At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

this was Brian’s way of explaining how a bucolic, lightly populated county like Norfolk could produce twenty-seven thousand archaeological finds a year, more than any other county in England. “People have been

dropping things here for a long time—since long before England was England.” He showed me a map of all the known archaeological finds in our parish. Nearly every field had yielded something—Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, Bronze Age graves, Viking farmsteads. Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant.

and the great Gothic spaceship known as the Albert Memorial was built just west of where the Crystal Palace had stood, at a whopping cost of £120,000, or about half as much again as the Crystal Palace itself had cost. There today Albert sits enthroned under an enormous gilded canopy. On his lap he holds a book: the catalog of the Great Exhibition.

Seven hundred miles to the north, on the Orkney Islands of Scotland, the storm raged for two days. 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.

Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids—to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted out to get at things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time—till the 1600s—before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers.

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.

Anglo-Saxons were extremely attached to timber as a construction material, so much so that timbran was their generic term for a building, but unfortunately it is in the nature of wood to rot and almost none of it remains. In the whole of Britain, as far as can be told, 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.

Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants.

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.

The low doors of so many old European houses, on which those of us who are absent-minded tend to crack our heads, are low not because people were shorter and required less headroom in former times, as is commonly supposed. People in the distant past were not in fact all that small. Doors were small for the same reason windows were small: they were expensive.

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.

It cost Tudor years of frustrated endeavor, and all of his family fortune, to get the ice business up and running, but gradually it caught on and eventually it made him and many others rich. For several decades, ice was America’s second biggest crop, measured by weight.

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.

For the first time in history food didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced.

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.

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.”)

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

Americans enjoyed even greater abundance. New York Harbor alone held half the world’s oysters and yielded so much sturgeon tha...

is perhaps no coincidence that two of the fattest monarchs in British history did a great deal of their eating in the 1700s. The first was Queen Anne. Although paintings of Anne always tactfully

make her look no more than a little fleshy, like one of Rubens’s plump beauties, she was in fact jumbo-sized—“exceedingly gross and corpulent” in the candid words of her former best friend the Duchess of Marlborough. Eventually Anne grew so stout that she could not go up and down stairs. A trapdoor had to be cut in the floor of her rooms at Windsor Castle through which she was lowered, jerkily and inelegantly, by means of pulleys and a hoist to the state rooms below. It must have been a most remarkable sight to behold. When she died, she was buried in a coffin that was “almost square.” Even more famously enormous was the prince regent, the future George IV, whose stomach when let out of its corset reportedly spilled to his knees. By the time he was forty his waist was more than four feet around.

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.

It was unquestionably a strange world. Servants constituted a class of humans whose existences were fundamentally devoted to making certain that another class of humans would find everything they desired within arm’s reach more or less the moment it occurred to them to desire it. 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.

That is true only up to a point, however, for Americans had slaves. 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.”

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.

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 determined that it is made from the beaks of squid, the one part of that animal that they cannot digest—and excreted at irregular intervals. For centuries it was found floating in the sea or washed up on beaches, so no one knew where it came from. It made a peerless fixative for perfumes, which gave it great value, although people who could afford it ate it as well.

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.

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.

By 1877, when he started his quest to make a commercially successful light, Edison was already well on his way to becoming known as “the Wizard of Menlo Park.” Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn’t scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favorable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had “a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.” But he was enterprising and hardworking and a peerless organizer.

Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage.

Parlor, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French parler, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.

Drawing room is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By midcentury it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by sitting room, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was lounge, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America, living room came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove parlor out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.

before Mr. Marsham’s birth, with a simple discovery that would

Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull’s new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully,

Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery.

Some two hundred other species of mahogany exist in the world, and most are very good woods, but they have nothing like the richness and smooth workability of the departed S. mahogani. The world may one day produce better chairmakers than Chippendale and his peers, but it will never produce finer chairs.

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. (One reason for pushing them aside was to make it easier to walk through rooms without tripping

over

furniture in the dark...

by late in the eighteenth century, households were full of features that would have been the wildest indulgences a century before. The modern house—a house such as

we would recognize today—had begun to emerge. At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.

One such was the great carver Grinling Gibbons, who lived from 1648 to 1721. His interesting Christian name was his mother’s maiden name.

Until well into the nineteenth century, the notion of a well-balanced diet had occurred to no one.

All

food was believed to contain a single vague but sustaining substance—“the universal aliment.” A pound of beef had the same value for the body as a pound of apples or parsnips or anything else, and all that was required of a human was to make sure that an ample amount was taken in. The idea that embedded within particular fo...