At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Fortunately, science was standing by to help. One remedy, described by Mary Roach in Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science (2008), was the Penile Pricking Ring, developed in the 1850s, which was slipped over the penis at bedtime (or indeed anytime) and was lined with metal prongs that bit into any penis that impiously swelled beyond a very small range of permissible deviation. Other devices used electrical currents to jerk the subject into a startled but penitent wakefulness.

The problem was diagnosed as breast cancer and a mastectomy was ordered. The job was given to a celebrated surgeon named Baron Larrey,

whose fame was based not so much on his skill at saving lives as on his lightning speed. He would later become famous for conducting two hundred amputations in twenty-four hours after the Battle of Borodino in 1812.

and the cancer never came back. Not surprisingly, people were sometimes driven by pain and a natural caution regarding doctors to attempt extreme remedies at home. Gouvernor Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, killed himself by forcing a whalebone up his penis to try to clear a urinary blockage.

With so many people dying, mourning became a central part of most people’s lives. The masters of mourning were of course the Victorians. Never have a people become more morbidly attached to death or found more complicated ways to mark it. The master practitioner was Victoria herself. After her beloved Prince Albert died in December 1861, the clocks in his bedroom were stopped at the

minute of his death, 10:50 p.m., but at the Queen’s behest his room continued to be serviced as if he were merely temporarily absent rather than permanently interred in a mausoleum across the grounds. A valet laid out clothes for him each day, and soap, towels, and hot water were brought to the room at the appropriate times, then taken away again. At all levels of society mourning rules were strict and exhaustingly comprehensive. Every possible permutation of relationship was considered and ruled on. If, for example, the dearly departed was an uncle by marriage, he was to be mourned for two months if his wife survived him, but for just one month if he was unmarried or widowed himself. So it went through the entire canon of relationships. One needn’t even have met the people being mourned. If one’s husband had been married before and widowed—a fairly common condition—and a close relative of his first wife’s died, the second wife was expected to engage in “complementary mourning”—a kind of proxy mourning on behalf of the deceased earlier partner.

taphephobia.

His name was William Price. He was a doctor in rural Wales noted for his eccentricities, which were exhaustive. He was a druid, a vegetarian, and a militant Chartist; he refused to wear socks or to touch coins. In his eighties he fathered a son by his housekeeper and named him Jesus Christ. When the baby died in early 1884, Price decided to cremate him on a pyre on his land. When villagers saw the flames and went to investigate, they found Price, dressed as a druid, dancing around the bonfire and reciting strange chants. Outraged and flustered, they stepped in to stop him and in the confusion

Price snatched the half-burned baby from the fire and retired with the body to his house, where he kept it in a box under his bed until arrested a few days later. Price was brought to trial, but released when the judge decided that nothing he had done was conclusively criminal, since the baby was not actually cremated. He did, however, set back the cause of cremation very severely.

They loved to get naked—gymnasium means “the naked place”—and work up a healthful sweat, and it was their habit to conclude their daily workouts with a communal bath. But these were primarily hygienic plunges.

Christianity was always curiously ill at ease with cleanliness anyway, and early on developed an odd tradition of equating holiness with dirtiness. When Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, died

in

1170, those who laid him...

approvingly that his undergarments were “seething with lice.” Throughout the medieval period, an almost surefire way to earn lasting honor was to take a vow not to wash. Many people walked from England to the Holy Land, but when a monk named Godric did it with...

The English sweating sickness, a disease about which we still know almost nothing, had epidemics in 1485, 1508, 1517, and 1528, killing thousands as it went, before disappearing, never to return (or at least not yet). It was followed in the 1550s by another strange fever—“the new sickness”—which “raged horribly throughout the realm and killed an exceeding great number of all

By the time Europeans began to visit the New World in large numbers, they had grown so habitually malodorous that the Indians nearly always remarked on how bad they smelled. Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento. There is no doubt that some standards

By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough.

it served him well in terms of insightfulness and compassion, for almost uniquely among medical authorities he did not blame the poor for their own diseases, but saw that their conditions of living left them vulnerable to influences beyond their control. No one had ever brought that kind of open-mindedness to the study of epidemiology before.

Besides, if cholera was spread by smell, then those who dealt most directly with bad odors—toshers, flushermen, nightsoil handlers, and others whose livelihood was human waste—ought to be the most frequent victims. But they weren’t. After the 1848 outbreak, Snow couldn’t find a single flusherman who had died of cholera.

Snow announced his findings in a pamphlet of 1849, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, which demonstrated a clear link between cholera and water contaminated with human feces. 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.

One such was “the milk sick.” People who drank milk in America sometimes grew delirious and swiftly died—Abraham Lincoln’s mother was one such victim—but infected milk tasted and smelled no different from ordinary milk, and no one knew what the infectious agent was. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anyone finally deduce that it came from cows grazing on a plant called white snakeroot, which was harmless to the cows but made their milk toxic to drink.

In the 1790s, a heroic English immigrant named Benjamin Latrobe began a long campaign to clean up water supplies.

The dual outbreak acted as a spur to New York in much the way the Great Stink motivated London, and in 1837 work started on the Croton Aqueduct, which when finished in 1842 finally began to deliver clean, safe water to the

Designed by the great George Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for the Albert Memorial, the Midland was intended to be the most magnificent hotel in the world when it opened in 1873. It cost the equivalent of $450 million in today’s money and was a wonder in almost every way. Unfortunately—in fact, amazingly—Scott provided just four

bathrooms to be shared among six hundred bedrooms. Almost from the day of its opening, the hotel was a failure.

Porcelain enamel is in fact neither porcelain nor enamel, but a vitreous coating—in essence a type of glass. Enamel bath surfaces would be quite transparent if whiteners or other tints weren’t added to the glazing compound.

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.

There is slightly more to this. James Chadwick, the father of Edwin and Henry, had earlier in his life been a teacher in Manchester, where he taught science to John Dalton, who is generally credited with the discovery of the atom. Then, as a radical journalist, James Chadwick had gone to Paris, where he had lived for a time with Thomas Paine. So although he was a man of no particular importance himself, he served as a direct link between Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, the discovery of the atom, the sewage of London, and the beginnings of professional baseball.

Hemp was roughly similar to flax, but coarser and not so comfortable to wear, so it tended to be used for things like rope and sails. 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.

But the primary clothing material of the Middle Ages was wool. Wool was a lot warmer and more hard-wearing than linen, but wool fibers are short and difficult to work, especially as early sheep were surprisingly unwoolly creatures. Their wool, such as it was, originally was a downy undercoating beneath dreadlocks of tangled hair. To turn sheep into the blocks of fleeciness we know and value today took centuries of devoted breeding. Moreover, wool wasn’t sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.

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.

Wigs were so valuable—a full one could cost £50—that they were left as bequests in wills. The more substantial the wig, the higher up the social echelon one stood—one became literally a bigwig.

So it is curious that the people who actually brought some restraint to matters—namely, the macaronis’ rival sartorial tribe, the dandies—have become associated in the popular consciousness with overdress. Nothing, with respect to male attire, could be further from the truth, and the quintessence of that muted splendor was George “Beau” Brummell, who lived from 1778 to 1840. Brummell was not rich or talented or blessed with brains. He just dressed better than anyone ever had before. Not more colorfully or extravagantly, but simply with more care.

The attire of dandies was studiously muted. Brummell’s apparel was confined almost entirely to three plain colors: white, buff, and blue-black. What distinguished dandies was not the richness of their plumage but the care with which they assembled themselves. It was all about getting a perfect line.

They would spend hours making sure every crease or furl was perfect, unimprovable. A visitor, arriving at Brummell’s to find the floor strewn with cravats, once asked Robinson, his long-suffering valet, what was going on. “Those,” Robinson sighed, “are our failures.” Dandies dressed and redressed endlessly. In a day they would typically get through at least three shirts and two pairs of trousers, four or five cravats, two waistcoats, several pairs of stockings, and a small stack of handkerchiefs.

Brummell’s fall from grace was abrupt and irreversible. He and the Prince of Wales had a falling out and ceased speaking. At a social occasion, the prince pointedly ignored Brummell and instead spoke to his companion. 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. Such an insult was social suicide. Shortly afterward Brummell’s debts caught up with him and he fled to France. He spent the last two and a half decades of his life living in poverty, mostly in Calais, growing slowly demented but always looking, in his restrained and careful way, sensational.

Before cotton, slavery had been in decline in the United States, but now there was a great need for labor because picking cotton remained extremely labor-intensive. At the time of Whitney’s invention slavery existed in just six states; by the outbreak of the Civil War it was legal in fifteen. Worse, the northern slave states like Virginia and Maryland, where cotton couldn’t be successfully grown, turned to exporting slaves to their southern neighbors, thus breaking up families and

intensifying the suffering for tens of thousands. Between 1793 and the outbreak of the Civil War, over eight hundred thousand slaves were shipped south.

Valerie Steele, in the engagingly precise and

academic The Corset: A Cultural History, could find no evidence that even one such operation had ever been undertaken.

These lines are from King John, written soon after Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died at the age of eleven in 1596: Grief fills the room up of my empty child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

the most celebrated case, Princess Charlotte, heir presumptive to the

British throne, died giving birth to her first child in 1817 because the presiding physician, Sir Richard Croft, would not allow his colleagues to use forceps to try to relieve her suffering. In consequence, after more than fifty hours of exhausting and unproductive contractions, both baby and mother died. Charlotte’s death changed the course of British history. Had she lived, there would have been no Queen Victoria and thus no Victorian period. The nation was shocked and unforgiving. Stunned and despondent at finding himself the most despised man in Britain, Croft retired to his chambers and put a bullet through his head.

& Engels, manufactured sewing thread. Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman—eventually he became a partner—he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London. It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club—in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting

at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.

So on the face of it, it would seem that Victorians didn’t so much invent childhood as disinvent it. In fact, however, it was more complicated than that. By withholding affection to children when they were young, but also then endeavoring to control their behavior well into adulthood, Victorians were in the very odd position of simultaneously trying to suppress childhood and make it last forever. It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin’s sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma’s brother and the Darwin siblings’ joint first cousin.