At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.

The upward expansion of houses changed everything. Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves. The first step, generally, was to build a grand new room upstairs called the great chamber, where the lord and his family did all the things they had done in the hall before—eat, sleep, loll, and play—but without so many other people about, returning to the great hall below only for banquets and other special occasions. Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants.

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.

People moved around the house looking for shade or sunlight and often took their furniture with them, so rooms, when they were labeled at all, were generally marked mattina (for morning use) or sera (for afternoon).

The small rooms off the bedchamber were used for every sort of private purpose, from defecation to assignation, so the words for these rooms have come down to us in a curiously fractured fashion. Closet, Mark Girouard tells us in Life in the English Country House, had “a long and honourable history before descending to final ignominy as a large cupboard or a room for the housemaid’s sink and mops.” Originally, a closet was more like a study than a storeroom. Cabinet, originally a diminutive form of cabin, by the mid-1500s had come to signify a case where valuables were kept. Very soon after that—in only a decade or so—it had come to mean the room itself. The French, as so often, refined the original concept into a variety of room types, so that by the eighteenth century a large French château might have a cabinet de compagnie, a cabinet d’assemblée, a cabinet de proprieté, and a cabinet de toilette in addition to a plain cabinet. 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.

To accommodate all the new room types, houses grew outward as well as upward. An entirely new type of house, known as the prodigy house, began to sprout and proliferate all over the countryside. Such houses were almost never less than three stories high and sometimes four, and they were often staggeringly immense. The most enormous of all was 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.

Royal progresses were nearly always greeted with a mixture of excitement and dread by those on whom the monarch called. On the one hand they provided unrivaled opportunities for preferment and social advancement, but on the other they were stupefyingly expensive. The royal household numbered up to about 1,500 people, and a good many of these—150 or so in the case of Elizabeth I—traveled with the royal personage on her annual pilgrimages. Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage, as well as some less salubrious surprises. After the court of Charles II departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors had left “their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars.”

Gifts were lavished freely. A hapless courtier named Sir John Puckering gave Elizabeth a diamond-festooned silk fan, several loose jewels, a gown of rare splendor, and a pair of exceptionally fine virginals, then watched at their first dinner as Her Majesty admired the silver cutlery and a salt cellar and, without a word, dropped them into the royal handbag.

Domestically, however, the hall became and remains the most semantically demoted room in the home. At the Old Rectory, as in most homes these days, it is a shrunken vestibule, a small utilitarian square with cupboards and hooks, where we take off boots and hang jackets—a clear preliminary to the house itself. Most of us unconsciously acknowledge this fact by inviting arriving guests into our houses twice: once at the door when they are brought in from outside, and then again, after they have been divested of coats and hats, into the house proper with a hearty, more emphatic double cry of “Come in! Come in!”

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.

Humphry Clinker, a sprawling novel written in the form of a series of letters, paints such a vivid picture of life in eighteenth-century England that it is much quoted even now and almost certainly therefore has a lot to answer for. In one of its more colorful passages Smollett describes how milk was carried through the streets of London in open pails, into which plopped “spittle, snot and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, over-flowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s-sake, the spewings of infants … and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture.” What is easily overlooked is that the book was intended as satire, not as documentary. Smollett wasn’t even in England when he wrote it; he was slowly dying in Italy. (He died three months after its publication.)

The notion of shipping ice from New England to distant ports was considered completely mad—“the vagary of a disordered brain,” in the words of one of his contemporaries. The first shipment of ice to Britain so puzzled customs officials as to how to classify it that all three hundred tons of it melted away before it could be moved off the docks. Shipowners were highly reluctant to accept it as cargo. They didn’t relish the humiliation of arriving in a port with a holdful of useless water, but they were also wary of the very real danger of tons of shifting ice and sloshing meltwater making their ships unstable. These were men, after all, whose nautical instincts were based entirely on the idea of keeping water outside the ship, so they were loath to take on such an eccentric risk when there wasn’t even a certain market at the end of it all.

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

Lake Wenham was actually completely incidental to the ice business in America. It never produced more than about ten thousand tons of ice in a year, compared with almost a million tons lifted annually just from the Kennebec River in Maine. In England, Wenham ice was more talked about than used. A few businesses took regular deliveries, but hardly any households (other than the royal one) did. By the 1850s, most ice sold in Britain was not from Wenham or even from America. The Norwegians—not a people one normally associates with sharp practices—changed the name of Lake Oppegaard, near Oslo, to Lake Wenham so that they could tap into the lucrative market. By the 1850s most ice sold in Britain was in fact Norwegian, though it has to be said that ice never really caught on with the British. Even now, it is still often dispensed there as if it were on prescription. The real market, it turned out, was in America itself.

Where ice really came into its own was in the refrigeration of railway cars, which allowed the transport of meat and other perishables from coast to coast. Chicago became the epicenter of the railway industry in part because it could generate and keep huge quantities of ice. Individual ice houses in Chicago held up to 250,000 tons of ice. Before ice, in hot weather milk (which came out of the cow warm, of course) could be kept for only an hour or two before it began to spoil. Chicken had to be eaten on the day of plucking. Fresh meat was seldom safe for more than a day. Now food could be kept longer locally, but it could also be sold in distant markets. 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. For the first time in history food didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced. Farmers on the boundless plains of the American Midwest could not only produce food more cheaply and abundantly than anywhere else but also sell it almost anywhere.

Meanwhile, other developments increased the range of food storage possibilities enormously. In 1859, an American named John Landis Mason solved the challenge that the Frenchman Nicolas-François Appert had not quite mastered the better part of a century before. Mason patented the threaded glass jar with a metal screw-on lid. This provided a perfect seal and made it possible to preserve all kinds of foods that would previously spoil. The Mason jar became a huge hit everywhere, though Mason himself scarcely benefited from it. He sold the rights in it for a modest sum, then turned his attention to other inventions—a folding life raft, a case for keeping cigars fresh, a self-draining soap dish—that he assumed would make him rich, but his other inventions were neither successful nor even very good. As one after another failed, Mason withdrew into a semi-demented poverty. He died alone and forgotten in a New York City tenement house in 1902.

Had you arrived at the Old Rectory at a time when the housekeeper, Miss Worm, and her assistant, a nineteen-year-old village girl named Martha Seely, were baking or cooking, you may well have found them doing something that until recently had not been done at all—carefully measuring out ingredients. Until almost the middle of the century instructions in cookbooks were always wonderfully imprecise, calling merely for “some flour” or “enough milk.” What changed all that was a revolutionary book by a shy, sweet-natured poet in Kent named Eliza Acton. Because Miss Acton’s poems weren’t selling, her publisher gently suggested she might try something more commercial, and in 1845, she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost always unwittingly, modeled.

Looking back now, it is nearly impossible to get a fix on Victorians and their diet. For a start, the range of foods was dazzling. People, it seems, ate practically anything that stirred in the undergrowth or could be hauled from water. Ptarmigan, sturgeon, larks, hare, woodcock, gurnet, barbel, smelts, plover, snipe, gudgeon, dace, eels, tench, sprats, smelts, turkey poults, and many more largely forgotten delicacies featured in Mrs. Beeton’s many recipes. Fruits and vegetables seemed almost infinite in number. Of apples alone there were, almost unbelievably, more than two thousand varieties to choose from—Worcester pearmain, Beauty of Bath, Cox’s orange pippin, and so on in long and poetic vein. At Monticello in the early nineteenth century Thomas Jefferson grew 23 different types of peas and more than 250 kinds of fruits and vegetables. (Unusual for his day, Jefferson was practically a vegetarian and ate only small portions of meat as a kind of “condiment.”) As well as gooseberries, strawberries, plums, figs, and other produce well known to us today, Jefferson and his contemporaries also enjoyed tayberries, tansy, purslane, Japanese wine berries, damsons, medlars, seakale, screwpine, rounceval peas, skirrets (a kind of sweet root), cardoons (a thistle), scorzonera (a type of salsify), lovage, turnip-cabbage, and scores more that nowadays are encountered rarely or not at all. Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplish...

Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. 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. Americans enjoyed even greater abundance. New York Harbor alone held half the world’s oysters and yielded so much sturgeon that caviar was set out as a bar snack. (The idea was that salty food would lead people to drink more beer.) The size and variety of dishes and condiments on offer was almost breathtaking. One hotel in New York had 145 dishes on the menu in 1867. A popular American recipe book of 1853, Home Cookery, casually mentions adding a hundred oysters to a pot of gumbo to “enhance” it. Mrs. Beeton provided no fewer than 135 recipes just for sauces.

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.

Mr. Marsham kept three servants: the housekeeper, Miss Worm; the village girl who worked as an underservant, Martha Seely; and a groom and gardener named James Baker. Like their master, all were unmarried. Three servants to look after one bachelor clergyman might seem excessive to us, but it wouldn’t have seemed so to anyone in Marsham’s day. Most rectors kept at least four servants, and some had ten or more. It was an age of servants. Households had servants the way modern people have appliances. Common laborers had servants. Sometimes servants had servants.

So servitude was a big part of life for a great many people. 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. For many, that was about all the choice there was. The total number of servants in London, male and female, was greater than the total populations of all but the six largest English cities. Service was very much a female world. Females in service in 1851 outnumbered males by ten to one. For women, however, seldom was it a job for life. Most left the profession by the age of thirty-five, usually to get married, and very few stayed in any one job for more than a year or so. That is little wonder, as we shall see. Being a servant was generally hard and thankless work.

The sixth Baron Walsingham once single-handedly shot 1,070 grouse in a day, a toll that has not been bettered and we may reasonably hope never is. (Walsingham would have had a team of loaders providing him with a steady supply of loaded guns, so managing to fire the requisite number of shots was easy. The real challenge would have been in keeping up a steady flow of targets. The grouse were almost certainly released a few at a time from cages. For all the sport in it, Walsingham might just as well have fired into the cages and given himself more time for tea.)

Guests brought their own servants, too, so at weekends it was not unusual for the number of people within a country house to swell by as many as 150. Amid such a mass of bodies, confusion was inevitable. On one occasion in the 1890s Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom and with a lusty cry of “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” leaped into the bed only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. To avoid such confusions, 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.

Before the advent of indoor plumbing, water had to be carried to each bedroom and then taken away again once used. As a rule, each active bedroom had to be visited and refreshed five times between breakfast and bedtime. And each visit required a complicated array of receptacles and cloths so that, for instance, fresh water didn’t ever come up in the same receptacle that wastewater went down in. The maid had to carry three cloths—one for drinking glasses, one for commodes, and one for wash basins—and remember (or be sufficiently unpeeved with her mistress) to use the right ones on the right objects. And that of course was just for general light washing. If a guest or family member wished for a bath, the workload rose dramatically. A gallon of water weighs eight pounds, and a typical bath held forty-five gallons, all of which had to be heated in the kitchen and brought up in special cans—and there might be two dozen or more baths to fill of an evening. Cooking likewise often required enormous strength and reserves of energy. A full cooking kettle could weigh sixty pounds.

It wasn’t just a question of doing the work, but often of doing it to the kind of exacting standards that generally occur only to people who don’t have to do the work themselves.

The provisioning of households was an enormous preoccupation. Often groceries were brought in just two or three times a year, and stored in bulk. Tea was purchased by the chest, flour by the barrel. Sugar came in large cones called loaves. Servants became adept at preserving and storing items for long periods. They also had to make the materials with which their work could be done. If you needed to starch a collar or polish shoes, you had to concoct your own ingredients. Commercial boot polishes didn’t become available until the 1890s. Before that it was necessary to boil up a supply of polish at home, a process that stained not only boots but also pots, stirring spoons, hands, and anything else the mixture came into contact with. Starch had to be laboriously made from rice or potatoes. Even linens didn’t come in a finished state. One bought bolts of cloth and had them made up into tablecloths, sheets, shirts, towels, and so on.

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. Lanhydrock House in Cornwall had a room exclusively for dealing with bedpans. Another in Wales, according to historian Juliet Gardiner, had a room set aside for ironing newspapers. The grandest or oldest homes might also have a saucery, a spicery, a poultery, a buttery, and other rooms of more exotic provenance, such as a ewery (a room for keeping water jugs, the word somehow derived from aquaria), a chandry (for candles), an avenery (for game beasts), and a napery (for linen). Some of the workroom names are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. Buttery has nothing to do with butter. It refers to butts, as in butts of ale. (It is a corruption of boutellerie, the same word from which butler and bottle are derived; looking after the wine bottles is what butlers originally did.) Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.

Servants were given little time for personal grooming, and then were constantly accused of being dirty, which was decidedly unfair since 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 author of one household manual noted wistfully how she would have loved to provide her servants with nice rooms, but sadly they always grew untidy. “The simpler, therefore, a servant’s room is furnished, the better,” she decided. By the Edwardian period servants got off half a day per week and one full day per month—hardly munificent when you consider that that was all the time they had to shop for personal items, get their hair cut, visit family, court, relax, or otherwise enjoy a few hours of precious liberty.

The recipients of this attention became spoiled almost beyond imagining. Visiting his daughter in the 1920s, in a house too small to keep his servants with him, 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.

Casual humiliation was a regular feature of life in service. 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. Butlers were an especially delicate issue. They were expected to have the bearing and comportment of a gentleman, and to dress accordingly, but often the butler was required to engage in some intentional sartorial gaucherie—wearing trousers that didn’t match his jacket, for instance—to ensure that his inferiority was instantly manifest.*

Often the hardest work was in smaller households, where one servant might have to do the work of two or three elsewhere. Mrs. Beeton, predictably, had a great deal to say about how many servants one should have depending on financial position and breeding. Someone of noble birth, she decreed, would require at least twenty-five servants. A person earning £1,000 a year needed five—a cook, two housemaids, a nursemaid, and a footman. The minimum for a professional middle-class household was three: parlormaid, housemaid, and cook. Even someone living on as little as £150 a year was deemed wealthy enough to employ a maid-of-all-work (a job title that truly said it all). Mrs. Beeton herself had four servants. In practice, however, it appears that most people didn’t employ nearly as many people as Mrs. Beeton thought they should. A much more typical household was that of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, the historian and his wife, who employed a single maid at 5 Great Cheyne Row in Chelsea. Not only did this underappreciated soul have to cook, clean, clear away dishes, tend fires, haul ash, deal with callers, manage supplies, and do all the rest, but each time the Carlyles wanted a bath—and they wanted many—she had to draw, heat, and carry eight or ten gallons of hot water up three flights of stairs, and afterward repeat the process in reverse.

The inevitable fact was that servants, being only human, rarely possessed the acuity, skills, endurance, and patience necessary to satisfy the ceaseless whims of employers. Anyone in command of the many talents necessary to be an outstanding servant was unlikely to want to be one.

As for the servants themselves, we generally don’t know much about them because their existences went mostly unrecorded. One interesting exception was Hannah Cullwick, who kept an unusually thorough diary for nearly forty years. Cullwick was born in 1833 in Shropshire and entered household service full-time as a pot girl—a kitchen skivvy—at the age of eight. In the course of a long career she was an undermaid, kitchen maid, cook, scullion, and general housekeeper. In all capacities, the work was hard and the hours long. She began her diary in 1859 at the age of twenty-five and kept it up until just shy of her sixty-fifth birthday. Thanks to its span, it constitutes the most complete record of the daily life of an underservant during the great age of servitude. Like most house servants, Cullwick worked from before seven in the morning till nine or ten at night, sometimes later. The diaries are an endless, largely emotionless catalog of tasks performed. Here is a typical entry, for July 14, 1860: Opened the shutters & lighted the kitchen fire. Shook my sooty thing in the dusthole & emptied the soot there. Swept & dusted the rooms & the hall. Laid the hearth & got breakfast up. Clean’d 2 pairs of boots. Made the beds & emptied the slops. Clean’d & washed the breakfast things up. Clean’d the plate; clean’d the knives & got dinner up. Clean’d away. Clean’d the kitchen up; unpack’d a hamper. Took two chickens to Mrs Brewer’s & brought the message back. Made a tart & pick’d & gut...

Thomas Jefferson owned more than two hundred slaves, including twenty-five for his household alone. As one of his biographers has noted, “When Jefferson wrote that he planted olive trees and pomegranates, one must be reminded that he wielded no shovel, but simply directed his slaves.”

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle—a good candle—provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt lightbulb.* Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed.

The widespread belief that people in the pre-electric world went to bed at nightfall seems to be based entirely on the presumption that anyone deprived of robust illumination would be driven by frustration to retire. In fact, it appears that most people didn’t retire terribly early—nine or ten o’clock seems to have been standard for most people in the days before electricity, and for some, particularly in cities, it was even later. For those who could control their working hours, bedtimes and rising times were at least as variable then as now and appear to have had little to do with the amount of light available.

The best light of all came from whale oil, and the best type of whale oil was spermaceti from the head of the sperm whale. Sperm whales are mysterious and elusive animals that are even now little understood. They produce and store great reserves of spermaceti—up to three tons of it—in a cavernous chamber in their skulls. Despite its name, spermaceti is not sperm and has no reproductive function, but when exposed to air it turns from a translucent watery liquid to a milky white cream—and it is obvious at once why sailors gave the sperm whale its name. No one has ever worked out what spermaceti is for. It may somehow assist with buoyancy, or it may help with the processing of nitrogen in the whale’s blood. Sperm whales dive with great speed to an enormous depth—up to a mile—without evident ill effects, and it is thought that the spermaceti may in some unfathomed way explain why they don’t get the bends. Another theory is that the spermaceti provides shock absorption for males when they fight for mating rights. This would help explain the sperm whale’s infamous predilection for headbutting whaling ships, often lethally, when angered. But it isn’t actually known whether sperm whales headbutt one another. No less mysterious is the very valuable commodity they produce known as ambergris (from French words meaning “gray amber,” though in fact ambergris is as likely to be black as gray). Ambergris is formed in the digestive system of sperm whales—only recently has it been determin...

Nobody knows how many whales were killed during the great age of whaling, but one estimate suggests that about three hundred thousand were slaughtered in the four decades or so leading to 1870. That may not seem an especially vast number, but then whale numbers were not vast to begin with. In any case, the hunting was enough to drive many species to the edge of extinction. As whale numbers dwindled, whaling voyages grew longer and longer—up to four years became common and five years not unknown—and whalers were driven to search the loneliest corners of the most distant seas. All this translated into greatly increased costs. By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50—half an average worker’s weekly wage—yet still the remorseless hunt continued. Many species of whale—possibly all—would have vanished forever but for a sequence of unlikely events that began in Nova Scotia in 1846 when a man named Abraham Gesner invented what for some time would be the most valuable product on Earth.

Bissell’s novel idea was to drill for oil, as you would for water. Everyone before had dug for it. To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake—always referred to in history books as “Colonel” Edwin Drake—to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free. To enhance his stature, Bissell and his associates sent correspondence to Drake addressed to “Colonel E. L. Drake.” With a wad of borrowed money, Drake commissioned a team of drillers to begin the search for oil. Although the drillers thought Drake was an amiable fool, they gladly accepted the work and began to drill to his instructions. Almost at once the project ran into technical difficulties. To the astonishment of all, Drake showed an unexpected knack for solving mechanical problems and was able to keep the project moving. For more than a year and a half they drilled, but no oil came. By the summer of 1859, Bissell and his partners were out of funds. Reluctantly, they dispatched a letter to Drake instructing him to shut down operations. Before the letter got there, however, on August 27, 1859, at a depth of just under seventy feet, Drake and his men hit oil. It wasn’t the towering gusher that we traditionally associate with oil strikes—this oil had to...

While others were failing and desperately trying to get out of the oil business, a small firm in Cleveland called Clark and Rockefeller, which normally dealt in pork and other farm commodities, decided to move in. It began buying up failed leases. By 1877, less than twenty years after the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, Clark had vanished from the scene and John D. Rockefeller controlled some 90 percent of America’s oil business. Oil not only provided the raw material for an exceedingly lucrative form of illumination but also answered a desperate need for lubrication for all the engines and machinery of the new industrial age. Rockefeller’s virtual monopoly allowed him to keep prices stable and to grow fantastically rich in the process. By the closing years of the century, his personal wealth was increasing by about $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money—and this in an age without income taxes. No human being in modern times has been richer.

Gas had many drawbacks. Those who worked in gas-supplied offices or visited gaslit theaters often complained of headaches and nausea. To minimize that problem, gaslights were sometimes erected outside factory windows. Indoors, gas blackened ceilings, discolored fabrics, corroded metal, and left a greasy layer of soot on every horizontal surface. Flowers wilted swiftly in its presence, and most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium. Only the aspidistra seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in nearly every Victorian parlor photograph. Gas also needed some care in use. Most gas-supply companies reduced gas flow through their pipes during the day when demand was low. So anyone lighting a gas jet during the day had to open the tap wide to get a decent light. But as the pressure was stepped up later in the day, the light could flare dangerously, scorching ceilings or even starting fires, wherever someone had forgotten to turn down the tap. So gas was dangerous as well as dirty.

Gas had one irresistible advantage, however. It was bright—at least compared with anything else the pre-electric world knew. The average room with gas was twenty times brighter than it had been before. It wasn’t an intimate light—you couldn’t move it nearer your book or sewing as you could a table lamp—but it provided wonderful overall illumination. 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.

Keeping warm remained a challenge for most people right through the nineteenth century.

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. It was Benjamin Franklin, predictably enough, who turned his attention to the matter and invented what became known as the Franklin (or Pennsylvania) stove. Franklin’s stove was an undoubted improvement, though more on paper than in practice. Essentially, it was a metal stove inserted into a fireplace, but with additional flues and vents that ingeniously redirected air flow and wafted more heat back into the room. But it was also complex and expensive and brought great—often intolerable—disruption to every room in which it was installed. The heart of the system was a second, rear flue, which proved to be impossible to sweep unless it was fully dismantled. The stove also required an under-floor cool-air vent, which in practical terms meant the stove couldn’t be installed in upstairs rooms or where there was a basement below, disqualifying it from many houses altogether. Franklin’s design was improved upon in America by David Rittenhouse and in Europe by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, but real comfort came only when people sealed off their fireplaces and brought a stove fully into the room. This kind of stove, known as a Dutch stove, smelled of hot ...

As Americans moved west into the prairies and beyond, an absence of wood for fuel caused problems. Corncobs were widely used, as were dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as “surface coal.” In wilderness areas, Americans also burned all kinds of fat—hog fat, deer fat, bear fat, even the fat of passenger pigeons—and fish oils, though all these were smoky and stank.

The combination of open flames and combustible materials brought an element of alarm and excitement to every aspect of daily life in the pre-electric world. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary how he bent over a candle while working at his desk, and soon afterward became aware of a horrible, pungent smell, as of burning wool; only then did he realize that his new and very expensive wig was impressively aflame. Such small fires were a common occurrence. Nearly every room of every house had open flames at least some of the time, and nearly every house was fabulously combustible, since almost everything within or on it, from straw beds to thatched roofs, was a fuel in waiting. To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew), but danger could never be entirely avoided.

Fires in public places became a great worry, too, especially after the development of a now-forgotten but lively form of illumination known as the Drummond light, named for a Thomas Drummond of Britain’s Royal Engineers, who was popularly but wrongly credited with its invention in the early 1820s. It was in fact invented by a Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, a fellow engineer and an inventor of considerable talent. Drummond merely popularized the light and never claimed to have invented it, but somehow the credit became attached to him and has remained there ever since. 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 downside was that the intense heat of limelight caused a lot of fires. In one decade in America, more than four hundred theaters burned down. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, nearly ten thousand people were killed in ...

On solid land, the greatest fear with fires was that they would get out of control and spread, destroying whole districts. The most famous urban fire in history is almost certainly the Great Fire of London of 1666, which began as a small fire in a bakery near London Bridge but quickly spread until it was half a mile across. As far away as Oxford, people could see the smoke and hear the fire as a small, eerie whisper. Altogether, it consumed 13,200 houses and 140 churches. But the fire of 1666 was actually the second Great Fire of London. A fire in 1212 was far more devastating. Though smaller in extent than the one of 1666, it was swifter and more frenzied, and leaped from street to street with such dreadful rapidity that many fleeing citizens were overtaken or left without escape routes. It was also more deadly, claiming twelve thousand lives (versus five people killed in the 1666 fire, as far as is known). For 454 years, the fire of 1212 was known as the Great Fire of London. It really still ought to be.