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At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Bill Bryson’s book At Home is a great holiday gift, possibly for yourself, and it’s available as an eBook, hardback, paperback, or audio (read by the author). So you can decide whether this is a lavish gift or more of a stocking stuffer. Whatever option you choose, the book is a delight.

The reliably funny and intelligent Bryson was inspired to write At Home by the Victorian parsonage that he and his family live in. In At Home, he tours his house room by room, tracing history through habitation. It’s completely fascinating and, because Bryson is so funny and personable, it’s never dry. Bryson focuses on the year 1851, the year that the house was built, but he gives himself some latitude to talk about developments before and after that period. Topics include, but are not limited to, hygiene (“The Bathroom”), food (“The Kitchen”), work (“The Scullery and Larder”), children (“The Nursery”), and pests (“The Study”).

Romance readers might be especially interested in “The Dressing Room,” which is about clothing and fashion. They will also will no doubt be intrigued by “The Bedroom,” which discusses hygiene, pests again, comfort, sleep, sex, medicine, and death. It contains this quote from a Victorian author for us to cherish,

Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months or even years before she should.

People who already study history will probably not find much new stuff in this book, but it’s a great overview of the Victorian Era and why our domestic lives today are the way they are. Bryson has a talent for conveying a lot of information in an entertaining, accessible way, as seen in A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything. This is a fun book with a lot of details on Victorian life. You will not want to time travel after you read this, but you will want to go see his house.

– Carrie S

In “AT HOME”, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose, and masterful storytelling that made “A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING” one of the most lauded books of the last decade. He delivers one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live.

Bill Bryson was struck one day by the thought that we devote a lot more time to studying the battles and wars of history than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business—eating, sleeping and merely endeavouring to get more comfortable. Also, that most of the key discoveries of humankind can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live. This inspired him to start a journey around his own house, an old rectory in Norfolk, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. Along the way he did a prodigious amount of research on the history of anything and everything, from architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the spice trade to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets; and on the brilliant, creative and often eccentric minds behind them.

He discovered that, although there may seem to be nothing as unremarkable as our domestic lives, there is a huge amount of history, interest and excitement—and even a little danger—lurking in the corners of every home.