surely most extraordinarily appropriate names in hygiene history, Thomas Crapper (1837–1910), who was born into a poor family in Yorkshire and reputedly walked to London at the age of eleven. There he became an apprentice plumber in Chelsea. Crapper invented the classic and, in Britain, still familiar toilet with an elevated cistern activated by the pull of a chain. Called the Marlboro Silent Water Waste Preventer, it was clean, leak-proof, odor-free, and wonderfully reliable, and its manufacture made Crapper very rich and so famous that it is often assumed that he gave his name to the slang term crap and its many derivatives. In fact, crap in the lavatorial sense is very ancient, and crapper for a toilet is an Americanism not recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 1922. Crapper’s name, it seems, was just a happy coincidence.

From about 1700, for reasons that had nothing to do with common sense or practicality, it became fashionably necessary to place on one’s head a daily snowfall of white powder. The main powdering agent was simple flour. When wheat harvests failed in France in the 1770s, there were riots all over as starving people realized that diminished supplies of flour were not being baked into bread, but were instead being used to powder the privileged heads of aristocrats.