Soon after Bill Bryson moved into his new home, a former Church of England rectory in an unidentified village in Norfolk, he climbed up to the attic to identify “a slow mysterious drip”. There he discovered a door that led to a small terrace which seemed utterly purposeless but provided an unexpected and wonderful view of the countryside. Apart from a tractor in the distance, the scene had remained unchanged through the centuries with ordinary people going about the business of living on that timeless tract of land. It occurred to him that the history of ordinary people and things could be developed into a fascinating story. As he sat at the dining table, he wondered how little he knew about the domestic world around him. He had absolutely no idea why, out of all the spices in the world, human beings could have such abiding interest in salt and pepper to keep them on the kitchen table or why forks always had four tines and what was board in “room and board”. “Suddenly the house seemed a place of mystery to me.”
Thus begins a remarkable, eccentric and witty history of nearly everything about the way we live, the things we eat, how we keep ourselves clean and warm and all the things that make us comfortable. In the process, it becomes a story of exploration, discovery and innovation, a story that requires indomitable curiosity and verbal skill that a rare individual like Bryson possesses. With a clever sleight of hand of the master storyteller, he observes that “houses are not refuges from history; they are where history ends up”. He invites the reader to explore the rectory with him: the hall, the kitchen, the scullery and larder, the drawing room, the bedroom, and all the other spaces that were laid out in the original floor-plan in the design for the building made in mid-19th century. Each of these spaces has a story to tell and the objects within them have their own histories. The chapters are named after them which begin in the Hall and end at the Attic, giving the book its quirky architecture.
The Old Rectory in Norfolk, to which we shall be attached for most part of the book, was built in 1851, the year of the opening of the Great Exhibition in London housed in the Crystal Palace, a shimmering hall of glass and iron, a Victorian architectural marvel. It was conceived and built within five months by Joseph Paxton, a gardener by profession to whom the organisers had turned when they had exhausted all options. The Crystal Palace withstood a devastating storm making glass and iron two essential ingredients of buildings of the future. Two things preoccupy Bryson in these initial pages, the history of human dwelling and the life of the Victorian clergy, the latter because the Norfolk rectory had been built for Thomas Marsham, a young clergyman and its first occupant, and now, 150 years later, this is the house that we are about to explore.
The scene is set and we cross the threshold of the rectory and step into the hall. It is also as if we have stepped into a time machine and a teleporter because for 500-odd pages we will travel through time and cross continents with an affable, idiosyncratic janus-like guide. For a long time, as Bryson explains, the hall was the house and “rooms” as we understand them today, entered the English vocabulary only around the time of the Tudors and now the word “hall” has come to mean a shrunken vestibule with hooks and cupboards. “No room has fallen further in history than the hall.”
As we move into the kitchen, a detail worth remembering is that we have left our outerwear in the hall and in that sense we have stepped into the space where the house truly begins. But even as the chapter begins, we are far away from the Norfolk rectory kitchen in 1851. We are watching Samuel Pepys, in 1662, staring at his plate of sturgeon creeping with worms. Through the centuries, human beings were struggling with nature to preserve food till suddenly in the 1840s a miracle product came along and caused a great deal of excitement. It is an unexpectedly familiar thing today: ice, and with it the concept of refrigeration, which not only changed our eating habit but influenced trade and commerce as never before. Food could be moved great distances without fear of contamination. Elsewhere in the book, Bryson dwells on the unchanging nature of our diet, 93 per cent of what we eat today was cultivated and eaten by our Neolithic ancestors — corn, rice, wheat, potato, millet, beans, cassava, barley, rye and oats. “We remain in a fundamental way Stone Age people.”
Let us pause the narrative for a moment and consider how Bryson goes about developing the book. He has set himself a constraint by following the floor plan of the rectory. At the outset, he mentions that he would have to be painfully selective. His digressions have to finally link up with the theme; the past has to bear upon the specific present which in the book is a house in the middle of the 19th century. Our present is largely the future in the story. Bryson pursues seemingly unconnected and different historical strands in each chapter and finds unexpected connections. This is the real pleasure of reading At Home. For us a rat trap is such an ordinary and somewhat unpleasant thing but Bryson begins the chapter called “The Study” with a detailed description of the invention of the mousetrap known as the Little Nipper in 1897 by James Henry Atkinson. Bryson calls it one of the great contraptions of history and later events described in the chapter bear this out. From rats the transition to the Great Plague and other vermin that lived in the Study and continue to torment our homes, is perfectly logical. The Little Nipper sold in millions but poor Atkinson got only £1,000 for his patent; a typical ironic Brysonian aside.
Towards the middle of the book, there is a long chapter on a gloomy passage in the rectory. Bryson begins the chapter with the building of the Eiffel Tower, the most striking and imaginative structure of the 19th century. It was also the last of the great edifices to be built of iron. Soon, steel would replace iron and the world would also witness the beginning of the Gilded Age of America. Bryson takes us back to the passage, points to a niche in the wall, of little use in 1851, which would hold one of the miracles of American inventions, the telephone. This, then, is the tenuous link that holds the chapter together. Readers familiar with English literary history will not fail to recognise the distinctive echo of the poetic idiom of some 17th-century English poets who discovered likeness in the most unlikely things leading to a more sophisticated understanding of a theme.
As we have sauntered from the garden to the dining room, climbed up the stairs (there is an entire chapter on the stairs, “the most dangerous part of the house”), to the bedroom, the nursery, the dressing room, the bathroom and finally back to the attic, we have travelled through remote centuries and distant worlds discovering exotic plants that beautify the English garden and aromatic spices which have flavoured their food and have met the people who risked the dangers of the high seas and the Amazon rain forests in search of these things. We have seen high life and the dark underbelly of Victorian London, the world of Beau Brummell, the arbiter of men’s fashion in Regency England, and the other world of the chimney sweeps and the night soil men.
At Home contains some of the quirkiest and funniest anecdotes. This reviewer is unlikely to ever forget why the famous Victorian art critic, John Ruskin’s wife, sought annulment of her marriage with him soon after their wedding night or the name of Thomas Crapper, who amassed great wealth for his innovation of the flush toilet and by a strange twist of fate became associated with an American lavatorial slang which has an utterly different origin. Apart from its historical intent borne out by the 15-page formidable bibliography, the book is a trivia hunter’s delight and a collection of memorable anecdotes. It is an object lesson in how to make stodgy social history into a bestseller.