Monday 14 June 2010

At Home: A Short History Of Private Life

A Note from the author.

Hello.

Early in the course of my research for my new book I learned that houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house.

Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked in to the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes.

Houses aren't refuges from history, as I hope you are about to discover in At Home. They are where history ends up.

Bill Bryson

4 comments:

  1. Dreadfully written book full of lazy mistakes. Here is just a small selection of those I found:




    87 “…when she [Mrs Beeton] died of puerpal fever”
    Mrs. Beeton died of tertiary syphilis, having been infected with this on her wedding night by her husband Sam, who was a notorious libertine.

    P109 “5 Great Cheyne Row”
    No such address exists or has ever existed. The Carlyles lived at 5 Cheyne Row. There is an Upper Cheyne Row but no Great Cheyne Row.

    P 112 – 113
    On 112, Pepys’ diary is said to cover 9 ½ years, and on 113, only 8 ½ years

    P 116 “At the bottom of the servant heap were laundrymaids”
    Laundering may have been thankless but it wasn’t unskilled. Because of the processes described on this page and the following, laundrymaids generally had to undertake specific training and were usually highly qualified in their field. The lowest female servant in the 18th and 19th centuries was the scullerymaid, or in more modest households, the maid-of-all-work.

    P168 “..where he built a 154-foot tower”.
    Beckford’s Tower is 120 feet tall cf: http://www.bath-preservation-trust.org.uk/index.php?id=39

    P 178 “Traditional cruet stands came with …three matching casters”
    There is no tradition for the number of casters and bottles in a cruet set.

    P 191 “five domesticated creatures”
    The deer was widely domesticated in Mesoamerica, bringing the above total to six

    P275 “he [Bridgeman] designed and laid out Stowe..”
    The gardens at Stowe pre-date Bridgeman by a good 15 years, although no trace of anything pre-Bridgeman survives.

    P 277 “bedding plants”
    The concept of mass planting of brightly coloured annual plants shortly before they flower was completely unknown in 18th century England, as were the plants themselves. Even the term itself is a Victorian neologism

    P282 “Both were the sons of tenant farmers”
    There is no evidence to suggest that either the fathers of Lancelot Brown or Joseph Paxton were tenant farmers. Brown’s antecedents are completely unknown, there in no mention of Paxton Senior’s name in either the rent books for the Woburn Estate or in the land tax records of the area. It is therefore considerably unlikely that Paxton Senior was a farmer of any kind, more likely a common labourer.

    “..and so he acquired his famous nickname”.
    Unfortunately an urban myth. In the estate records for Stowe, Lord Cobham refers to Brown several times as “the very capable Mr. Brown”. In any case, “capability” merely means the quality of being capable, and landscapes are not individually capable.

    P285 “Just as Capability Brown was rejecting flowers…”
    It is commonly supposed that England during the 18th century was devoid of flowers. Mark Laird’s “The Flowering of the Landscape Garden” proves conclusively that this was not so. Brown himself designed flower gardens, notably at Brocklesby Hall in Lincolnshire, plans of which are reproduced in Laird.

    289 “description of a steam lawnmower”
    The machine actually described is a “steam plough” which I suppose one might call a tractor.

    294 “municipal park – Birkenhead”
    Birkenhead Park didn’t open until 1847, four years after Loudon’s death.

    P389 “…the neighbourhood around Broad Street”
    There is no Broad Street in Soho. The correct address is Broadwick Street.

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  2. I loved this book, we have a signed copy which the whole family has read. My review of it is up here.

    - Bristol Bookworm

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  3. A glaring error is the comment that Pepys diaries were held at the Bodlean Library, Oxford, whereas they are housed at the famous Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Pepys was a student.

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  4. I loved this book too. Incredibly interesting and full of fascinating stories. A couple of thoughts regarding unanswered questions in the book: could the mystery third canister/castor on the dining table have contained sugar? Later in the book, you mention that the British adored sugar and used it on practically everything including savory items. Possibly the reason that castor sugar was so named. Secondly, regarding the question of why the early English didn't use the already built Roman houses and preferred to build their own more primitive homes, could it have been the fear of infection from a contagious disease such as smallpox that still resided in the buildings? Perhaps that's why the Romans deserted England so quickly and left behind much of their life. Could the new settlers have known of the danger? Just some ideas...

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