At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

By the turn of the century, writes David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, “the best minds of a generation were outside the church rather than within.”

For us, making grass edible is a challenge that can be solved only with a lot of careful manipulation and protracted ingenuity. Take wheat. Wheat is useless as a food until made into something much more complex and ambitious like bread, and that takes a great deal of effort. Somebody must first separate out the grain and grind it into meal, then convert the meal into flour, then mix that with other components like yeast and salt to make dough. Then the dough must be kneaded to a particular consistency, and finally the resulting lump must be baked with precision and care. The scope for failure in the last step alone is so great that 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.

We are, in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer.

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.

Upon the death of a serf the lord was entitled to take a small personal possession, such as an article of clothing, as a kind of death duty. Often peasants only owned one main item of apparel, a type of loose gown known as a cotta (which eventually evolved into the modern coat). The fact that that was the best that a peasant had to offer, and that the lord of the manor would want it, tells you about all you need to know about the quality of medieval life at many levels.

Eventually cupboards were incorporated into rather more ornate dressers, which have nothing to do with clothing but rather with the preparation, or dressing, of food.

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.

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.

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. If tuffets ever actually existed, they are not otherwise recorded.

This explains why literally no one knows what that rhyme is about

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.

Wait what is a cabinet in modern britain?

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.

How many unsuspecting ladies of quality, he wondered, had enjoyed a plate of luscious cherries that had been “rolled and moistened between the filthy and, perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St Giles’s huckster”?

Help

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.

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.

Worst of all was the tomato: “The whole plant has a disagreeable odour, and its juice, subjected to the action of the fire, emits a vapour so powerful as to cause vertigo and vomiting.”

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.

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.

Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did.

Although Funk was right about the vital part, it turned out that only some of the vitamines were amines (that is to say, nitrogen-bearing), and so the name was changed to vitamins to make it “less emphatically inaccurate,” in Anthony Smith’s nice phrase.

A typical middle-class family could burn a ton a month, and nineteenth-century Britain suddenly had lots of middle-class families. 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.

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing.

Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions—working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts.

Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression “sleep tight”),

As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman’s touch could spoil a ham.

In the centuries before anesthetics, many ways of ameliorating pain were tried out. One method was to bleed the patient to the point of faintness. Another was to inject an infusion of tobacco into the rectum (which, at the very least, must have given the patient something else to think about).

According to one report, of twelve hundred bodies exhumed in New York City for one reason or another between 1860 and 1880, six showed signs of thrashing or other postinterment distress.

wtf

as time went on life in the baths—as with life in Rome generally—grew increasingly frisky, and it became common for men and women to bathe together and, possibly but by no means certainly, for females to bathe with male slaves. No one really knows quite what the Romans got up to in there, but whatever it was it didn’t sit well with the early Christians.

Fuckin christians

Christianity was always curiously ill at ease with cleanliness anyway, and early on developed an odd tradition of equating holiness with dirtiness.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness lol

Graham is always portrayed now as a ludicrous quack, and in large part of course he was, but it is also worth remembering that many of his beliefs—cold baths, plain food, hard beds, windows opened wide to fill bedrooms with healthful frosty air, and above all an abiding horror of masturbation—became cherished fixtures of English life that lasted well beyond his brief spell of celestial importance.

One early type of shower was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.

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.

The French from 1770 called an indoor toilet un lieu à l’anglaise, or “an English place,” which would seem a potential explanation for where the English word loo comes from.

It is one of the most important documents in the history of statistics, public health, medicine, demographics, forensic science—one of the most important documents, in short, of the nineteenth century. No one listened, and the epidemics kept coming.

Elsewhere, however, baths remained luxuries. In Europe a big part of the problem was a lack of space in which to put bathrooms. In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath. In Britain the journalist Katharine Whitehorn recalled that as recently as the late 1950s she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman’s Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms, as not enough British homes had them, and such articles would only promote envy.

Ötzi wore fur leggings held up with leather strips attached to a waist strap that made them look uncannily—almost comically—like the kind of nylon hose and garter sets that Hollywood pinups wore during the Second World War.

It did, however, have the evidently very considerable compensating advantage that you could smoke it and get high, which Barber believes accounts for its prevalence and rapid spread in antiquity. Not to put too fine a point on it, people throughout the ancient world were very, very fond of hemp, and grew more of it than they needed for ropes or sails.

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history—perhaps most—it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn’t get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn’t actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.

God damn, I've always wondered what ancient obsolete function these served

The more substantial the wig, the higher up the social echelon one stood—one became literally a bigwig.

All wigs tended to be scratchy, uncomfortable, and hot, particularly in summer. To make them more bearable, many men shaved their heads, so we should be surprised to see many famous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century figures as their wives saw them first thing in the morning. It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn’t afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.

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. By the late eighteenth century, hair powders were commonly colored—blue and pink were especially popular—and scented, too.

Blue and pink? This is all blowing my mind. The 1700s lookin like the Hunger Games

Judicial wigs these days are made of horsehair and cost about £600, I’m told. To avoid a look of newness—which many lawyers fear might suggest inexperience—recently purchased wigs are customarily soaked in tea.

Women, meanwhile, took wig wearing literally to another level—building their hair up on a wire scaffolding known as a pallisade or commode. By mixing greased wool and horsehair with their own hair, they could attain truly monumental heights. Female wigs sometimes rose as much as two and a half feet, making the average wearer roughly seven and a half feet tall. When traveling to engagements, they often had to sit on the floor of their carriages or ride with their heads out the windows. At least two fatalities were attributed to women’s hair catching fire after brushing against chandeliers.

Because of the amount of work involved, it was not uncommon for women to leave their hair untouched for months on end, except to add a little paste from time to time to keep everything cemented in place. Many slept with their necks on special wooden blocks to keep their hairstyles elevated and undisturbed. One consequence of failing to wash was that their hair often swarmed with insects, particularly weevils. One woman reportedly miscarried when she discovered that mice were nesting in her upper decks.

As the prince withdrew, Brummell turned to the companion and made one of the most famously ill-advised remarks in social history. “Who’s your fat friend?” he asked.

A patent medicine company in Manchester produced a purgative that was guaranteed to expel, faithfully and perhaps just a touch explosively, every last unwelcome parasite in the intestinal tract. One user proudly testified that he had brought forth three hundred worms, “some of them of Uncommon Thickness.”

One of the ironies of the Beagle voyage was that Darwin was engaged by Captain Robert FitzRoy because he had a background in theology and was expected to find evidence to support a biblical interpretation of history.

Remarkably, what brought those animals to this part of the world was a climate just 3 degrees Celsius or so warmer than today. There are people alive now who will live in a Britain that warm again. Whether it will be a parched Serengeti or a verdant paradise of homegrown wines and year-round fruit is beyond the scope of this book to guess. What is certain is that it will be a very different place, and one to which future humans will have to adjust at something much faster than a geological pace.

Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet’s other citizens. One day—and don’t expect it to be a distant day—many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand to have what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield. The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.