At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural bewilderments,

Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

All this reinforced the more or less universal conviction that Americans were little more than amiable backwoodsmen not yet ready for unsupervised outings on the world stage.

for the first 99 percent of our history as beings we didn’t do much of anything but procreate and survive.

Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in

The march of progress, in short, has been anything but predictable and rhythmic.

in every society in which bread has featured, baking has been turned over to professionals from the earliest stages.

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.

So little did people think of rooms in the modern sense that the word room, with the meaning of an enclosed chamber or distinct space, isn’t recorded in English until the time of the Tudors.

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.

the word chair itself dates only from about 1300—and

For much of the medieval period the largest source of animal protein for most people was smoked herring.

We “make a bed” today because in the Middle Ages that is essentially what you did—you rolled out a cloth sleeping pallet or heaped a pile of straw, found a cloak or blanket and fashioned whatever comfort you could.

People condemned to short lives and chronic hardship are perhaps unlikely to worry overmuch about decor.

just one door survives from the Anglo-Saxon period—a battered oak door in an outer vestibule at Westminster Abbey, which escaped attention until the summer of 2005, when it was realized that it was 950 years old and thus the oldest known door in the country.

boudoir, literally “a room to sulk in,” which from its earliest days was associated with sexual intrigue.

Toilets often had multiple seats, for ease of conversation,

generally known as the privy but also called, among other things, jakes, latrine, draughts, place of easement, necessarium, garderobe, house of office, or gong.

Knole in Kent, which grew and grew until it covered nearly four acres and incorporated 7 courtyards (one for each day of the week), 52 staircases (one for each week of the year), and 365 rooms (one for each day of the year), or so it has long been said.

For several decades, ice was America’s second biggest crop, measured by weight.

in 1845, she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times,

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

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.

By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London—those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five—were servants. Another one in three was a prostitute.

The total number of servants in London, male and female, was greater than the total populations of all but the six largest English cities.

guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes containing personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridors to help find their way back to, or between, rooms.

The kitchen at Saltram, a house in Devon, had six hundred copper pots and pans, and that was pretty typical.

As a rule, each active bedroom had to be visited and refreshed five times between breakfast and bedtime.

A large country house was likely to have a gun room, lamp room, still room, pastry room, butler’s pantry, fish store, bake house, coal store, game larder, brewery, knife room, brush room, shoe room, and at least a dozen more.

looking after the wine bottles is what butlers originally did.)

a typical servant’s day ran from 6:30 in the morning to 10:00 at night—later if an evening social event was involved.

the maid didn’t have a room of her own, but lived and slept in the kitchen—a surprisingly common arrangement in smaller households,

Until well into the twentieth century, many of the wealthiest London residents chose to send their weekly laundry to their country estates by train and have it done by people they felt they could trust.

Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century.

The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb.

As late as the 1930s, almost half of London streets were still lit by gas.

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.

The amount of illumination one gave oneself was a telling indicator of status.

Until the late eighteenth century the quality of lighting had remained unchanged for some three thousand years.

not only middle-class homes but also institutions like lunatic asylums and prisons tended to be better lit—and, come to that, better warmed—long before England’s stateliest homes were.

Stoves became something of an American obsession. By the early twentieth century more than seven thousand types had been registered with the U.S. Patent Office.

between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad.

an exotic new contrivance that he called a “sopha.” Sofas were daring, even titillating, because they resembled beds and so hinted at salacious repose.

Chairs or tables in the middle of the room would have looked as out of place to Georgians as a wardrobe left in the middle of a room would look to us today.

between 1500 and 1850. Typically, scurvy killed about half the crew on any long voyage.

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

When the Goths threatened to sack Rome in 408, the Romans bought them off with a tribute that included three thousand pounds of pepper.

For his wedding meal in 1468, Duke Karl of Bourgogne ordered 380 pounds of black pepper—far more than even the largest wedding party could eat—and displayed it conspicuously so that people could see how fabulously wealthy he was.

For centuries spices were not just the world’s most valued foodstuffs, they were the most treasured commodities of any type.

There was scarcely a dinner table in the world in any land east or west that wasn’t drastically improved by the foods of the Americas.