At Home: A Short History of Private Life / Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is definitely one of those people you’d want to be seated next to at a dinner party. His latest nonfiction book At Home: A Short History of Private Life is just chock-full of interesting anecdotes and factoids that would make you lean in closer at the dinner table and say, “do tell me more”. In fact, I dog-eared so many pages of things I found interesting or wanted to go back to that I knew I was a huge violator of library book etiquette (though I did go back and smooth out the creases before I returned it). Bryson uses the floor plan of his Norfolk house, a former vicarage or parsonage (I can’t remember which, and there is a difference which he explains) to group historic information related to each of the rooms in the house—kitchen, drawing room, dining room, attic, etc. The historical insights are thematically grouped to the rooms—somehow his digressions on a myriad of topics only remotely linked to the room in focus don’t derail his narrative. It’s all fascinating. And if we take a short detour to the sewers of London or the Crystal Palace, the book is all the more enriched for it.

Here’s just a sampling of the fascinating things you’ll be exposed to in At Home

• Gas [as a fuel for lamps] 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… 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. p123



• It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung—or frass, as it is known to entomologists. p245
  


• The famous pagoda at Kew Gardens, rising to a height of 163 feet, was for a long time the tallest structure in England. Until the nineteenth century it was richly gilded and covered with painted dragons—eighty in all—and tinkling brass bells, but these were sold off by King George IV to pay down his debts, so what we see today is really a stripped-down shell. p260
  


• [Consider…] the fate of an eighteenth-century Chateau Margaux [bottle of wine] reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, [... the] wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world’s most expensive bottle of wine into the world’s most expensive carpet stain. p279
  


• The French were […] commonly accused of relieving themselves on staircases, “a practice which was still to be found at Versailles in the eighteenth century,” writes Mark Girouard in Life in the French Country House. It was the boast of Versailles that it had one hundred bathrooms and three hundred commodes, but they were oddly underused, and in 1715 an edict reassured residents and visitors that henceforth the corridors would be cleared of feces weekly. p356
  


• When buttons came [into fashion], 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. p451