Travel writer Bill Bryson's latest book deals with home truths

In his latest book on ‘private life’, travel writer Bill Bryson brings his trademark wit and boundless curiosity to bear on everything, from the history of the drawing room to why forks have four tines.

The Bryson formula is as follows: read widely from a number of sources, look out for oddities and interesting trivia, add your own take, sprinkle it with humour, and the book is ready to be served. In Bryson’s hands, the formula works well, helping him churn out bestseller after bestseller.

Bryson applied this formula superbly in his previous book, A Short History Of Nearly Everything, which explained the evolution of science, and also in all the travelogues that he has written till date. He does that with his latest book as well.

At Home: A Short History Of Private Life supposedly deals with all objects and spaces that go into the making of a modern home. But what it actually does, and does well, is to curate trivia. The book runs into 536 pages. The bibliography alone, of 500 odd books, is 26 pages long, with names such as The Archeology Of Garbage and History Of Childbirth.

The wide reading helps Bryson marshal an impressive array of facts. Like the sexaholic rats, for instance. Did you know that “rats have a lot of sex — up to 20 times a day”? If a male rat cannot find a female rat he will find relief in a male. And this, when they sleep up to 20 hours in a day and seldom venture more than 150 feet from wherever they are. 

Or did you know that in the 1830s, guano (bird droppings) were in great demand to be used as fertiliser? Bryson writes, “Guano — bird droppings — had been used in Peru since the time of the Incas, and its efficacy had been remarked upon by explorers and travellers ever since…Once guano was discovered by outsiders, however, they couldn’t get enough of it…It killed the market for human waste. Previously, the people who emptied city cesspits…had sold their waste to farmers outside the cities...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.” The most interesting piece of trivia that Bryson unearths in the book is about the toilet seat. It seems research shows that the cleanest surface in the average house is the toilet seat. “That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface.

By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat…The dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink,” writes Bryson.

And continuing with more such useless facts, did you know that the Eiffel Tower is the largest, completely useless thing ever built? “It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t even commemorate a fallen hero…Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent and gloriously pointless at the same time.”

The book is divided into chapters named after the various rooms in a home — the kitchen, the dining room, the drawing room, etc. “Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up,” writes Bryson. He uses the floor plan of his own house, which was a Victorian country rectory, to unearth how the modern urban middle-class ‘home’ became what it is today.  

He reconstructs the history of each room. Take the case of the ‘drawing room’. Bryson explains, “The term is a shortening of the much older ‘withdrawing room’, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy.”

Besides such interesting factoids, Bryson also tries to answer basic questions like why forks have four tines rather than three, five or fifteen. “Manufacturers experimented with additional number of tines — sometimes as many as six — before settling, late in the nineteenth century, on four as the number that people most comfortable with.” 

Given Bryson’s penchant for trivia, the writing does deviate a fair bit from the chapter heading and goes into details — such as how New York was built or how churches in England used to make most of their money from burying (dead) human beings — which don’t have much to do with the topic at hand. But so long as the information is interesting, who is complaining?

While like all Bryson books this one too is a light, quick read, on the flip side, it is largely limited to happenings in Great Britain, the United States and parts of continental Europe. This is a serious limitation given the universalistic aspirations of the book’s title.

At Home is not for those who expect their books to be intellectually challenging. But if you are the kind who likes to settle down on the couch with a book and a cup of coffee while it’s raining outside, you’ll enjoy the company of this one.