At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Because of the impossibility of achieving perfection in storage, hygiene regulations in most places allow up to two fecal pellets per pint of grain—a thought to bear in mind the next time you look at a loaf of whole grain bread.

We associate rats with conditions of poverty, but rats are no fools: they sensibly prefer a well-heeled home to a poor one. What’s more, modern homes make a delectable environment for rats. “The high protein content that characterizes the more affluent neighborhoods is particularly enticing,” James M. Clinton, a U.S. health official, wrote some years ago in a public health report that remains one of the most compelling, if unnerving, surveys ever taken of the behavior of domestic rats. It isn’t merely that modern houses are full of food, but also that many of them dispose

of it in ways that make it practically

irresis...

Rat bites are almost certainly underreported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States are attacked by rats each year. Rats have very sharp teeth and can become aggressive if cornered, biting “savagely and blindly, in the

manner of mad dogs,” in the words of one rat authority. A motivated rat can leap as high as three feet—high enough to be considerably unnerving if it is coming your way and is out of sorts.

The usual defense against rat outbreaks is poison. Poisons are often designed around the curious fact that rats cannot regurgitate, so they will retain poisons that other animals—pet d...

Rats are smart and often work cooperatively. At the former Gansevoort poultry market in Greenwich Village, New York, pest control authorities could not understand how rats were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace.

In a similar manner workers at a packing plant discovered how sides of meat, hanging from hooks, were knocked to the floor and devoured night after night. An exterminator named Irving Billig watched and found that a swarm of rats formed a pyramid underneath a side of meat, and one rat scrambled to the top of the heap and leaped onto the meat from there.

It then climbed to the top of the side of meat and gnawed its way through it around the hook until the meat dropped to the floor, at which p...

It has been suggested that some outbreaks attributed to plague may not have been plague at all, but ergotism, a fungal disease of grain. Plague didn’t come at all to many cold, dry northern places—Iceland escaped entirely, as did much of Norway, Sweden, and Finland—even though those places had rats. At the same time, plague was associated with miserably wet years almost everywhere it appeared—the very circumstances that would tend to produce ergotism. The one problem with the theory is that the symptoms of ergotism are not much like those of plague. It may be that the word pestilence was used loosely or vaguely and simply misinterpreted by later historians.

It is commonly written that there is one rat for every human being in a typical city, but studies have shown that to be an exaggeration. The actual figure is more like one rat for every three dozen people. Unfortunately, that still adds up to a lot of rats—a quarter of a million in New York City, for instance.

Brass beds became popular in the nineteenth century not because brass was suddenly thought a stylish metal for bedsteads, but because it gave no harbor to bedbugs.

Almost certainly the most memorable finding of recent years with respect to microbes was when an enterprising middle school student in Florida compared the quality of water in the toilets at her local fast-food restaurants with the quality of the ice in the soft drinks, and found that in 70 percent of outlets she surveyed the toilet water was cleaner than the ice.

The world has far more bats than most people realize. In fact, about a quarter of all mammal species—some eleven hundred in all—are bats. They range in size from tiny

bumblebee bats, which really are no bigger than bumblebees and therefore are the smallest of all mammals, up to the magnificent flying foxes of Australia and south Asia, which can have wingspans of six feet.

Never has that been more true than in 1873, when farmers in the western United States and across the plains of Canada experienced a devastating visitation unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. From out of nowhere there came swarms of Rocky Mountain locusts—great chirring masses of motion and appetite that blotted out the sun and devoured everything in their path. Wherever the swarms landed, the effects were appalling. They stripped clean fields and orchards. They ate laundry off lines and wool off the backs of living sheep. They ate leather and canvas and even the handles of wooden

tools. One amazed witness reported them landing in such numbers that they put out a good-sized fire. It was, according to most witnesses, like experiencing the end of the world. The noise was deafening. One swarm was estimated as being 1,800 miles long and perhaps 110 miles wide. It took five days to pass. It is thought to have contained at least 10 billion individual insects, but other estimates have put the figure as high as 12.5 trillion, with a massed weight of 27.5 million tons. It was almost certainly the largest gathering of living things ever seen on Earth. Nothing would deflect them. When two swarms met, they would push through each other and emerge in unbroken ranks on the other side. No amount of battering them with shovels or spraying with insecticide made any measurable impact.

And then it all just came to an end. In 1877, the swarms were much reduced and the locusts within them seemed curiously lethargic. The next year they didn’t come at all. The Rocky Mountain locust (its formal name was Melanoplus spretus) didn’t just retreat but vanished altogether. It was a miracle. The last living specimen was found in Canada in 1902. None has been seen since.

It took more than a century for scientists to work out what had happened, but it appears that the locusts retired every winter to hibernate and breed in the loamy soils abutting the winding rivers of the high plains east of the Rockies. These, it turned out, were the very places where new waves of incoming farmers were transforming the land through ploughing and irrigation—actions that killed the locusts and their pupae as they slept. They couldn’t have devised a more effective remedy if they had spent millions of dollars and studied the matter for years. No extinction can ever be called a good thing, but this was

probably as close to positive as such an ...

The pond, called the Serpentine,

It was almost as if a rich person couldn’t begin work on a grand house until he had thoroughly disrupted at least a few dozen menial lives. Oliver Goldsmith lamented the practice in a long, sentimental poem, “The Deserted Village,” inspired by a visit to Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire when the first Earl Harcourt was in the process of erasing an ancient village to create a more picturesque space for his new house. Here at least fate exacted an interesting revenge. After completing the work, the earl went for a stroll around his newly reconfigured grounds, but failed to recall where the old village

well had been, fell into it, and drowned.*

It just needed a bit of management, or as he put it in a famous line: “A Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions.” (The newish word landscape, you will gather, hadn’t quite settled in yet.) “I do not know whether I am singular in my Opinion,” he went on, “but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure,” and all at

Does he really not connect any of this to the American writers' philosophy of just prior? Thoreau, Emerson, etc?

once the world seemed to agree with him.

He saw in his mind’s eye exactly how landscapes could look a hundred years hence. Long before anyone else thought of doing so, he used native trees almost exclusively. It is such touches that make his landscapes look as if they evolved naturally when in fact they were designed almost down to the last cow

pat.

The landscape of much of lowland England today may look timeless, but it was in large part an eighteenth-century creation, and it was Brown more than anyone who made it. If that is tinkering, it is on a grand scale.

If not a great architect, he was certainly a competent one. For one thing, thanks to his work in landscaping, he understood drainage better than perhaps any other architect of his

time. He was a master of soil engineering long before such a discipline existed. Unseen beneath his dozing landscapes can be complex drainage systems that turned bogs into meadows, and have kept them that way for 250 years. He might just as well have been called “Drainage Brown.”

The person who can reasonably be said to have started it all was Joseph Banks, the brilliant botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyage to the South Seas and beyond from 1768 to 1771.

Banks packed Cook’s little ship with specimen plants—thirty thousand in all—including fourteen hundred never previously recorded, at a stroke increasing the world’s stock of known plants

by about a quarter. He would almost certainly have found more on Cook’s second voyage, but Banks, alas, was spoiled as well as brilliant. He insisted on taking...

Hawaii, David Douglas, discoverer of the Douglas fir, fell into an animal trap at a particularly unpropitious moment: it was already occupied by a wild bull, which

proceeded to trample him to death.

Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates,

To satisfy the design brief, all the proposals were required to incorporate certain features—parade ground, playing fields, skating pond, at least one flower garden, and a lookout tower, among rather a lot else—and they also had to incorporate four crossing streets at intervals so that the park wouldn’t act as a barrier to east-west traffic along its entire length. What set Olmsted and Vaux’s design apart more than anything else was their decision to place the cross streets in trenches, below the line of sight, physically segregating them from park visitors, who passed safely above on bridges. “This also had the advantage of allowing the park to be closed

at night without interrupting traffic,” writes Witold Rybczynski in his biography of Olmsted. Theirs was the only proposal with this feature.*

Guano was often enormously abundant where seabirds nested. Many rocky islands were literally smothered in it: deposits 150 feet deep were not unknown. Some Pacific islands were essentially nothing but guano. Trading in guano made a lot of people very rich. Schroder’s, the British merchant bank, was founded largely on the guano trade. For thirty years Peru earned practically all its foreign exchange from bagging up

For those who wished to have a greensward, there were only two options. The first was to keep a flock of sheep. That was the option chosen for Central Park in New York, which until the end of the nineteenth century was home to a roaming flock of two hundred sheep superintended by a shepherd who lived in the building that was until recently the Tavern on the Green.

It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.

(an act of vandalism so infuriating to Jefferson that he wanted to send American agents to London to set fire to landmarks there), and with it went the Congressional Library. Jefferson immediately, and generously, offered his own library to the nation “on whatever terms the Congress might think proper.” Jefferson thought he had about 10,000 books, but when a delegation from the federal government came to survey the collection, they found that the number was in fact 6,487. Worse, when they had a look at the books, they weren’t at all sure they wanted them.

Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 115 million books and related items. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s part of it didn’t last

Even on the most conservative calculations, however, stairs rank as the second most common cause of accidental death, well behind car accidents, but far ahead of drownings,

burns, and other similarly grim misfortunes.

Although lead’s dangers have been well known for a long time, it continued to be used in many products well into the twentieth century. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was often stored in lead-lined tanks. Lead was sprayed onto fruit as a pesticide. Lead was even used in the manufacture of toothpaste tubes. It was banned from domestic paints in the United States in 1978. Although lead has been removed from most consumer products, it continues to build up in the atmosphere because of industrial applications. The average person of today has about 625 times more lead in his system than someone of fifty years ago.

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.

Generally, such beds were notionally reserved for really important visitors but in practice were hardly used, a fact that adds some perspective to the famous clause in Shakespeare’s will in which he left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne. This has often been construed as an insult, when in fact the second-best bed was almost certainly the marital one and therefore the one with the most tender associations.

Educating them was not simply a waste of time and resources but dangerously bad for their delicate constitutions. In 1865, John Ruskin opined in an essay that women should be educated just enough to make themselves practically useful to their spouses, but no further. Even the American educator Catharine Beecher, who was by the standards of the age a radical feminist, argued passionately that women should be accorded full and equal educational rights, so long as it was recognized that they would need extra time to do their hair.