At Home: a Short History of Private Life (Review)

This is the second book I've read by Bill Bryson and he's quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.  What makes his work so enjoyable to read is that it feels more like a friendly conversation than a history lesson.   He sets the scene from his home, an Anglican rectory built in 1851, and takes the reader from room-to-room chapter by chapter, examining the evolution of domestic life.  Granted it's not always a forward march through time - he tends to wander back and forth through the years a bit - but you'll go with him willingly because the meandering bits are interesting and fun.

We start in The Hall of all places, a room we barely think of as a room really.  We learn that this mostly ignored passageway to more important places was actually the entire home at one point, and that it wasn't until after the invention of the chimney that our domicile began to expand and with it was born the concept of privacy.

In the kitchen we learn about the modern history of food preparation, storage and the devious ways in which people adulterated groceries they sold to the public.  "A tea drinker," we learn, "might unwittingly take in anything from sawdust to powdered sheep's dung."  Milk was particularly prone to contain "extras" since it was carried through the streets in open pails.  I'll leave that one to your imagination.  This whole chapter is a Gordon Ramsey nightmare.

The Fuse Box chapter, as you may have guessed,  is a meander through interior lighting and the adaption of electricity.  "A candle - a good candle - provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt lightbulb. 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."  So dark that according to Bryson, James Boswell was able to have sex with a prostitute on Westminster Bridge in 1763. 

Speaking of sex... The chapter on the bedroom discusses sex through the ages, but spends a lot of time in the Victorian era.  Humorous and sad at the same time, the Victorians really had some hang-ups.  "The well-known consequences of masturbation covered virtually every undesirable condition known to medical science, not excluding insanity and premature death." 

In addition to the perils of a robust sex life, The Bedroom takes us from the straw sleeping mats most people slept on in the middle ages to the ornate, hand-carved beds of royalty in more modern ages.  It also takes us back to a time when privacy was a different concept than it is today.  It was common for hotel guests to double up in their rooms... with strangers.  "Diaries frequently contain entries lamenting how the author was disappointed to find a late-arriving stranger clambering into bed with him."

Ewwwww.

 The book takes the reader through many other rooms in the house as well and on every page you'll learn something new.  This is not just for the history buff.  Bryson has a gift for story-telling and making learning fun.