At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition’s lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes. But most people adored it, and nearly all behaved themselves. During the whole of the Great Exhibition just twenty-five people were charged with offenses—fifteen for picking pockets and ten for petty larceny. The absence of crime was even more remarkable than it sounds, for by the 1850s Hyde Park had become notoriously dangerous, particularly from dusk onward, when the risk of robbery was so great that the practice arose of crossing the park only after forming a convoy. Thanks to the crowds, for just under half a year Hyde Park was one of the safest places in London.

At a place called the Bay o’ Skaill the gale stripped the grassy covering off a large irregular knoll, of a type known locally as a howie, which had stood as a landmark for as long as anyone had known it. When at last the storm cleared and the islanders came upon their newly reconfigured beach, they were astounded to find that where the howie had stood were now revealed the remains of a compact, ancient stone village, roofless but otherwise marvelously intact. 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.

Nearly all his many books were based on reading rather than personal experience. 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.

The head of the household was the husband—a compound term meaning literally “householder” or “house owner.” His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner.

Although slaves were property and could be sold—and for quite a lot: a healthy male slave was worth eight oxen—slaves were able to own property, marry, and move about freely within the community. The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

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.

Seating was on plain benches—in French, bancs, from which comes banquet. Until the 1600s, chairs were rare—the word chair itself dates only from about 1300—and were designed not to be comfortable but to impute authority. Even now, of course, the person in charge of a meeting chairs it, and a person in charge of a company is the chairman of the board—a term that additionally, and a little oddly, recalls the dining habits of medieval peasants.

Almost no furniture survives from before 1300 or so, and illustrations in manuscripts or paintings are scarce and contradictory. Furniture historians are so starved of fact that they must even trawl through nursery rhymes. It is often written that a kind of medieval footstool was called a tuffet—a presumption based entirely on the venerable line “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet.” In fact, the only place the word appears in historic English is in the nursery rhyme itself.

Meanwhile, not everyone was happy with the loss of open hearths. Many people missed the drifting smoke and were convinced they had been healthier when kept “well kippered in wood smoke,” as one observer put it. As late as 1577, a William Harrison insisted that in the days of open fires “our heads did never ake.” Smoke in the roof space discouraged nesting birds and was believed to strengthen timbers. Above all, people complained that they weren’t nearly as warm as before, which was true. 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.

The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.

Even with the growth of comparative privacy, life remained much more communal and exposed than today. Toilets often had multiple seats, for ease of conversation, and paintings regularly showed couples in bed or bath in an attitude of casual friskiness while attendants waited on them and their friends sat amiably nearby, playing cards or conversing but comfortably within sight and earshot.

In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers—the innermost sanctum where the most private meetings could take place. Then it made one of those bizarre leaps that words sometimes make and came to describe (by 1605) not just where the king met with his ministers, but the collective term for the ministers themselves. This explains why this one word now describes both the most intimate and exalted group of advisers in government and the shelved recess in the bathroom where we keep Ex-Lax and the like.

Bread seems to have been particularly a target. In his popular novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Smollett characterized London bread as a poisonous compound of “chalk, alum and bone-ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution,” but such charges were in fact already a commonplace by then and probably had been for a very long time, as evidenced by the line in “Jack and the Beanstalk”: “I’ll crush his bones to make my bread.”

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.

As Gavin Weightman notes in his history of the business, The Frozen-Water Trade, Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers, and to create a vast range of frozen treats. Ice cream became popular—and startlingly inventive, too. At Delmonico’s, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors. Manhattan alone consumed nearly 1 million tons of ice a year, while Brooklyn sucked down 334,000 tons, Boston 380,000, and Philadelphia 377,000. Americans grew immensely proud of the civilizing conveniences of ice. “Whenever you hear America abused,” one American told Sarah Maury, a visiting Briton, “remember the ice.”

Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the East Coast in a refrigerated railway car. Chicagoans came to stare at it as if it had arrived from a distant planet.

At the beginning of the 1800s, one man, working hard, could produce about sixty cans a day; by 1880, machines could pump out fifteen hundred in a day. Surprisingly, getting them open remained a serious impediment much longer. Various cutting devices were patented, but all were difficult to use or nearly lethal if they slipped. The safe, modern manual can opener—the sort with two rolling wheels and a twisting key—dates only from 1925.

Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

The greatest part of the tragedy is that Ireland actually had plenty of food. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals, and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.

Beyond her spare account of duties, there was something even more extraordinary about Hannah Cullwick’s life, for she spent thirty-six years of it, from 1873 to her death in 1909, secretly married to her employer, a civil servant and minor poet named Arthur Munby, who never disclosed the relationship to family or friends. When alone, they lived as man and wife; when a visitor called, however, Cullwick stepped back into the role of maid. If overnight guests were present, Cullwick withdrew from the marital bed and slept in the kitchen. Munby was a man of some standing. He numbered among his friends Ruskin, Rossetti, and Browning, and they were frequent visitors to his home, but none had any idea that the woman who called him “Sir” was actually his wife. Even in private, their relationship was a touch unorthodox, to say the least. At his bidding, she called him “massa” and blacked her skin to make herself look like a slave. The diaries, it transpires, were kept largely so that he could read about her getting dirty.

“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.

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.

Newspapers gave full and vivid accounts whenever an electrician electrocuted himself, as happened pretty routinely. In England, the poet Hilaire Belloc offered a snatch of doggerel that caught the public mood: Some random touch—a hand’s imprudent slip— The Terminals—flash—a sound like “Zip!” A smell of burning fills the startled Air— The Electrician is no longer there!

Thanks to Thomas Edison, electric lighting became the wonder of the age. Interestingly, as we shall see a little further on, electric lighting turned out to be one of the remarkably few Edison inventions that actually did what he hoped it would do.

Throughout their fractious relationship, Beckford bombarded Wyatt with outraged letters. “What putrid inn, what stinking tavern or pox ridden brothel hides your hoary and glutinous limbs?” ran one typical inquiry. His pet name for Wyatt was “Bagasse” (pimp). Every letter was a screed of rage and inventive insult. Wyatt was, to be sure, maddening. Once he left Fonthill to go to London, ostensibly on urgent business, but got only three miles, to another property owned by Beckford, where he fell in with another boozy guest. A week later Beckford discovered them there together, insensate and surrounded by empty bottles.

James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir—vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.

Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers—excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing on first hearty chomp.

In 1599, eighty British merchants, exasperated by the rising cost of pepper, formed the British East India Company with a view to getting a piece of the market for themselves. This was the initiative that brought King James the treasured isles of Puloway and Puloroon, but in fact the British never had much success in the East Indies, and in 1667, in the Treaty of Breda, they ceded all claims to the region to the Dutch in return for a small piece of land of no great significance in North America. The piece of land was called Manhattan.

For three years in the 1840s, Fortune traveled all around China, disguised as a native, collecting information on how tea was grown and processed. It was risky work: had he been caught, he would certainly have been imprisoned and could well have been executed. Although Fortune spoke none of the languages of China, he got around that problem by pretending always to come from a distant province where another dialect prevailed.

What caused dining rooms to come into being wasn’t a sudden universal urge to dine in a space exclusively dedicated to the purpose, but 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.

A hurricane in 1634 blew away—literally just lifted up and carried off—half the houses of Massachusetts. Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in, “overturning sundry howses, uncovering [i.e., unroofing] diverse others,” in the words of one diarist who lived through it.

By 1842, Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world. In London the result was a near-impenetrable gloom through much of the year. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories the detective has to strike a match—in daytime—to read something written on a London wall. So hard was it to find one’s way that people not infrequently walked into walls or tumbled into unseen voids. In one famous incident, seven people in a row fell into the Thames, one after the other.

Once he used quicklime and shellac to age some leather chairs at the Everglades Club. Unfortunately, the body heat from the guests warmed the shellac to a renewed gooeyness and several found themselves stuck fast. “I spent the whole night pulling dames out of those goddam chairs,” recalled a club waiter years later. Several women left the backs of their dresses behind.

For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. 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. An estate owner in Lancashire promised £50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwelling on his estate without cutting his hair or toenails or talking to another person. Someone took up the offer and actually lasted four years before deciding he could take no more; whether he was given at least a partial pension for his efforts is sadly unknown. Queen Caroline—she of the Serpentine in Hyde Park—had the architect William Kent build for her a hermitage at Richmond into which she installed a poet named Stephen Duck, but that was not a success either, for Duck decided he didn’t like the silence or being looked at by strangers, so he quit. Somewhat improbably, he went on to become the rector of a church at Byfleet in Surrey. Unfortunately, he appears not to have been happy there—he appears not to have been happy anywhere—and drowned himself in the Thames.

Washington didn’t get to spend a lot of time enjoying Mount Vernon; even when he was at home, he didn’t get much peace. One of the conventions of the age was to feed and put up any respectable-looking person who presented himself at the door. Washington was plagued with guests—he had 677 of them in one year—and many of those stayed for more than one night.

Many people kept flocks of geese, which they plucked for fresh bedding perhaps three times a year (a job that must have been as tiresome for the servants as it was for the geese). A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fissure between billowy hills. Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression “sleep tight”), but in no degree of tension did they offer much comfort.

An American named Eliza Ann Summers reported in 1867 how she and her sister took armloads of shoes to bed each night to throw at the rats that ran across the floor. Susanna Augusta Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, said that she never forgot, or indeed ever quite got over, the experience of rats scuttling across her childhood bed.

It is often assumed that because people died young they also married young in order to make the most of the short life that lay in front of them. In fact, that seems not to be so. For one thing, people still saw the normal span of life—one’s theoretical entitlement—as the biblical three score years and ten. It was just that not so many people made it to that point. Nearly always cited in support of the contention that people married early are the tender ages of the principal characters in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—Juliet just thirteen, Romeo a little older. Putting aside the consideration that the characters were fictitious and hardly proof of anything, what is always overlooked in this is that in the poem by Arthur Brooke on which Shakespeare based the story, the characters were actually sixteen. Why Shakespeare reduced their ages is, like most of what Shakespeare did, unknowable. In any case, Shakespeare’s youthful ages are not supported by documentary evidence in the real world.

Then in the Middle Ages the spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene and what they might do to modify their own susceptibility to outbreaks. Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapors to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years most people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it—and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everyone itched nearly all the time. Discomfort was constant, and serious illness was accepted with resignation.

“Going down into my cellar … I put my foot into a great heap of turds … by which I found that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.”

The new sewage outfalls did, however, have an unfortunate role in the greatest tragedy ever experienced on the Thames. In September 1878, a pleasure boat named the Princess Alice, packed to overflowing with day-trippers, was returning to London after a day at the seaside, when it collided with another ship at Barking at the very place and moment when the two giant outfall pipes surged into action. The Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes. Nearly eight hundred people drowned in a choking sludge of raw sewage. Even those who could swim found it nearly impossible to make headway through the glutinous filth. For days afterward bodies bobbed to the surface. Many, the Times reported, were so bloated with gaseous bacteria that they wouldn’t fit into normal coffins.

Wigs were so valuable—a full one could cost £50—that they were left as bequests in wills. The more substantial the wig, the higher up the social echelon one stood—one became literally a bigwig.

As early as 1847, a doctor in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis, realized that if hospital staff washed their hands in mildly chlorinated water deaths of all types declined sharply, but hardly anyone paid any attention to him, and decades more would pass before antiseptic practices became general.

For a lucky few women, there was at least some promise of greater safety with the arrival of obstetrical forceps, which allowed babies to be repositioned mechanically. Unfortunately their inventor, Peter Chamberlen, chose not to share his invention with the world, but kept it secret for the sake of his own practice, and his heirs maintained this lamentable tradition for a hundred years more until forceps were independently devised by others. In the meantime, untold thousands of women died in unnecessary agony.

Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval—a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old—and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers.