Top Quotes: “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” — Bill Bryson

Introduction

“The Christmas card [was invented] as a way of encouraging people to use the new penny post.”

“The role of country clergy was a remarkably loose one. Piety was not necessarily a requirement, or even an expectation. Ordination in the Church of England required a university degree, but most ministers read classics and didn’t study divinity at all, and so had no training in how to preach, provide inspiration or solace, or otherwise offer meaningful Christian support. Many didn’t even bother composing sermons but just bought a big book of prepared sermons and read one out once a week.

Though no one intended it, the effect was to create a class of well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their hands. In consequence many of them began, quite spontaneously, to do remarkable things. Never before in history had a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.

George Bayldon, a vicar in a remote corner of Yorkshire, had such poor attendances at his services that he converted half his church into a henhouse, but he became a self-taught authority in linguistics and compiled the world’s first dictionary of Icelandic.”

“The amount of food placed on eighteenth-century tables was staggering, and Woodforde scarcely ever had a meal that he didn’t record lovingly and in full. Here are the items he sat down to at a typical dinner in 1784: Dover sole in lobster sauce, spring chicken, ox tongue, roast beef, soup, fillet of veal with morrells and truffles, pigeon pie, sweetbreads, green goose and peas, apricot jam, cheesecakes, stewed mushrooms, and trifle. At another meal he could choose from a platter of tench, a ham, three fowls, two roasted ducks, a neck of pork, plum pudding and plum tart, apple tart, and miscellaneous fruit and nuts, all washed down with red and white wines, beer, and cider. Nothing got in the way of a good meal. When Woodforde’s sister died, he recorded his sincere grief in his diary but also found space to note: “Dinner today a fine turkey rosted [sic].” Nor did anything much from the outside world intrude. The American War of Independence is hardly mentioned. When the Bastille fell in 1789, Woodforde noted the fact but gave more space to what he had for breakfast. Fittingly, the final entry of his diary recorded a meal.

Woodforde was a decent enough human being — he sent food to the poor from time to time and led a life of blameless virtue — but in all the years of his diaries there isn’t any indication that he ever gave a moment’s thought to the composition of a sermon or felt any particular attachment to his parishioners beyond a gladness to join them for dinner whenever the offer was extended.”

“Among the novelties were a knife with 1,851 blades, furniture carved from furniture-sized blocks of coal (for no reason other than to show that it could be done), a four-sided piano for homey quartets, a bed that became a life raft and another that automatically tipped its startled occupant into a freshly drawn bath.”

“The most popular feature at the Great Exhibition was not an exhibition at all, but rather the elegant “retiring rooms,” where visitors could relieve themselves in comfort, an offer taken up with gratitude and enthusiasm by 827,000 people — 11,000 of them on a single day. Public facilities in London were woefully lacking in 1851. At the British Museum, up to 30,000 daily visitors had to share just two outside privies. At the Crystal Palace the toilets actually flushed, enchanting visitors so much that it started a vogue for installing flushing toilets at home — a development that would quickly have catastrophic consequences for London.”

“Chartism was a popular movement named for the People’s Charter of 1837, which sought a range of political reforms — all fairly modest in retrospect — from the abolition of rotten and pocket boroughs to the adoption of universal male suffrage. Over the space of a decade or so, Chartists presented a series of petitions to Parliament, one of them over six miles long and said to be signed by 5.7 million people. Parliament was impressed but rejected them all anyway, for the people’s own good.”

“Even the most hotheaded proletarian, it seems, loved the Great Exhibition. It opened on May 1, 1851, without incident — a “beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle,” in the words of a radiant Queen Victoria, who called opening day “the greatest day in our history” and sincerely meant it. People came from every corner of the country. A woman named Mary Callinack, aged eighty-five, walked more than 250 miles from Cornwall, and so made herself famous. Altogether 6 million people attended in the five and a half months that the Great Exhibition was open. On the busiest day, October 7, almost 110,000 people were admitted. At one point, 92,000 were in the building at the same time — the largest number of people ever to be indoors in a single location to that time.”

“Nearly every written description of Childe dwells almost lovingly on his oddness of manner and peculiar looks. His colleague said “he had a face so ugly it was painful to look at.””

“Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand. In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.”

The Kitchen

“The Natufians built the first villages and founded Jericho, which became the world’s first true city. So they were very settled people. But they didn’t farm. This was most unexpected. However, other excavations across the Middle East showed that it was not uncommon for people to settle in permanent communities long before they took up farming — sometimes by as much as eight thousand years.

So if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea — or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right. According to the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.”

“The dough must be kneaded to a particular consistency, and finally the resulting lump must be baked with precision and care. The scope for failure in the last step alone is so great that in every society in which bread has featured, baking has been turned over to professionals from the earliest stages.”

“Settled people became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies. The three great domesticated crops of prehistory were rice, wheat, and maize, but all had significant drawbacks as staples. As the journalist John Lanchester explains: “Rice inhibits the activity of Vitamin A; wheat has a chemical that impedes the action of zinc and can lead to stunted growth; maize is deficient in essential amino acids and contains phytates, which prevent the absorption of iron.” The average height of people actually fell by almost six inches in the early days of farming in the Near East. Even on Orkney, where prehistoric life was probably as good as it could get, an analysis of 340 ancient skeletons showed that hardly any people lived beyond their twenties.

What killed the Orcadians was not dietary deficiency but disease. People living together are vastly more likely to spread illness from household to household, and the close exposure to animals through domestication meant that flu (from pigs or fowl), smallpox and measles (from cows and sheep), and anthrax (from horses and goats, among others) could become part of the human condition. too.”

“Sedentism meant poorer diets, more illness, lots of toothache and gum disease, and earlier deaths. What is truly extraordinary is that these are all still factors in our lives today. Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven — corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats — account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

We are in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer.”

“Mesoamericans were the greatest cultivators in history, but of all their many horticultural innovations none was more lastingly important or unexpected than the creation of maize, or corn. We still don’t have any idea how they did it. If you look at primitive forms of barley, rice, or wheat set beside their modern counterparts, you can see the affinities at once. But nothing in the wild remotely resembles modern corn.

Genetically, its nearest relative is a wispy grass called teosinte, but beyond the level of chromosomes there is no discernible kinship. Corn grows into a hefty cob on a single stalk and its grains are encased in a stiff, protective husk. An ear of teosinte, in comparison, is less than an inch long, has no husk, and grows on a multiplicity of stems. Teosinte is almost valueless as a food; one kernel of corn is more nutritious than a whole ear of teosinte.

It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant — or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from around the world convened in 1969 at a conference on the origin of corn at the University of Ilinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times so personal, that the conference broke up in confusion and no papers from it were ever published. Nothing like it has been attempted since. Scientists are now pretty sure, however, that corn was first domesticated on the plains of western Mexico, and are in no doubt, thanks to the persuasive wonders of genetics, that somehow it was coaxed into being from teosinte, but how it was done remains as much of a mystery as it ever did.

However they did it, the Mesoamericans created the world’s first fully engineered plant — a plant so thoroughly manipulated that it is now wholly dependent on us for its survival. Corn kernels do not spontaneously disengage from their cobs, so unless they are deliberately stripped and planted, no corn will grow. Had people not been tending it continuously for these thousands of years, corn would be extinct. The inventors of corn not only created a new kind of plant, they also created — conceived from nothing really — a new type of ecosystem that existed nowhere in their world. In Mesopotamia natural meadows grew everywhere already, so cultivation was largely a matter of transforming natural grain fields into superior managed ones. In the arid scrubs of Central America, however, fields were unknown. They had to be created from scratch by people who had never seen such a thing before. It was like someone in a desert imagining lawns.

Today corn is far more indispensable than most people realize. Cornstarch is used in the manufacture of soda pop, chewing gum, ice cream, peanut butter, library paste, ketchup, automobile paint, embalming fluid, gunpowder, insecticides, deodorants, soap, potato chips, surgical dressings, nail polish, foot power, salad dressing, and several hundred things more.”

“Potatoes, the other great food crop of the New World, present an almost equally intriguing batch of mysteries. Potatoes are from the nightshade family, which is of course notoriously toxic, and in their wild state they are full of poisonous glycoalkaloids — the same stuff, at lower doses, that puts the zip in caffeine and nicotine. Making any wild potatoes safe to eat required reducing the glycoalkaloid content to between one-fifteenth and one-twentieth of its normal level. This raises a lot of questions, beginning most obviously with: How did they do it? And while they were doing it, how did they know they were doing it? How do you tell that the poison content has been reduced by, say, 20 percent or 35 percent or some other intermediate figure? How do you assess progress in such a process? Above all, how did they know that the whole exercise was worth the effort and that they would get a safe and nutritious foodstuff in the end?

Of course, a nontoxic potato might equally have mutated spontaneously, saving them generations of experimental selective breeding. But if so, how did they know that it had mutated and that out of all the poisonous wild potatoes around them here at last was one that was safe to eat?”

“In Turkey in 1958, a young British archaeologist named James Mellaart was driving through an empty corner of central Anatolia with two colleagues when he noticed an unnatural-looking earthen mound — a “thistle-covered hump” — stretching across the arid plain. It was fifty or sixty feet high and two thousand feet long. Altogether it covered about thirty-three acres — a mysteriously immense area. Returning the next year, Mellaart did some experimental digging and, to his astonishment, discovered that the mound contained the remains of an ancient city.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ancient cities, as even laymen knew, were phenomena of Mesopotamia and the Levant. They were not supposed to exist in Anatolia. Yet here was one of the very oldest — possibly the very oldest — bang in the middle of Turkey and of a size that was astoundingly unprecedented. Çatalhöyük (the name means “forked mound”) was nine thousand years old. It had been lived in continuously for well over a thousand years and at its peak had a population of eight thousand.”

“Childe would almost certainly have been fascinated with Çatalhöyuk because almost nothing about the place made sense. The town was built without streets or lanes. The houses huddled together in a more or less solid mass. Those in the middle of the mass could be reached only by clambering over the roofs of many other houses, all of differing heights — a staggeringly inconvenient arrangement. There were no squares or marketplaces, no municipal or administrative buildings — no signs of social organization at all. Each builder put up four new walls, even when building against existing walls. It was as if the inhabitants hadn’t got the hang of collective living yet. It may well be that they hadn’t. It is certainly a vivid reminder that the nature of communities and the buildings within them is not preordained. It may seem to us natural to have doors at ground level and houses separated from one another by streets and lanes, but the people of Catalhöyuk clearly saw it another way altogether.

No roads or tracks led to or from the community either. It was built on marshy ground, on a floodplain. For miles around was nothing but space, and yet the people packed themselves densely together as if pressed by incoming tides on all sides. Nothing at all indicates, why people should have congregated there in the thousands when they might have spread out across the surrounding countryside.

The people farmed — but on farms that were at least seven miles away. The land around the village provided poor grazing, and offered nothing at all in the way of fruits, nuts, or other natural sources of nutrition. There was no wood for fuel either. In short, there wasn’t any very obvious reason for people to settle there at all, and yet clearly they did in large numbers.

Çatalhöyuk was not a primitive place by any means. It was strikingly advanced and sophisticated for its time — full of weavers, basketmakers, carpenters, joiners, beadmakers, bowmakers, and many others with specialized skills. The inhabitants practiced art of a high order and produced not only fabrics but also a variety of stylish weaves. They could even produce stripes — not evidently an easy thing to do. Looking good was important to them. It is remarkable to think that people thought of striped fabrics before they thought of doors and windows.”

The Hall

“No room has fallen further in history than the hall. Now a place to wipe feet and hang hats, once it was the most important room in the house. Indeed, for a long time it was the house. How it came to this curious pass is a story that goes back to the very beginnings of England and a time, sixteen hundred years ago, when boatloads of people from mainland Europe came ashore and began, in an entirely mysterious way, to take over. We know remarkably little about who these people were, and the little we do know often makes no sense, but it was with them that the history of England and the modern house begins.

As conventionally related, events were straightforward: in AD 410, their empire collapsing, the Romans withdrew from Britain in haste and confusion, and Germanic tribes — the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes — swarmed in to take their place. It seems, however, that much of that may not be so.

First, the invaders didn’t necessarily swarm. By one estimate, perhaps as few as ten thousand outsiders moved into Britain in the century after the Romans left — an average of only one hundred people a year. Most historians think that is much too small a figure, though none can put a more certain number in its place. Nor, come to that, can anyone say how many native Britons were there to receive or oppose the invaders. The number is variously put at between 1.5 million and 5 million — in itself a vivid demonstration of just how comprehensively vague a period we are dealing with here — but what seems nearly certain is that the invaders were very considerably outnumbered by those they conquered.

Why the vanquished Britons couldn’t find the means or spirit to resist more effectively is a deep mystery. They were, after all, giving up a great deal. For almost four centuries they had been part of the mightiest civilization on Earth and had enjoyed benefits — running water, central heating, good communications, orderly governments, hot baths — with which their rough conquerors were uncomfortable or unacquainted. It is difficult to conceive the sense of indignity that the natives must have felt at finding themselves overrun by illiterate, unwashed pagans from the wooded fringes of Europe. Under the new regime they would give up nearly all their material advantages and not return to many of them for a thousand years.”

“Britain, it seems, was conquered by farmers, not warriors.

The invaders brought almost nothing that was new — just a language and their own DNA. No aspect of their technology or mode of living offered even a moderate improvement over what existed already. They can’t have been well liked. They don’t seem to have been very impressive. Yet somehow they made such a profound impact that their culture remains with us, more than a millennium and a half later, in the most extraordinary and fundamental ways. We may know nothing of their beliefs, but we still pay homage to three of their gods — Tiw, Woden, and Thor — in the names of our three middle weekdays, and eternally commemorate Woden’s wife, Frig, every Friday. That’s quite a line of attachment. They simply obliterated the existing culture. The Romans had been in Britain for 367 years and the Celts for at least a thousand, yet now it was as if they had never been. Nothing like this happened elsewhere. When the Romans left Gaul and Spain, life went on much as before. The inhabitants continued to speak their own versions of Latin, which were already evolving into modern French and Spanish. Government continued. Business thrived. Coins circulated. Society’s structures were maintained. In Britain, however, the Romans left barely five words and the Celts no more than twenty, mostly geographical terms to describe features specific to the British land-scape. Crag, for instance, is a Celtic word, and so is torr, meaning a rocky outcrop.”

“The newcomers declined to live in Roman houses even though the Roman houses were soundly built, superior to anything they had had at home, and there for the taking. Instead they erected far more basic structures, often right alongside abandoned Roman villas. They didn’t use Roman towns either. For three hundred years, London stood mostly empty.”

“The head of the household was the husband — a compound term meaning literally “householder” or “house owner.”His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management became known as husbandry. Only much later did husband come to signify a marriage partner.”

“Slavery from the ninth to eleventh centuries in England was not quite the kind of dehumanizing bondage we think of from more modern times, as in the American South, for instance. Although slaves were property and could be sold — and for quite a lot: a healthy male slave was worth eight oxen — slaves were able to own property, marry, and move about freely within the community. The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.”

“Royal households could easily have five hundred servants and retainers, and important peers and prelates were unlikely to have less than a hundred. With numbers so substantial, it was as easy to take the household to food as it was to bring food to the household, so motion was more or less constant, and everything was designed to be mobile (which is why, not incidentally, the French. and Italian words for furniture are meubles and mobilia, respectively). So furniture tended to be sparing, portable, and starkly utilitarian.”

“The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted out to get at things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time — till the 1600s — before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers.”

“In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strew with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,” as the Dutch theologian and traveler Desiderius Erasmus rather crisply summarized in 1524. New layers of rushes were laid down twice a year normally, but the old accretions were seldom removed, so that, Erasmus added glumly, “the substratum may be unmolested for twenty years.” The floors were in effect a very large nest, much appreciated by insects and furtive rodents, and a perfect incubator for plague. Yet a deep pile of flooring was generally a sign of prestige. It was common among the French to say of a rich man that he was “waist deep in straw.”

Bare earth floors remained the norm in much of rural Britain and Ireland until the twentieth century. “The ‘ground floor’ was justly named,” as the historian James Ayres has put it. Even after wood or tile floors began to grow common in superior homes, at about the time of William Shakespeare, carpets were too precious to be placed underfoot. They were hung on the walls or laid over tables. Often, however, they were kept in chests and brought out only to impress special visitors.”

“The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders and why an honest person — someone who keeps his hands visible at all times — is said to be aboveboard.

Seating was on plain benches — in French, bancs, from which comes banquet. Until the 1600s, chairs were rare — the word chair itself dates only from about 1300 — and were designed not to be comfortable but to impute authority. Even now, of course, the person in charge of a meeting chairs it, and a person in charge of a company is the chairman of the board — a term that additionally, and a little oddly, recalls the dining habits of medieval peasants.

Medieval banquets show people eating all kinds of foods that are no longer eaten. Birds especially featured. Eagles, herons, peacocks, sparrows, larks, finches, swans, and almost all other feathered creatures were widely consumed. This wasn’t so much because swans and other birds were fantastically delicious — they weren’t; that’s why we don’t eat them now- but rather because other, better meats weren’t available. Beef, mutton, and lamb were hardly eaten at all for a thousand years because the animals they came from were needed for their fleeces, manure, or muscle power and thus were much too valuable to kill.”

“After an evening meal, the inhabitants of the medieval hall had no bedrooms in which to retire. We “make a bed” today because in the Middle Ages that is essentially what you did — you rolled out a cloth sleeping pallet or heaped a pile of straw, found a cloak or blanket and fashioned whatever comfort you could.”

“One other thing people recorded with care was, somewhat surprisingly, window glass. Other than in churches and a few wealthy homes, window glass was a rarity well into the 1600s. Eleanor Godfrey, in The Development of English Glassmaking, 1560–1640, notes how in 1590 an alderman in Doncaster left his house to his wife but the windows to his son. The owners of Alnwick Castle from the same period always had their windows taken out and stored when they were away to minimize the risk of breakage.

Even in the largest houses generally only the windows in the most important rooms had glass in them. All the others were covered with shutters.”

“Because fireplaces were so inefficient, they were constantly enlarged. Some became so enormous that they were built with benches in them, letting people sit inside the fireplace, almost the only place in the house where they could be really warm.”

“The upward expansion of houses changed everything. Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves. The first step, generally, was to build a grand new room upstairs called the great chamber, where the lord and his family did all the things they had done in the hall before — eat, sleep, loll, and play — but without so many other people about, returning to the great hall below only for banquets and other special occasions. Servants stopped being part of the family and became, well, servants.

The idea of personal space, which seems so natural to us now, was a revelation. People couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it wasn’t merely sufficient to live apart from one’s inferiors; one had to have time apart from one’s equals, too.”

“Even with the growth of comparative privacy, life remained much more communal and exposed than today. Toilets often had multiple seats, for ease of conversation, and paintings regularly showed couples in bed or bath in an attitude of casual friskiness while attendants waited on them and their friends sat amiably nearby, playing cards or conversing but comfortably within sight and earshot.”

“In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers — the innermost sanctum where the most private meetings could take place. Then it made one of those bizarre leaps that words sometimes make and came to describe (by 1605) not just where the king met with his ministers, but the collective term for the ministers themselves.”

“Wardrobe originally signified a room for storing apparel. Then it became successively a dressing room, a sleeping room, a privy, and finally a piece of furniture. Along the way it also collected the meaning of one’s full set of clothes.”

“The royal household numbered up to about 1,500 people, and a good many of these — 150 or so in the case of Elizabeth I — traveled with the royal personage on her annual pilgrimages. Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage, as well as some less salubrious surprises. After the court of Charles I departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors had left “their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars.””

“Gifts were lavished freely. A hapless courtier named Sir John Puckering gave Elizabeth a diamond-festooned silk fan, several loose jewels, a gown of rare splendor, and a pair of exceptionally fine virginals, then watched at their first dinner as Her Majesty admired the silver cutlery and a salt cellar and, without a word, dropped them into the royal handbag.

Even her most long-standing ministers learned to be hypersensitive to the queen’s pleasures. When Elizabeth complained of the distance to his country house in Lincolnshire, Lord Burghley bought and extended another at Waltham Cross, in London’s Home Counties. Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth’s lord chancellor, built a mighty edifice called Holdenby House expressly for receiving the queen. In the event, she never came, and Hatton died €18,000 in debt — a crushing burden, equivalent to about £9 million today.”

“As life withdrew deeper and deeper into ever-larger houses, the hall lost its original purpose and became a mere entrance lobby with a staircase — a room to be received in and pass through on the way to more important spaces. Such was the case at Hardwick Hall (its name notwithstanding), where all the important rooms were upstairs. Never again would the hall be a room of any real significance. As early as 1663, the word was being used to describe any modest space, particularly an entrance or associated passageway. Perversely, at the same time its original sense was preserved and indeed extended to describe large, important spaces, particularly public ones: Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, town hall, study hall, and hall of fame, among many others.”

The Kitchen

“Even cherries, Tobias Smollett reported, could be made to glisten afresh by being gently rolled around in the vendor’s mouth before being put on display.”

“It is hard to overemphasize just how important bread was to the English diet through the nineteenth century. For many people bread wasn’t just an important accompaniment to a meal, it was the meal. Up to 80 percent of all household expenditure, according to the bread historian Christian Petersen, was spent on food, and up to 80 percent of that went on bread.”

“Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra — the famous baker’s dozen.”

“The notion of shipping ice from New England to distant ports was considered completely mad — “the vagary of a disordered brain,” in the words of one of his contemporaries. The first shipment of ice to Britain so puzzled customs officials as to how to classify it that all three hundred tons of it melted away before it could be moved off the docks. Shipowners were highly reluctant to accept it as cargo. They didn’t relish the humiliation of arriving in a port with a holdful of useless water, but they were also wary of the very real danger of tons of shifting ice and sloshing meltwater making their ships unstable. These were men, after all, whose nautical instincts were based entirely on the idea of keeping water outside the ship, so they were loath to take on such an eccentric risk when there wasn’t even a certain market at the end of it all.”

“Lake Wenham was actually completely incidental to the ice business in America. It never produced more than about ten thousand tons of ice in a year, compared with almost a million tons lifted annually just from the Kennebec River in Maine. In England, Wenham ice was more talked about than used. A few businesses took regular deliveries, but hardly any households (other than the royal one) did. By the 1850s, most ice sold in Britain was not from Wenham or even from America. The Norwegians — not a people one normally associates with sharp practices — changed the name of Lake Oppegaard, near Oslo, to Lake Wenham so that they could tap into the lucrative market. By the 1850s most ice sold in Britain was in fact Norwegian, though it has to be said that ice never really caught on with the British. Even now, it is still often dispensed there as if it were on prescription. The real market, it turned out, was in America itself.

As Gavin Weightman notes in his history of the business, The Frozen-Water Trade, Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers, and to create a vast range of frozen treats. Ice cream became popular — and startlingly inventive, too. At Delmonico’s, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors.”

“Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the East Coast in a refrigerated railway car. Chicagoans came to stare at it as if it had arrived from a distant planet. For the first time in history food didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced. Farmers on the boundless plains of the American Midwest could not only produce food more cheaply and abundantly than anywhere else but also sell it almost anywhere.”

“An alternative, and ultimately even more successful, method for preserving food — namely, canning — was perfected in England by a man named Bryan Donkin working between 1810 and 1820. Donkin’s invention preserved foods beautifully, though the early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them. The real breakthrough awaited the development of lighter materials, which in turn enabled mass production. At the beginning of the 1800s, one man, working hard, could produce about sixty cans a day; by 1880, machines could pump out fifteen hundred in a day. Surprisingly, getting them open remained a serious impediment much longer. Various cutting devices were patented, but all were difficult to use or nearly lethal if they slipped. The safe, modern manual can opener — the sort with two rolling wheels and a twisting key — dates only from 1925.”

“The sudden ability to transport food over great distances. and to keep it fresh enough to reach far-off markets transformed agriculture in many distant lands. Kansas wheat, Argentinian beef, New Zealand lamb, and other foodstuffs from around the world began to turn up on dinner tables thousands of miles away. The repercussions in traditional farming areas were enormous. You don’t have to venture far into any New England forest to find the ghostly house foundations and old field walls that denote a farm abandoned in the nineteenth century. Farmers throughout the region left their farms in droves, either to work in factories or to try their hand at farming on better land farther west. In a single generation Vermont lost nearly half its population. Europe suffered equally. “British agriculture virtually collapsed in the last generation of the nineteenth century.””

“The book enjoyed considerable success but then was abruptly shouldered aside by a brasher work — the vastly, lastingly, powerfully, mystifyingly influential Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton. There has never been another book quite like it, both for influence and content. It was an instant success and would remain à success well into the following century.

Mrs. Beeton made clear that running a household was a grave and cheerless business: “As with the commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house.” Only a moment earlier she had saluted her own selfless heroism: “I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it,” she declared, leaving the reader with a sense of mild gloom and guilty indebtedness.

Its title notwithstanding, The Book of Household Management whips through its professed subject in just twenty-three pages, then turns to cooking for nearly the whole of the next nine hundred. Despite this bias toward the kitchen, however, Mrs. Beeton didn’t actually like cooking and didn’t go near her own kitchen if she could possibly help it. You don’t have to read far into the recipes to begin to suspect as much — when she suggests, for instance, boiling pasta for an hour and three quarters. Like many of her nation and generation, she had an innate suspicion of anything exotic. Mangoes, she said, were liked only “by those who have not a prejudice against turpentine.” Lobsters she found “rather indigestible” and “not so nutritive as they are generally supposed to be! Garlic was “offensive.” Potatoes were “suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious.” Cheese she thought fit only for sedentary people — she didn’t say why — and then only “in very small quantities.” Especially to be avoided were cheeses with veins, since these were fungal growths. “Generally speaking,” she added, just a touch ambiguously, “decomposing bodies are not wholesome eating, and the line must be drawn somewhere.” Worst of all was the tomato: “The whole plant has a disagreeable odour, and its juice, subjected to the action of the fire, emits a vapour so powerful as to cause vertigo and vomiting.”

Mrs. Beeton appears to have been unacquainted with ice as a preservative, but we may safely assume that she. wouldn’t have liked it, for she didn’t like chilled things generally. “The aged, the delicate and children should abstain from ices or cold beverages,” she wrote. “It is also necessary to abstain from them when persons are very warm, or immediately after taking violent exercise, as in some cases they have produced illnesses which have ended fatally.” A great many foods and activities had fatal consequences in Mrs. Beeton’s book.

For all her matronly airs, Mrs. Beeton was just twenty-three when she began the book.”

“Nearly everything about The Book of Household Management suggested it was done in carelessness and haste. The recipes were mostly contributed by readers, and nearly all the rest was plagiarized. Mrs. Beeton stole shamelessly from the most obvious and traceable sources. Whole passages are lifted verbatim from the autobiography of Florence Nightingale. Others are taken straight from Eliza Acton. Remarkably, Mrs. Beeton didn’t even trouble to adjust gender, so that one or two of her stories are related in a voice that, disconcertingly and bewilderingly, can only be male. Organizationally, the whole is a mess. She devotes more space to the making of turtle soup than to breakfast, lunch, and supper combined, and never mentions afternoon tea at all. The inconsistencies are little short of spectacular. On the very page on which she lengthily explicates the tomato’s dangerous failings (“it has been found to contain a particular acid, a volatile oil, a brown, very fragrant extractoresinous matter, a vegeto-mineral matter, muco-saccharine, some salts, and, in all probability, an alkaloid”), she gives a recipe for stewed tomatoes, which she calls a “delicious accompaniment,” and notes, “It is a wholesome fruit and digests easily. Its flavour stimulates the appetite and it is almost universally approved. “

Despite its manifold peculiarities, Mrs. Beeton’s book was a huge and lasting success. Its two unimpeachable virtues were its supreme confidence and its comprehensiveness. The Victorian era was an age of anxiety, and Mrs. Beeton’s plump tome promised to guide the worried homemaker through every one of life’s foamy shoals. Flicking through the pages, the homemaker could learn how to fold napkins, dismiss a servant, eradicate freckles, compose a menu, apply leeches, make a Battenberg cake, and restore to life someone struck by lightning. Mrs. Beeton elucidated in precise steps how to make hot buttered toast. She gave cures for stammering and for thrush, discussed the history of lambs as a sacrifice; provided an exhaustive list of the many brushes (stove brush, cornice brush, banister broom, whisk broom, carpet broom, crumb brush — some forty in all) that were needed in any house that aspired to hygienic respectability; and discussed the dangers of making friendships in haste and the precautions to be taken before entering a sickroom. It was an instruction manual that could be followed religiously, and that was exactly what people wanted. Mrs. Beeton was decisive on every manner of topic — the domestic equivalent of a drill sergeant.

She was just twenty-eight when she died, of puerperal fever, eight days after giving birth for the fourth time, but her book lived on and on. It sold more than two million copies in its first decade alone and continued to sell steadily well into the twentieth century.”

“Thomas Jefferson grew 23 different types of peas and more than 250 kinds of fruits and vegetables. (Unusual for his day, Jefferson was practically a vegetarian and ate only small portions of meat as a kind of “condiment.”)”

“Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain’s coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week. Americans enjoyed even greater abundance. New York Harbor alone held half the world’s oysters and yielded so much sturgeon that caviar was set out as a bar snack. (The idea was that salty food would lead people to drink more beer.) The size and variety of dishes and condiments on offer was almost breathtaking. One hotel in New York had 145 dishes on the menu in 1867. A popular American recipe book of 1853, Home Cookery, casually mentions adding a hundred oysters to a pot of gumbo to “enhance” Mrs. Beeton provided no fewer than 135 recipes just for sauces.

Remarkably, Victorian appetites were really comparatively restrained. The golden age of gluttony was actually the eighteenth century. This was the age of John Bull, the most red-faced, overfed, coronary-ready icon ever created by any nation in the hope of impressing other nations. It is perhaps no coincidence that two of the fattest monarchs in British history did a great deal of their eating in the 1700s. The first was Queen Anne. Although paintings of Anne always tactfully make her look no more than a little fleshy, like one of Rubens’s plump beauties, she was in fact jumbo-sized-”exceedingly gross and corpulent” in the candid words of her former best friend the Duchess of Marlborough. Eventually Anne grew so stout that she could not go up and down stairs. A trapdoor had to be cut in the floor of her rooms at Windsor Castle through which she was lowered, jerkily and inelegantly, by means of pulleys and a hoist to the state rooms below. It must have been a most remarkable sight to behold. When she died, she was buried in a coffin that was “almost square.” Even more famously enormous was the prince regent, the future George IV, whose stomach when let out of its corset reportedly spilled to his knees. By the time he was forty his waist was more than four feet around.”

“Mrs. Beeton didn’t actually appear to like food at all and treated it, as she treated most things, as a kind of grim necessity to be dealt with swiftly and decisively. She was especially suspicious of anything that added zest to food. Garlic she abhorred. Chilies were barely worth mentioning. Even black pepper was only for the foolhardy: “It should never be forgotten,” she warned her readers, “that, even in small quantities, it produces detrimental effects on inflammatory constitu-tions.” These alarmed sentiments were echoed endlessly in books and periodicals throughout the age.

Eventually many Victorian households gave up on flavor altogether and just concentrated on trying to get food to the table hot. In larger homes that was ambition enough because kitchens could be wondrously distant from dining rooms. Audley End in Essex set something of a record in this respect by having the kitchen and dining room more than two hundred yards apart. To try to speed things up at Tatton Park in Cheshire, an internal railway line was laid down so that trolleys could be rushed from the kitchen to a distant dumbwaiter, there to be hastily dispatched onward. Sir Arthur Middleton of Belsay Hall near Newcastle became so obsessed with the temperature of the food sent to his table that he plunged a thermometer into each arriving dish and sent back for a further blast of heat, sometimes repeatedly, any that failed to register to his expected standards, so that many of his dinners were taken very late and in a more or less carbonized condition.”

“Potatoes were widely disdained for the first 150 years or so after their introduction to Europe. Many people considered the potato an unwholesome vegetable because its edible parts grew belowground rather than reaching nobly for the sun. Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.”

“The greatest part of the tragedy is that Ireland actually had plenty of food. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals, and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.”

“The sixth Baron Walsingham once single-handedly shot 1,070 grouse in a day, a toll that has not been bettered and we may reasonably hope never is. (Walsingham would have had a team of loaders providing him with a steady supply of loaded guns, so managing to fire the requisite number of shots was easy. The real challenge would have been in keeping up a steady flow of targets. The grouse were almost certainly released a few at a time from cages. For all the sport in it, Walsingham might just as well have fired into the cages and given himself more time for tea.)

Guests brought their own servants, too, so at weekends it was not unusual for the number of people within a country house to swell by as many as 150. Amid such a mass of bodies, confusion was inevitable. On one occasion in the 1890s Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s. bedroom and with a lusty cry of “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” leaped into the bed only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. To avoid such confusions, guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes containing personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridors to help find their way back to, or between, rooms.

Everything tended to be on a grand scale. The kitchen at Saltram, a house in Devon, had six hundred copper pots and pans, and that was pretty typical. The average country house might have as many as six hundred towels, and similarly vast quantities of sheets and linens. Just keeping everything marked, recorded, and correctly shelved was a monumental task.”

“Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.”

“Casual humiliation was a regular feature of life in service. Servants were sometimes required to adopt a new name, so that the second footman in a household would always be called “Johnson,” say, thus sparing the family the tedium of having to learn a new name each time a footman retired or fell under the wheels of a carriage. Butlers were an especially delicate issue. They were expected to have the bearing and comportment of a gentleman, and to dress accordingly, but often the butler was required to engage in some intentional sartorial gaucherie — wearing trousers that didn’t match his jacket, for instance — to ensure that his inferiority was instantly manifest.

One handbook actually gave instructions — in fact, provided a working script — for how to humiliate a servant in front of a child, for the good of both child and servant.”

“Beyond her spare account of duties, there was something even more extraordinary about Hannah Cullwick’s life, for she spent thirty-six years of it, from 1873 to her death in 1909, secretly married to her employer, a civil servant and minor poet named Arthur Munby, who never disclosed the relationship to family or friends. When alone, they lived as man and wife; when a visitor called, however, Cullwick stepped back into the role of maid. If overnight guests were present, Cullwick withdrew from the marital bed and slept in the kitchen. Munby was a man of some standing. He numbered among his friends Ruskin, Rossetti, and Browning, and they were frequent visitors to his home, but none had any idea that the woman who called him “Sir” was actually his wife. Even in private, their relationship was a touch unorthodox, to say the least. At his bidding, she called him “massa” and blacked her skin to make herself look like a slave. The diaries, it transpires, were kept largely so that he could read about her getting dirty.”

“In the autumn of 1939, during the slightly hysterical confusion that comes with the outbreak of war, Great Britain introduced stringent blackout regulations to thwart any murderous ambitions by the Luftwaffe. For three months it was essentially illegal to show any light at night, however faint. Rule breakers could be arrested for lighting a cigarette in a doorway or holding a match up to read a road sign. One man was fined for not covering the glow of the heater light from his tropical fish tank. Hotels and offices spent hours every day putting up and taking down special blackout covers. Drivers had to drive around in almost perfect invisibility — even dashboard lights were not allowed — so they had to guess not only where the road was but at what speed they were moving.

Not since the Middle Ages had Britain been so dark, and the consequences were noisy and profound. To avoid striking the curb or anything parked along it, cars took to straddling the middle white lines, which was fine until they encountered another vehicle doing likewise from the opposite direction. Pedestrians found themselves in constant peril as every sidewalk became an obstacle course of unseen lampposts, trees, and street furniture. Trams, known with respect as “the silent peril,” were especially unnerving. “During the first four months of the war,” Juliet Gardiner relates in Wartime, “a total of 4,133 people were killed on Britain’s roads” — a 100 percent increase over the year before. Nearly three-quarters of the victims were pedestrians. Without dropping a single bomb, the Luftwaffe was already killing six hundred people a month, as the British Medical Journal drily observed.”

“The widespread belief that people in the pre-electric world went to bed at nightfall seems to be based entirely on the presumption that anyone deprived of robust illumination would be driven by frustration to retire. In fact, it appears that most people didn’t retire terribly early — nine or ten o’clock seems to have been standard for most people in the days before electricity, and for some, particularly in cities, it was even later. For those who could control their working hours, bedtimes and rising times were at least as variable then as now and appear to have had little to do with the amount of light available.”

“Many species of whale — possibly all — would have vanished forever but for a sequence of unlikely events that began in Nova Scotia in 1846 when a man named Abraham Gener invented what for some time would be the most valuable product on Earth.

Gesner was a physician by profession, but he had an odd passion for coal geology. While experimenting with coal tar — a useless, sticky residue left over from the processing of coal into gas — he devised a way to distill it into a combustible liquid that he called (for uncertain reasons) kerosene. Kerosene burned beautifully and gave a light as strong and steady as that of whale oil, but with the potential to be produced much more cheaply.”

“Traditionally, most English farmland was divided into long strips called furlongs and each furlong was left fallow for one season in every three — sometimes one season in two — so that it could recover its ability to produce healthy crops. This meant that in any given year at least one-third of the nation’s farmland stood idle. In consequence, there wasn’t sufficient feed to keep large numbers of animals alive through the winter, so landowners had no choice but to slaughter most of their stock each autumn and face a long, lean period till spring.

Then English farmers discovered something that Dutch farmers had know for a long time: if turnips, clover, or one or two other amenable crops were sown on the idle fields, they miraculously refreshed the soil and produced a bounty of winter fodder into the bargain. It was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What was understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically. Moreover, because more animals lived through the winter, they produced heaps of additional manure, and these glorious, gratis ploppings enriched the soil even further.

It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed. Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad. Now, thanks to the simple expedient of crop rotation, agriculture was able to settle into a continuous, more or less reliable prosperity. It was this long golden age that gave so much of the countryside the air of prosperous comeliness it enjoys still today, and allowed the likes of Mr. Marsham to embrace that gratifying new commodity: comfort.”

“Until well into the nineteenth century, the notion of a well-balanced diet had occurred to no one. All food was believed to contain a single vague but sustaining substance — “the universal aliment.” A pound of beef had the same value for the body as a pound of apples or parsnips or anything else, and all that was required of a human was to make sure that an ample amount was taken in. The idea that embedded within particular foods were vital elements that were central to one’s well-being had not yet been thought of.”

“Two million sailors died between 1500 and 1850. Typically, scurvy killed about half the crew on any long voyage. Various desperate expedients were tried. Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can’t have done much for their spirits either.”

“In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods — bread and water chiefly — to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.”

“It is hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers — excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing on first hearty chomp.”

“It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas. These foods weren’t just incorporated into foreign cuisines. They effectively became the foreign cuisines. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Greek food without eggplant, Thai and Indonesian foods without peanut sauce, curries without chilies, hamburgers without French fries or ketchup, African food without cassava. There was scarcely a dinner table in the world in any land east or west that wasn’t drastically improved by the foods of the Americas.”

“The indigenous people of Peru had 150 varieties of potato, and valued them all. An Incan of five hundred years ago would have been able to identify varieties of potato in much the way that a modern wine snob identifies grapes. The Quechuan language of Peru still has a thousand words for different types or conditions of potatoes. Hantha, for instance, describes a potato that is distinctly on the old side but still has edible flesh.”

“The Americas, it may be said, gained much from Europe in return. Before the Europeans stormed into their lives, people in Central America had only five domesticated creatures — the turkey, duck, dog, bee, and cochineal insect — and no dairy products. Without European meat and cheese, Mexican food as we know it could not exist. Wheat in Kansas, coffee in Brazil, beef in Argentina, and a great deal more would not be possible.”

“Not everyone got the hang of tea immediately. The poet Robert Southey related the story of a lady in the country who received a pound of tea as a gift from a city friend when it was still a novelty. Uncertain how to engage with it, she boiled it up in a pot, spread the leaves on toast with butter and salt, and served it to her friends, who nibbled it gamely and declared it interesting but not quite to their taste. Elsewhere, however, it raced ahead, in tandem with sugar.”

The Dining Room

“What caused dining rooms to come into being wasn’t a sudden universal urge to dine in a space exclusively dedicated to the purpose, but rather, by and large, a simple desire on the part of the mistress of the house to save her lovely new upholstered furniture from greasy desecration. Upholstered furniture, as we have lately seen, was expensive, and the last thing a proud owner wanted was to have anyone wiping fingers on it.”

“Dining hours were dictated to some extent by the onerous and often preposterous obligations of making and returning social calls. The convention was to drop in on others between twelve and three each day. If someone called and left a card while you were out, etiquette dictated that you must return the call the next day. Not to do so was the gravest affront. What this meant in practice was that most people spent their afternoons dashing around trying to catch up with people who were dashing around in a similarly unproductive manner trying to catch up with them.

Partly for this reason the dinner hour moved later and later — from midday to midafternoon to early evening — though the new conventions were by no means taken up uniformly. One visitor to London in 1773 noted that in a single week he was invited to dinners that started successively at one, five, three, and “half after six, dinner on table at seven.””

“Another factor that materially influenced dining times was theater hours. In Shakespeare’s day performances began about two o’clock, which kept them conveniently out of the way of mealtimes, but that was dictated largely by the need for daylight in open-air arenas like the Globe. Once plays moved indoors, starting times tended to get later and later and theatergoers found it necessary to adjust their dining times accordingly — though this was done with a certain reluctance and even resentment. Eventually, unable or unwilling to modify their personal habits any further, the beau monde stopped trying to get to the theater for the first act and took to sending a servant to hold their seats for them till they had finished dining. Generally they would show up — noisy, drunk, and disinclined to focus — for the later acts. For a generation or so it was usual for a theatrical company to perform the first half of a play to an auditorium full of dozing servants who had no attachment to the proceedings and to perform the second half to a crowd of ill-mannered inebriates who had no idea what was going on.

Dinner finally became an evening meal in the 1850s, influenced by Queen Victoria. As the distance between breakfast and dinner widened, it became necessary to create a smaller meal around the middle of the day, for which the word luncheon was appropriated. Luncheon originally signified a lump or portion (as in “a luncheon of cheese”). In that sense it was first recorded in English in 1580. In 1755, Samuel Johnson was still defining it as a quantity of food — “as much food as one’s hand can hold.” Only slowly over the next century did luncheon come to signify, in refined circles at least, the middle meal of the day.”

The Cellar

“The state of New York had just one important advantage — an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and were such an obstruction to trade and communications that many people believed that the pioneers living beyond the mountains would eventually, of practical necessity, form a separate nation. For farmers it was cheaper to ship their produce downriver to New Orleans, via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, then by sea around Florida and up the Atlantic seaboard to Charleston or one of the other eastern ports — a distance of three thousand miles or more — than it was to haul it three hundred miles overland across the mountains.”

“Without the Erie Canal, Canada would have been ideally positioned to become the powerhouse of North America, with the St. Lawrence River serving as the conduit to the Great Lakes and the rich lands beyond.”

“The history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials. For a country famed for being rich in natural resources, America along the eastern seaboard proved to be appallingly deficient in many basic commodities necessary to an independent civilization. One of those commodities was limestone, as the first colonists discovered to their dismay. In England, you could build a reasonably secure house with wattle and daub — essentially a framework of mud and sticks-if it was sufficiently bound with lime. But in America there was no lime (or at least none found before 1690), so the colonists used dried mud, which proved to be woefully lacking in sturdiness. During the first century of colonization, it was a rare house that lasted more than ten years. This was the period of the Little Ice Age, when a century or so of bitterly cold winters and howling storms battered the temperate world. A hurricane in 1634 blew away — literally just lifted up and carried off — half the houses of Massachusetts. Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in, “overturning sundry howses, uncovering [i.e. unroofing] diverse others,” in the words of one diarist who lived through it. Even decent building stone was not available in many areas.”

“One common assumption is that the early settlers built log cabins. They didn’t. They didn’t know how. Log cabins were introduced by Scandinavian immigrants in the late eighteenth century, at which point they did rapidly catch on.”

“There was just one problem with brick that became increasingly apparent as the century wore on and building space grew constrained. Bricks are immensely heavy, and you can’t make really tall buildings with them — not that people didn’t try. The tallest brick building ever built was the sixteen-story Monadnock Building, a general-purpose office building erected in Chicago in 1893 and designed shortly before his death by the architect John Root of the famous firm of Burnham and Root. The Monadnock Building still stands, and is an extraordinary edifice. Such is its weight that the walls at street level are six feet thick, making the ground floor — normally the most welcoming part of a building — into a dark and forbidding vault.”

“The event that brought it into being was the Paris Exposition of 1889.

As is usual with these things, the organizers wanted an iconic centerpiece and invited proposals. A hundred or so were submitted, including a design for a nine-hundred-foot-high guillotine, to commemorate France’s unrivaled contribution to decapitation. For many that was scarcely more preposterous than Eiffel’s winning entry. Large numbers of Parisians could not see the point of placing an enormous functionless derrick in the middle of the city.

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications — that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper reaches — but eventually even he admitted that mostly he wished to build it simply for the slightly strange pleasure of making something really quite enormous.”

“Although by 1889 steel was displacing iron everywhere, Eiffel rejected it because he had always worked in iron and didn’t feel comfortable with steel. So there is a certain irony in the thought that the greatest edifice ever built of iron was also the last.”

“America in 1889 was in the sumptuous midst of the period of hyper-self-indulgence known as the Gilded Age. There would never be another time to equal it. Between 1850 and 1900 every measure of wealth, productivity, and well-being skyrocketed in America. The country’s population in the period tripled, but its wealth increased by a factor of thirteen. Steel production went from 13,000 tons a year to 11.3 million. Exports of metal products of all kinds — guns, rails, pipes, boilers, machinery of every description — went from $6 million to $120 million. The number of millionaires, fewer than twenty in 1850, rose to forty thousand by century’s end.

Europeans viewed America’s industrial ambitions with amusement, then consternation, and finally alarm. In Britain, a national efficiency movement arose with the idea of recapturing the bulldog spirit that had formerly made Britain preeminent. Books with titles like The American Invaders and The “American Commercial Invasion” of Europe sold briskly. But actually what Europeans were seeing was only the beginning.

By the early twentieth century, America was producing more steel than Germany and Britain combined — a circumstance that would have seemed inconceivable half a century before.”

“Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party — possibly the most preposterous ever staged — several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry’s, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.”

“They had even more palatial homes outside the city, particularly at Newport, Rhode Island. In possibly the only example ever of the super-rich being ironic, they called their Newport homes “cottages.” In fact, these were houses so big that even the servants needed servants. They contained acres of marble, the most glittery chandeliers, tapestries the size of tennis courts, fittings heavily wrought from silver and gold.

It has been estimated that if built today the Breakers would cost half a billion dollars — rather a lot for a summer home. The ostentation of these properties generated such widespread disapproval that a Senate committee for a time seriously considered introducing a law limiting how much any person could spend on a house.”

“In 1888, he decided finally to build a place of his own. He bought 130,000 acres of wooded retreat in North Carolina and engaged Richard Morris Hunt to build him something suitably comfy. George decided he wanted a Loire château — but grander, of course, and with better plumbing — and so he built more with Biltmore (though he seems never to have noticed the pun). Closely modeled on the famous Château de Blois, it is a rambling, gloriously excessive mountain of Indiana limestone, comprising 250 rooms, a frontage 780 feet long, and a footprint of 5 acres. It was, and remains, the largest house ever built in America. For its construction, George employed a thousand workers at an average wage of 90 cents a day.

George Vanderbilt filled Biltmore with the finest of everything Europeans would sell him, which in the late 1880s was practically everything — tapestries, furnishings, classic works of art. The scale recalls, and in some crucial respects exceeds, the manic excesses of William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey. The dining room table could seat seventy-six. The ceiling was seventy-five feet above the floor. It must have been like living on the concourse of a major railway station.

For the grounds he brought in the aging Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park in New York, who persuaded George to turn much of the estate into experimental forest. The U.S. secretary of agriculture, J. Sterling Morton, marveled that Vanderbilt employed more men and had a larger budget for his single forest than Morton had for an entire federal department. The estate had two hundred miles of roads. It included a town — a small city, really — complete with schools, a hospital, churches, railroad station, banks, and shops to serve the estate’s two thousand employees and their families. Workers lived a prosperous but semifeudal existence, bound by many rules. They were not allowed to keep dogs, for instance. To support the estate, George’s forests were logged for timber, and his many farms produced fruit, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, poultry, and livestock. He also engaged in some manufacturing and processing.”

“His abiding dream was to fill the world with concrete houses.

The plan was to make a mold of a complete house into which concrete could be poured in a continuous flow, forming not just walls and floors but every interior structure — baths, toilets, sinks, cabinets, doorjambs, even picture frames. Apart from a few odds and ends like doors and light switches, everything would be made of concrete. The walls could even be tinted, Edison suggested, to make painting forever unnecessary. A four-man team could build a new house every two days, he calculated. Edison expected his concrete houses to sell for $1,200, about a third of the cost of a conventional home of the same size.

It was a wild and ultimately unrealizable dream. The technical problems were overwhelming. The molds, which were of course the size of the house itself, were ridiculously cumbersome and complex, but the real problem was filling them smoothly. Concrete is a mixture of cement, water, and aggregates — that is, gravel and small stones — and it is in the nature of aggregates to want to sink. The challenge for Edison’s engineers was to formulate a mixture liquid enough to flow into every corner of every mold, but thick enough to hold its aggregates in suspension in defiance of gravity, while hardening to a smooth, uniform consistency of sufficient quality to persuade people that they were purchasing a home and not a bunker. It proved an impossible ambition. Even if all else went well, the engineers calculated, the house would weigh 450,000 pounds, causing all manner of ongoing structural strains.

All the technical challenges, plus problems of oversupply generally within the industry (which Edison’s huge plant did much to aggravate), guaranteed that Edison would always struggle to make money on the enterprise. Cement making was a difficult business anyway because it was so seasonal. But Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings — bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano — to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. It was the last anyone ever heard of concrete furniture. As far as is known, Edison never discussed the matter.

A few concrete houses were built and some actually still stand in New Jersey and Ohio, but the general concept clearly never caught on, and concrete houses became one of Edison’s more costly failures.”

“For years he refused to accept that the future of motion pictures lay in projecting images on screens because he hated the thought that they could become visible to someone who had slipped into the viewing chamber without buying a ticket. For a long time he held out for the idea of keeping moving images securely inside hand-cranked peepshow boxes. In 1908 he confidently declared that airplanes had no future.”

“Remarkably, before the ringing bell, the only way to know if someone was trying to get through to you was to pick up the phone from time to time and see if anyone was there.”

“Displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876, it attracted little attention. Most visitors were far more impressed by an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison. The pen worked by rapidly punching holes in a sheet of paper to form an outline of letters in a stencil fashion, permitting ink to be injected onto pages below, which allowed multiple copies of a document to be made quickly. Edison, ever misguided, was confident that the invention would be “bigger than telegraphy.’ Of course it wasn’t, but someone else was taken with the idea of the rapidly punching pen and redeveloped it to inject ink under skin. The modern tattoo gun was born.”

“By the early twentieth century Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph, was the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. (When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.)”

“For a client named George S. Rasmussen, Miner forgot to include a staircase and so put an external one up on an outside wall as an afterthought. This compelled Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen to put on rainwear or other appropriate attire when they wished to go from floor to floor in their own home. When asked about this oversight, Miner reportedly said it didn’t matter because he didn’t like Mr. Rasmussen anyway.”

“Once he used quicklime and shellac to age some leather chairs at the Everglades Club. Unfortunately, the body heat from the guests warmed the shellac to a renewed gooeyness and several found themselves stuck fast. “I spent the whole night pulling dames out of those goddam chairs,” recalled a club waiter years later. Several women left the backs of their dresses behind.”

The Study

“House mice are wondrously adaptable with regard to environment. Mice have even been found living in a refrigerated meat locker kept permanently chilled at 10 degrees Celsius. They will eat almost anything. They are next to impossible to keep out of a house: a normal adult can squeeze through an opening just three-eighths of an inch wide, a gap so very tight that you would almost certainly bet good money that no grown mouse could possibly squeeze through it. They could. They can. They very often do.

Once in, mice breed prodigiously. In optimum conditions (and in most houses conditions seldom are other than optimal) a female mouse can start breeding at six to eight weeks old and can give birth monthly thereafter. A typical litter consists of six to eight offspring, so numbers can very quickly mount up. Two mice, breeding prolifically, could theoretically produce a million descendants in a year. That doesn’t happen in our homes, thank goodness, but very occasionally mouse numbers do get completely out of control. Australia seems to be particularly propitious in this respect. In one famous outbreak in 1917, the town of Lascelles, in western Victoria, was overrun with mice after an unusually warm winter. For a short but memorably lively period, mice existed in Lascelles in such densities that every horizontal surface became a frantic mass of darting bodies. Every inanimate object writhed under a furry coating. There was nowhere to sit. Beds were unusable. “The people are sleeping on tables to avoid the mice,” one newspaper reported. “The women are kept in a constant state of terror, and the men are kept busy preventing the mice from crawling down their coat collars.” Over fifteen hundred tons of mice — perhaps a hundred million individuals — were killed before the outbreak was defeated.”

“Fleas much prefer the blood of furry creatures to the blood of humans, and generally turn to us only when nothing better is available. For that reason, modern epidemiologists in places where plague is still common – notably parts of Africa and Asia – generally avoid culling rats and other rodents too enthusiastically during outbreaks. In a very real sense there is no more welcome time for rats to be around than when plague is rampant.”

“Like lice, bedbugs are making an unwelcome comeback. For most of the twentieth century they were virtually extinct in most of Europe and America thanks to the rise of modern insecticides, but in recent years they have been vigorously rebounding. No one is sure why. It may have something to do with more international travel — people bringing them home in their suitcases and so on — or that they are developing greater resistance to the things we spray at them.”

“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.

At times in the past attempts have been made to capitalize on bats’ special qualities. In the Second World War, the American military invested a great deal of time and money in an extraordinary plan to arm bats with tiny incendiary bombs and to release them in vast numbers — as many as a million at a time — from planes over Japan.

The idea was that the bats would roost in eaves and roof spaces, and that soon afterward tiny detonators on timers would go off and they would burst into flames, causing hundreds of thousands of fires. Creating sufficiently tiny bombs and timers required a great deal of experiment and ingenuity, but finally in the spring of 1943 work had progressed sufficiently that a trial was set to take place at Muroc Lake, California. It would be putting it mildly to say that matters didn’t go quite to plan. Remarkably for an experiment, the bats were fully armed with live bomblets when released. This proved not to be a good idea. The bats failed to light on any of the designated targets, but did destroy all the hangars and most of the storage buildings at the Muroc Lake airport, as well as an army general’s car. The general’s report on the day’s events must have made interesting reading. In any case, the program was canceled soon afterward.”

“Today bats are among the most endangered of all animals. About a quarter of bat species are on extinction watch lists — that is an amazingly and indeed appallingly high proportion for such a vital creature — and over forty species teeter on the very edge of extinction.”

“In 1873 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.”

“The locusts returned in the following three summers, each time in larger numbers than before. The unnerving thought that life in the West might become untenable began to take hold. No less alarming was the thought that the locusts could spread eastward and begin to devour the even richer farmlands of the Midwest and the East. There has never been a darker or more helpless moment in the whole of American history.

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 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.”

“American farmers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were already gripped with a form of angry populism that was deeply resentful of banks and big business, and these feelings were widely echoed in the cities, particularly among newly arrived immigrants. Had agriculture collapsed sufficiently to produce widespread hardship and hunger, there might well have been an overwhelming rush to socialism.”

The Garden

“For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live- in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. An estate owner in Lancashire promised £50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwelling on his estate without cutting his hair or toenails or talking to another person. Someone took up the offer and actually lasted four years before deciding he could take no more; whether he was given at least a partial pension for his efforts is sadly unknown.”

“The first Europeans to penetrate America’s interior from the east weren’t looking for lands to settle or passages to the west. They were looking for plants they could sell, and they found wondrous new species by the score — the azalea, aster, camellia, catalpa, euphorbia, hydrangea, rhododendron, rudbeckia, Virginia creeper, and wild cherry, as well as many types of ferns, shrubs, trees, and vines. Fortunes could be made from finding new plants and getting them safely back to the nurseries of Europe for propagation.”

“In 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.”

“A small monkey puzzle tree, a decorative conifer discovered in Chile in 1782, could by the 1840s easily fetch £5 in Britain, roughly the annual cost of keeping a maid.”

“Many churches made most of their money from burials, and were loath to give up such lucrative business. At the Enon Baptist Chapel on Clement’s Lane in Holborn (now the site of the campus of the London School of Economics), the church authorities managed to cram a colossal twelve thousand bodies in the cellar in just nineteen years. Not surprisingly, such a volume of rotting flesh created odors that could not well be contained. It was a rare service in which several worshippers didn’t faint. Eventually, most stopped coming altogether, but still the chapel kept accepting bodies for interment. The parson needed the income.”

“At the peak of construction in 1859, Central Park had a workforce of thirty-six hundred men. The park opened bit by bit, so it never had a grand opening.”

“For thirty years Peru earned practically all its foreign exchange from bagging up and selling bird droppings to a grateful world. Chile and Bolivia went to war over guano claims. The U.S. Congress brought in the Guano Islands Act, which allowed private interests to claim as U.S. territory any guano-bearing islands they found that weren’t already claimed. More than fifty were.

While guano was making life better for farmers, it had one very serious effect on city life: it killed the market in human waste. Previously, the workers who emptied city cesspits had sold the waste to farmers just outside the cities. That had helped keep costs down. But after 1847 the market for human waste collapsed, so disposal became a problem that was generally solved by tipping the collected waste into the nearest convenient river, with consequences that would take decades to sort out.

The inevitable problem with guano was that it had taken centuries to accumulate but no time at all to be used up. One island off the coast of Africa containing an estimated two hundred thousand tons of guano was scraped bare in just over a year. Prices soared to almost $80 a ton. By 1850, the average farmer had the dispiriting choice of spending roughly half his income on guano or watching his yields wither. Clearly what was needed was a synthetic fertilizer — something that would feed crops reliably and economically.”

“Before the nineteenth century lawns in any meaningful sense were the preserve almost exclusively of owners of stately homes and institutions with large grounds because of the cost of maintaining them. 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. The other option was to employ a dedicated team of people who would spend the whole of every growing season scything, gathering, and carting away grass. Both options were expensive, and neither gave a very good finish. Even the most carefully scythed lawn was, by modern standards, rough and clumpy, and a sheep-grazed lawn was even worse.”

“Jefferson, amazingly energetic, scarcely wasted a moment of his eighty-three years. His boast was that in fifty years the sun had never caught him in bed. He was an obsessive record keeper. He had seven notebooks on the go at any one time, and into each of these he recorded the most microscopic details of daily life. He fully noted each day’s weather, the migratory patterns of birds, the dates on which flowers blossomed. He not only kept copies of eighteen thousand letters he wrote, and saved the five thousand he was sent, but also diligently logged them all in an “Epistolary Record” that itself ran to more than 650 pages. He kept a record of every cent earned and spent. He recorded how many peas it took to fill a pint pot. He kept full, individual inventories for his slaves, giving an unusually complete record of how they were treated and what they owned.”

The Bedroom

“One of the conventions of the age was to feed and put up any respectable-looking person who presented himself at the door. Washington was plagued with guests – he had 677 of them in one year.”

“Even by 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.”

“Two very basic colors didn’t exist at all in Mr. Marsham’s day: a good white and a good black. The brightest white available was a rather dull off-white, and although whites improved through the nineteenth century, it wasn’t until the 1940s, with the addition of titanium dioxide to paints, that really strong, lasting whites became available. The absence of a good white paint would have been doubly noticeable in early New England, for the Puritans had no white paint and didn’t believe in painting anyway. (They thought it was showy.) So all those gleaming white churches we associate with New England towns are in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon.

Also missing from the painter’s palette was a strong black. Permanent black paint, distilled from tar and pitch, wasn’t popularly available until the late nineteenth century. So all the glossy black front doors, railings, gates, lampposts, gutters, downpipes, and other fittings that are such an elemental feature of London’s streets today are actually quite recent. If we were to be thrust back in time to Dickens’s London, one of the most startling differences to greet us would be the absence of black-painted surfaces. In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.”

“Beds were hard work, too. Turning and plumping mattresses was a regular chore – and a heavy one, too. A typical feather bed contained forty pounds of feathers. Pillows and bolsters added about as much again, and all of these had to be emptied out from time to time to let the feathers air, for otherwise they began to stink. Many people kept flocks of geese, which they plucked for fresh bedding perhaps three times a year.”

“For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned. In William Shakespeare’s day a decent canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. Because they were such treasured items, the best bed was often kept downstairs, sometimes in the living room, where it could be better show off to visitors or seen through an open window by passersby. Generally, such beds were notionally reserved for really important visitors but in practice were hardly used.”

“As one authority explained, seminal fluid, when nobly retained within the body, enriched the blood and invigorated the brain. The consequence of discharging this natural elixir illicitly was to leave a man literally enfeebled in mind and body. So even within marriage one should be spermatozoically frugal, as more frequent sex produced “languid” sperm, which resulted in listless offspring. Monthly intercourse was recommended as a safe maximum.

Self-abuse was of course out of the question at all times. The well-known consequences of masturbation covered virtually every undesirable condition known to medical science, not excluding insanity and premature death. Self-polluters – “poor creeping tremulous, pale, spindle-shanked wretched creatures who crawl upon the earth,” as one chronicler described them-were to be pitied. “Every act of self-pollution is an earthquake – a blast – a deadly paralytic stroke,” declared one expert. Case studies vividly drove home the risks. A medical man named Samuel Tissot described how one of his patients drooled continuously, , dripped watery blood from his nose, and “defecated in his bed without noticing it. It was those last three words that were particularly crushing.

Worst of all, an addiction to self-abuse would automatically be passed on to offspring.”

“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.”

“A woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually, he infected her with gonorrhea and then poisoned her almost to the point of death by slipping antivenereal powders into her food without her knowledge. Her health and spirit broken, she sued for divorce. The judge listened carefully to the arguments, then dismissed the case and sent Mrs. Robinson home with instructions to try to be more patient.”

“Sweeping generalizations were about as close as any medical man would permit himself to get to women’s reproductive affairs. This could have serious medical consequences, since no doctor could make a proper gynecological examination. In extremis, he might probe gently beneath a blanket in an underlit room, but this was highly exceptional. For the most part, women who had any medical complaint between neck and knees were required to point blushingly to the affected area on a dummy.”

“The first stage usually showed itself as a genital chancre, ugly but painless. This was followed some time later by a second stage that involved anything from aches and pains to hair loss. Like first-stage syphilis, this would also resolve itself after a month or so whether it was treated or not. For two-thirds of syphilis sufferers, that was it. The disease was over. For the unfortunate one-third, however, the real dread was yet to come. The infection would lie dormant for as long as twenty years before erupting in third-stage syphilis. This is the stage nobody wants to go through. It eats away the body, destroying bones and tissue without pause or mercy. Noses frequently collapsed and vanished. (London for a time had a “No-Nose’d Club.”) The mouth may lose its roof. The death of nerve cells can turn the victim into a stumbling wreck.”

“When President James A. Garfield was shot in 1881, it wasn’t the bullet that killed him, but doctors sticking their unwashed fingers in the wound.”

“In the 1960s, the Stanford historian Peter Laslett did a careful study of British marriage records and found that at no time in the recorded past did people regularly marry at very early ages. Between 1619 and 1660, for instance, 85 percent of women were nineteen or older when married; just one in a thousand was thirteen or under. The median age at marriage for brides was twenty-three years and seven months, and for men it was nearly twenty-eight years – not very different from the ages of today. William Shakespeare himself was unusual in being married at eighteen, while his wife, Anne, was unusually old at twenty-six.”

“A correspondent to the British journal Notes and Queries offered this contribution in 1858:

A rich manufacturer named Oppelt died about fifteen years since at Reichenberg, in Austria, and a vault was built in the cemetery for the reception of the body by his widow and children. The widow died about a month ago and was taken to the same tomb; but, when it was opened for that purpose, the coffin of her husband was found open and empty, and the skeleton discovered in a corner of the vault in a sitting posture.”

“Another more entrepreneurial type designed a device that allowed someone awaking within a coffin to pull a cord, which opened a breathing tube for air and simultaneously set off a bell and started a flag waving at ground level.”

“Until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832, only executed criminals could be used for experiment and dissection. Yet executions in England were much rarer than is commonly supposed: in 1831, a typical year, sixteen hundred people were condemned to death in England, but only fifty-two executed. So the demand for bodies was way beyond what could be legally supplied. Grave robbery in consequence became an irresistibly tempting business, particularly as stealing a body was, thanks to a curious legal quirk, a misdemeanor rather than a felony. At a time when a well-paid working man might earn £1 in a week, a fresh corpse could fetch £8 or £10 and sometimes as much as £20, and, at least initially, without much risk as long as the culprits were careful to remove only the bodies and not shrouds, coffins, or keepsakes, for which they could be charged with a felony.”

“To thwart robbers, the poor in particular often held on to departed loved ones until the bodies had begun to putrefy and so had lost their value. Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain was full of gruesome and shocking details about the practice. In some districts, he noted, it was common for families to keep a body in the front room for a week or more while waiting for putrefaction to get a good hold. It was not unusual, he said, to find maggots dropping onto the carpet and infants playing among them. The stench, not surprisingly, was powerful.

Graveyards also improved their security, employing armed night-watchmen. That severely elevated the risk of being apprehended and beaten, so some resurrection men, as they were popularly known, turned to murder as safer. The most notorious and devoted were William Burke and William Hare, Irish immigrants in Edinburgh, who killed at least fifteen people in a period of less than a year, beginning in November 1827. Their method was crudely effective. They befriended sad wastrels, got them drunk, and suffocated them, the stout Burke sitting on the victim’s chest and Hare covering the mouth. The bodies were taken at once to Professor Robert Knox, who paid from £7 to £14 for each fresh, pink corpse.”

“Hare escaped hanging by turning king’s evidence and offering to testify against his friend and partner. This proved unnecessary, as Burke made a full confession and was swiftly hanged. His body was delivered to another anatomy school for dissection, and pieces of his skin were pickled and for years handed out as keepsakes to favored visitors.

Hare spent only a couple of months in prison before being released, though his fate was not a happy one. He took a job at a lime kiln, where his co-workers recognized him and thrust his face into a heap of quicklime, permanently blinding him. He is thought to have spent his last years as a wandering beggar. Some reports had him returning to Ireland, others place him in America, but how long he lived and where he was buried are unknown.

All this gave a great spur to an alternative way of disposing of bodies that was surprisingly controversial in the nineteenth century: cremation. The cremation movement had nothing to do with religion or spirituality. It was all about creating a practical way to get rid of a lot of bodies in a clean, efficient, and nonpolluting manner.”

“The ancient Greeks were devoted bathers. 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.”

“In the Middle Ages the spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene and what they might do to modify their own susceptibility to outbreaks. Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapors to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years most people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it — and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everyone itched nearly all the time. Discomfort was constant, and serious illness was accepted with resignation.”

“Benjamin Franklin tried another tack. During his years in London, he developed the custom of taking “air baths,” basking naked in front of an open upstairs window. This can’t have got him any cleaner, but it seems to have done him no harm and it must at least have given the neighbors something to talk about.”

“What really got the Victorians to turn to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing. The Victorians had a kind of instinct for self-torment, and water became a perfect way to make that manifest. Many diaries record how people had to break the ice in their washbasins in order to ablute in the morning, and the Reverend Francis Kilvert noted with pleasure how jagged ice clung to the side of his bath and pricked his skin as he merrily bathed on Christmas morning 1870. Showers, too, had great scope for punishment, and were often designed to be as powerful as possible. One early type of shower was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.”

“The Romans were particularly attached to the combining of evacuation and conversation. Their public latrines generally had twenty seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus. (To answer an inevitable question, a channel of water ran across the floor in front of each row of seats; users dipped sponges attached to sticks into the water for purposes of wiping.) Being comfortable with strangers lasted far into modern times. Hampton Court contained a “Great House of Ease” that could accommodate fourteen users at once. Charles Il always took two attendants with him when he went into the lavatory. Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, has a lovingly preserved privy with two seats side by side.”

“The French from 1770 called an indoor toilet un lieu à l’anglaise, or “an English place,” which would seem a potential explanation for where the English word loo comes from.”

“Troubled that there were almost no public lavatories in London, he devised a plan to place public toilets at critical spots throughout the city. By collecting urine and collecting it as an industrial product (stale urine was viral to the processing of alum, for one thing), he calculated that each urinal could produce 48 pounds of income a year, a very handsome return.”

“By 1940, an American could buy an entire bath suite – sink, bath, and toilet-for $70, a price nearly everyone could afford.

Elsewhere, however, baths remained luxuries. 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.”

The Dressing Room

“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.”

“The fourth principal fabric was silk. Silk was a rare luxury, literally worth its weight in gold. Accounts of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly always dwell on the way criminals were imprisoned or transported to Australia for the theft of a handkerchief or packet of lace or some other seeming trifle, but in fact these were often items of great value. A pair of silk stockings could cost £5 and a packet of lace could sell for £20 — enough to live on for a couple of years and an exceedingly serious loss to any shopkeeper. A silk cloak would cost £50 — well beyond the means of any but the highest nobility.”

“With these few materials, and some trimmings like feathers and ermine, people managed to make wondrous outfits — so much so that by the fourteenth century rulers felt it necessary to introduce what were known as sumptuary laws, to limit what people wore. Sumptuary laws laid down with fanatical precision what materials and colors of fabric a person could wear. In Shakespeare’s day, someone with an income of £20 a year was permitted to wear a satin doublet but not a satin gown, while someone worth £100 a year had no restrictions on satin, but could wear velvet only on doublets and then so long as the velvet wasn’t crimson or blue — colors reserved for people of still higher status.”

“Sumptuary laws were enacted partly to keep people within their class, but partly also for the good of domestic industries, since they were often designed to depress the importation of foreign materials. That’s why for a time there was a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping national capmakers through a depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons, Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. Although various clothing restrictions were enshrined in statutes in 1337, 1363, 1463, 1483, 1510, 1533, and 1554, records show they were never much enforced. They were repealed altogether in 1604.”

“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.”

“All wigs tended to be scratchy, uncomfortable, and hot, particularly in summer. To make them more bearable, many men shaved their heads, so we should be surprised to see many famous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century figures as their wives saw them first thing in the morning. It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn’t afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.

Wigs took a lot of maintenance. Once every week or so they had to be sent out to have their buckles (from the French boules, meaning curls), reshaped on heated rollers, and possibly baked in an oven, a process known as fluxing. From about 1700, for reasons that had nothing to do with common sense or practicality, it became fashionably necessary to place on one’s head a daily snowfall of white powder.

The main powdering agent was simple flour. When wheat harvests failed in France in the 1770s, there were riots all over as starving people realized that diminished supplies of flour were not being baked into bread, but were instead being used to powder the privileged heads of aristocrats. By the late eighteenth century, hair powders were commonly colored — blue and pink were especially popular — and scented, too.

Powdering could be done while the wig was on a wooden stand, but it was widely agreed that maximum stylishness was achieved by powdering the wig while it was on. The procedure required the owner to don his wig, cover his shoulders and upper body with a cloth, and stick his face in a paper funnel (to avoid choking) while a servant or frisseur armed with a bellows dispensed clouds of powder onto his head.”

“Women, meanwhile, took wig wearing literally to another level — building their hair up on a wire scaffolding known as a pallisade or commode. By mixing greased wool and horsehair with their own hair, they could attain truly monumental heights. Female wigs sometimes rose as much as two and a half feet, making the average wearer roughly seven and a half feet tall. When traveling to engagements, they often had to sit on the floor of their carriages or ride with their heads out the windows. At least two fatalities were attributed to women’s hair catching fire after brushing against chandeliers.”

“Many slept with their necks on special wooden blocks to keep their hairstyles elevated and undisturbed. One consequence of failing to wash was that their hair often swarmed with insects, particularly weevils. One woman reportedly miscarried when she discovered that mice were nesting in her upper decks.”

“In the same period it became fashionable to wear artificial moles, know as mouches. Gradually these artificial patches took on shapes, like stars or crescent moons, which were worn on the face, neck, and shoulders. One lady is recorded as sporting a coach and six horses galloping across her cheeks. At the peak of the fashion, people wore a superabundance of mouches until they must have looked rather as if they were covered in flies. Patches were worn by men as well as women, and were said to reflect one’s political leanings by whether they were worn on the right cheek (Whigs) or left cheek (Tories). Similarly, a heart on the right cheek signaled that the wearer was married, and on the left cheek that he or she was engaged.”

“It became briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin.”

“Men wore makeup too, and indeed for a century or so were inclined to display breathtaking effeminacy, sometimes in the most unexpected circumstances. Louis XIV’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, “in spite of being one of history’s most famous sodomites,” in the startlingly forthright words of the historian Nancy Mitford, was a brave soldier, but an unorthodox one. He would arrive at the battlefield “painted, powdered, all his eyelashes stuck together, covered with ribbons and diamonds,” Mitford wrote in The Sun King. “He would never wear a hat for fear of flattening his wig. Once in action he was as brave as a lion, only afraid of what the sun and dust might do to his complexion.” Men as well as women festooned their hair with plumes and feathers, and tied ribbons to each bouncing curl. Some men took to wearing high-heeled shoes — not clunky platform shoes, but slender, spiky heels up to six inches high — and to carrying furry muffs to keep their hands warm. Some carried parasols in the summer. Nearly all drenched themselves in perfume.”

“When word got out that the withered and miserly Marquis of Queensberry, who lived nearby, was also in the habit of taking milk baths, milk sales in the district plummeted because it was rumored that he returned the milk for resale after he had immersed his crusty and decrepit skin in it.”

“The one sartorial area in which dandies did stand out, as it were, was in their trousers. Pantaloons were often worn tight as paint and were not a great deal less revealing, particularly as they were worn without underwear. The night after seeing the Count d’Orsay, Jane Carlyle noted in her diary, perhaps just a touch breathlessly, that the count’s pantaloons were “skin-coloured and fitting like a glove.” The style was based on the riding trousers of Brummell’s regiment. Jackets were tailored with tails in back, but were cut away in front so that they perfectly framed the groin. It was the first time in history that men’s apparel was consciously designed to be more sexy than women’s.”

“Although some cotton was grown in Egypt, India dominated the cotton trade, as we are reminded by the endless numbers of words that came into English from there: khaki, dungarees, gingham, muslin, pajamas, shawl, seersucker, and so on.”

“A popular periodical approvingly recorded in 1866 how the boarders at one girls’ school were strapped into their corsets on a Monday morning and left constrained until Saturday, when they were allowed to ease the stays for an hour “for purposes of ablution.” Such a regime, the magazine noted, allowed the average girl to reduce her waist size from twenty-three inches to thirteen in just two years.”

Conclusion

“In the worst circumstances, children were sometimes given the most backbreaking of jobs. Those as young as six, of both sexes, were put to work in mines, where their small frames allowed them access to tight spaces. Because of the heat and to save their clothes, they often worked naked. (Grown men also traditionally worked naked; women usually worked naked to the waist.) For much of the year, those who worked in mines never saw sunlight, which left many stunted and weak from vitamin D deficiencies. Even comparatively light labor was often dangerous. Children in the ceramics factories of the Potteries in the Midlands cleaned out pots containing residues of lead and arsenic, inducing a slow poisoning that condemned many to eventual paralysis, palsies, and seizures.

The least envied child workers of all were the chimney sweeps, or “climbing boys,” as they were also known. They started earlier, worked harder, and died sooner than any other group. Most began their short careers at about the age of five, though the records show one boy articled into the profession at three and a half, an age at which even the simplest tasks must have been confusing and frightening. Little boys were needed because flues were tight and often wildly convoluted.”

“One method of encouraging the boys not to slack was to light a pile of straw in the grate to send a blast of heat up the chimney after them. Many climbing boys ended their short careers stooped and ruined by the age of eleven or twelve. Cancer of the scrotum seems to have been a particular occupational hazard.”

“Until well into the nineteenth century children received almost nothing in the way of legal protection. Before 1814, no law forbade the theft of a child, for instance. In Middlesex in 1802, a woman named Elizabeth Salmon, after abducting a child named Elizabeth Impey, was charged with stealing the child’s cap and gown because that was the only part of the offense that was illegal.”

“Toddlers sometimes survived on what fell on the floor or what they could otherwise scavenge. By the time they were seven or eight, many children were sent out onto the streets to fend for themselves.”

“To make sure that the poor were never rewarded for their idleness, the new workhouses were made as strict and joyless as possible. Husbands were separated from wives, children from their parents. At some workhouses inmates were required to wear prison-style uniforms. Food was calculatedly grim. (“On no account must the diet be superior or equal to the ordinary mode of subsistence of the labouring classes of the neighbourhood,” decreed the commissioners.) Conversation in dining halls and during hours of work was forbidden. All hope of happiness was ruthlessly banished.

Inmates had to perform hours of daily work to earn their meals and shelter. One common task was picking oakum. Oakum was old rope that had been heavily coated in tar to make it usable for ships’ caulking. To pick it was simply to disentangle strands so that they could be reused. It was hard and unpleasant work — the stiff fibers could inflict painful cuts — and agonizingly slow. At Poplar Workhouse in East London male inmates were required to pick five and a half pounds of oakum per day — a quota nearly twice that imposed on prison convicts. Those who failed to achieve their targets were put on a reduced diet of bread and water. By 1873, two-thirds of the inmates at Poplar were on short rations. At Andover Workhouse in Hampshire, where inmates were made to crush bones for fertilizer, they were said to be so permanently famished that they sucked the bones to get at the marrow.”

“In practice, the workhouses could only hold so many people — no more than about a fifth of England’s paupers at any one time. The rest of the nation’s indigent survived on “outdoor relief” — small sums to help with rent and food. Collecting these sums was sometimes made almost impossibly difficult. C. S. Peel notes the case of an unemployed shepherd in Kent-”an honest and industrious man, out of work through no fault of his own” — who was required to make a round trip of twenty-six miles on foot each day to collect paltry relief of one shilling and sixpence for himself, his wife, and five children. The shepherd made the trudge daily for nine weeks before eventually collapsing from weakness and hunger. In London, a woman named Annie Kaplan, left to bring up six children after her husband died, was told that she could not support six children on the meager sum she was to receive and was instructed to nominate two children to send to an orphanage. Kaplan refused. “If four’ll starve, six’ll starve.” she declared. “If I have a piece of bread for four, I’lI have a piece of bread for six…. I’m not giving anybody away.” The authorities entreated her to reconsider, but she would not, so they gave her nothing at all. What became of her and her children is unknown.”

“Augustus Pitt Rivers was a large and intimidating figure with a fiery temper at the end of a very short fuse who presided imperiously over an estate of twenty-seven thousand acres called Rushmore, near Salisbury. He was notoriously mean-spirited. His wife once invited local villagers to Rushmore for a Christmas party, and was heartbroken when no one turned up. What she didn’t know was that her husband, learning of her plans, had sent a servant to padlock the estate gates.”

“In 1883, the London and South-Western Railway announced plans to run a line through the heart of the Stonehenge site. When people complained, a railway official countered that Stonehenge. was “entirely out of repair, and not the slightest use to anyone now.””

“Upon reaching adulthood, Lubbock followed his father into banking, but his heart was in science. He was a tireless, if slightly eccentric, experimenter. Once he spent three months trying to teach his dog to read. Developing an interest in archaeology, he learned Danish because Denmark was then the world leader in the field. His particular interest in insects led him to keep a colony of bees in his sitting room, the better to study their habits.”

“The National Trust rescued some two hundred other houses over the course of the century, and a few survived by turning themselves into tourist attractions — not always entirely smoothly at first. A grandmother at one stately home, Simon Jenkins relates in England’s Thousand Best Houses, refused to leave one of the rooms whenever horse racing was on the television. “She was voted the best exhibit,” Jenkins adds.”