At Home

I’ll read almost anything. I think it’s a genetic predisposition. One of my girls taught herself to read from Cheerios boxes.

Fiction, thrillers, history, well-written, bad; I’ll read it. It is a very rare book, indeed, that I will abandon midway through. As I get older, certain exceptions creep in. Life is short and some literary fiction is a complete waste of time, like solitaire. Not that it keeps me from playing solitaire.

I just finished reading Bill Bryson’s At Home. He lives in a former rectory in a small village in Norfolk, England. The house was built in 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace.

Bryson uses the layout of the house as a jumping-off point for an extended essay on the changes in domestic life since, well, the beginning of domestic life, but especially through the course of the Industrial Revolution.

His premise is that life had not changed much since people first started building and occupying houses. There has been a slow inexorable trend toward more comfort and privacy, but neither made much of a leap forward until the dawn of the industrial age. People, rich and poor, were miserable everywhere together until the advent of cheap, mass-produced goods created and sustained a middle class. Between 1800 and 1900, life improved dramatically for everyone. Well, almost everyone.

The Industrial Revolution was truly a social revolution. The rich became fabulously wealthy, to the point of inventing more extravagant ways to waste money. When they forced their serfs off the land in a movement called the enclosures, the poor migrated to cities and descended into even more abject poverty, and the middle class emerged to copy and challenge the wealthy for the consumption crown.

None of this is new. What Bryson brings to the story is the transformation in domestic life that happened during that revolution. He tells the story through the lens of language, technology, culture and the people who brought those changes about.

I devour the kind of factoids Bryson uncovers. A history of humans and rodents wouldn’t be complete without the inventor of the mousetrap. The story of competitive fashion wouldn’t be complete without a history of wigs and their care (or lack) up to the point when one courtesan discovered mice nesting in her carefully coifed hair. And who would not be fascinated by the transformative history of the word “toilet.” It followed a long, circuitous journey from a piece of cloth to a watery throne. By the way, the rat stories are true.

Domestic life gets a short shrift in histories. Anyone writing historical romances or any form of historical fiction would do well to keep Bryson’s book as a ready reference. His salacious slice of reality may be more vivid than your own imaginings.