Book Review: At Home: A Short History of Private Life

When I posted on a social network a photograph of a few remaining savouries and other treats from last month’s Blokes Book Club, an old solicitor friend of mine expressed relief that Blokes Book Club actually existed and was not a mere literary fiction invented to add interest to reviews otherwise lacking that important ingredient. The evidence points both ways. First, my friend credits me with more imagination than I am likely ever to display. On the other hand, if the Blokes are inventions, I might just as easily gone to great pains to photograph some random empty dip dishes and large piles of pistachio shells from another event in order to create a false verisimilitude.

I assure you, hands on heart, that the Blokes are real live, book reading and discussing club members.

The savouries had been provided by Brett, a man whose work day job involves ensuring that, come flood, tsunami, or massive computer crash, our taxes will still be able to be collected and, on the bright side, that our refunds, if any, will still be able to be refunded. He may be a logisticsist (which seems unwieldy) or a disaster planner (which seems actually the opposite of what he does).

The savouries were good, that night. As usual, I was the only one who came direct from work. Therefore, I was the only one who wore a tie. I was also the only member who ate, oafishly, like he had not eaten for six hours (which was approximately true). The evidence of that is in the photo called “Blokes’ Book Club: all that’s left”.

Brett (and Annie’s) oldest is the same age as our youngest and they were classmates and friends. Their house is in the Grange, once part of an area known for its saleyards, tanneries and fellmongers.2 The house is full of cosy spots to conduct a meeting of bookclubbers. On this occasion, since it was a cold evening in May, we met at a table in a large kitchen dining area. Their house has a wonderful arbour in the back yard which would be brilliant on a summer evening.

If I seem to be rambling, it is because I have fallen under the influence of Bill Bryson. At Home might have been called A Short History of Anything I Can Vaguely Link to Houses or, maybe, Everything I Haven’t Already Dealt With in Enough Detail in my Other Books. The point is that it may be fairly accused of the odd ramble at various times within the 500 odd pages.

The thesis of At Home is that our living spaces are not immune from history. Rather, history is reflected in every aspect of our domestic lives and the spaces in which we live them. The thesis is, undoubtedly, true. Equally valid is the didactic message that we can often miss the things of interest that lie under our noses. We can imagine that exciting things happen elsewhere and do not affect us.

The opening of At Home is both fascinating and brilliant. Bryson takes the year 1851 as pivotal. The year is linked by the Great Exhibition in London and the construction of the old rectory in which Bryson and his family spend their lives.

The star of the Great Exhibition was the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace was a staggeringly different and beautiful building, built of glass and iron, airy, full of light and a delight to be within. The designer was an improbable hero who had sprung from poor farming stock and had become, at a young age, the head gardener for the fabulously rich Duke of Devonshire and done extremely well in the position

The Crystal Palace was based on Paxton’s design for hothouses for the Duke but was an extremely large version thereof. The Crystal Palace made the Exhibition a great success. It was the first occasion that England’s hoi polloi got to mix with their social betters and England felt much happier with itself as a result.

Meanwhile, the rectory was being designed and built in rural Norfolk for the twenty-nine year old, Reverend Marsham. Neither the house nor Mr. Marsham seems to have been a great success although both lasted. The house seems, by the end of the book, a rather dingy affair. Mr. Marsham seems to have done almost nothing memorable in his long lifetime. He did keep the same female housekeeper for a very long time and speculation is not discouraged that they comforted one another in ways considered at the time more befitting man and wife than rector and housekeeper.

The old rectory is the conceit on which the structure of the book is, in a very loose manner, built. After the first two chapters, each chapter is named for a room in the house. Each such chapter provides a little more information about the house; about the respective lives of Marsham and his housekeeper on the one hand, and Bryson and his family on the other; and, purportedly, heaps about the history of all the sorts of things that one might find in that room. The problem in practice is that the things that Bryson wants to tell us about are, in most chapters, only very loosely connected to the room in question. The result is a very loosely confined history of “almost everything else” which, from time to time, suddenly remembers that it is supposed to have a carefully worked out structure and theme.

The first great wandering off concerned the social position of Anglican clergymen in 1851. Bryson points out that any clergyman who obtained “a living” was entitled to a regular income from the landowners of the district based on an established percentage of the land’s value. In return, the rector or vicar was obliged to do very little. Even a regular Sunday sermon seems to have been a loose obligation. This history of the economic life of clergymen is followed until their decline with the decline of English agriculture in the late nineteenth century.

The result, however, of the clergyman’s social and economic position was a lot of well off, well educated, underemployed men many of whom were tempted to turn their free time and considerable income to other aspects of human endeavour. Bryson lists a few of the extraordinary achievements of the English clergy including the breeding of the eponymous Jack Russell terrier and the discovery of the Bayes’ theorem in statistical mathematics.

Not surprisingly, whole houses became a prominent theme of At Home. David, who is seeking his practising certificate from the Bar Association as I write, came up with the pithy phrase that the book was mainly about people with too much money spending it in the most tasteless manner they can think of or “rich horrible people doing horrible things”. There are, indeed, a lot of tales about owners, houses and architects in At Home that meet that description.

Stories of architects are not all bad, however. Palladio, a sixteenth century architect from the Republic of Venice designed a lot of very beautiful buildings and then, in retirement, wrote The Four Books of Architecture. Bryson points out that, although Palladio’s work is restricted to a small area of northern Italy, his works look familiar on first meeting because of the extensive influence of Palladio’s ideas. The great public buildings of the United States, including the White House, might as well have been designed by Palladio. Having made this interesting point, At Home spends a lot of words examining the houses built, with the Four Books at hand, by amateur but well-heeled architects, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington,.

At Home is very much a history of the development of technology. It follows closely, also, the social impacts of the same technology. The chapter on the kitchen is, indeed, about developments in food. The expensive and murderous trade in spices, the accidental discovery of America by Columbus, and the huge impact of domesticated foods from the Americas on the cuisines of European peoples will be as surprising to many readers as it is interesting. Who could imagine, we might ask rhetorically, Italian cooking without the tomato or the Irish without access to the potato.

At Home is at its best when it engages in social history. The reader is invited to imagine the paucity of light in the long dark nights that preceded both gas and electricity. We meet heroes like John Snow (who may not ever have bowled a cricket ball in anger) who, singlehandedly and single-mindedly, discovered that cholera was caused by drinking infected water and was hated for his efforts. Another great hero is Joseph Bazelgette, a railway engineer, who succeeded, ahead of time and under budget, in re-sewering London in the mid-1870s.

An objective of writing is to entertain and en-trance the reader with each passing word or sentence. At the end of the volume, however, the experience depends on a sense that each word, each line and each page is part of a well-thought and beautifully crafted whole. The result of failing the second requirement will often be a sense of lost promise.

At Home comes close to breaking these rules. It is a book that is bursting at the seams. The focus on 1851 is a beautiful idea but it is insufficient to anchor the greater whole. The idea of a history of ordinary life themed by rooms in an old rectory is clever but fails to provide coherence. History cannot always be told in a chronological way. However, this reviewer found himself struggling to locate the current anecdote or invention as before or after the half dozen such anecdotes that had preceded it. At Home fails the test of the beautifully crafted whole.

However, Bryson’s mastery of engaging prose; his ability to find the interesting side of each historical event (Columbus was a bumbler and Vasco da Gama was a sadistic psychopath); and the wealth of ideas that pour from his pen make the structural failures almost irrelevant. One reads in puzzlement as the narrative extends far and wide. One wonders why such an accomplished writer can show such little discipline.

But, in the end, to a man, the Blokes enjoyed At Home. We would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who enjoys history.

And, ironically, despite the plethora of characters, facts and anecdotes, At Home does give a sense of connection and continuity. The decline of the English countryside is connected to the rise of farming in the mid-west of the United States. And the rise of refrigerated rail transport is responsible for each of them in that it linked the food bowl of the mid-west to the sea board ports and so undercut and stole the livelihood of farmers in both Britain and New England. In turn, English vicars, no longer, could afford to write short sermons and spend the rest of the week discovering a cure for athlete’s foot. And so, the great contribution to dog breeding and mathematics came to an end.

I have a personal reason to thank Bill Bryson for writing At Home. He cites a book on several occasions that I had read nearly three decades earlier. The academic historian who served as the librarian of the US Congress from 1975 to 1987, Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Discoverers is one of the most interesting and beautifully written histories I have read. As the title suggests, the book is about discovery and its different forms. So, great navigators are examined in detail. So are the great physicists and chemists. Less obvious discoveries such as the accurate measurement of time take their place in the Pantheon.

So, I also recommend At Home. But also look for The Discoverers. No nagging sense of dissatisfaction, however slight, will accompany your reading of Boorstin’s masterpiece.

Footnotes

1. Doubleday is now known as Knopf Doubleday and is a division of Random House.
2. Barry Shaw, Wilston to Grange in Retrospect, in Brisbane History Group, Brisbane: Houses, Gardens, Suburbs and Congregations, 2010. A fellmonger is a dealer in hides and skins of animals. I visit a fellmonger every now and then to update my Ugg boots.