A History of Private Life, Or So He Says

There is a bit of history in every room, or so Bill Bryson claims in his 2010 book At Home: A Short History of Private Life. To show us what he means, he takes us to the rooftop of an English rectory and promises to “wander from room to room and consider how each has featured in the evolution of private life. The bathroom would be a history of hygiene, the kitchen of cooking, the bedroom of sex and death and sleeping, and so on” (p.8). For him, the novelty is all there, to “write a history of the world without leaving home” (ibid.). Unfortunately, if you haven’t been living under a rock, this is all stuff you’ve seen before. In the dressing room, we get a condensed version of British imperialism and the cotton trade that reads like a well-written wikipedia page. In the bathroom, we get a rehash of who in history loved to bathe and who loathed it, followed by the faintest nod of all nods to Ignaz Semmelweis who ‘invented’ hand-washing. 

    Basically, it took great self-restraint to not constantly roll my eyes. Yes, I know. So what? Where is the promised sociological commentary on how these changes in the past have shaped our ideas about rest, comfort, privacy, protection and ownership, all of which are embodied in the image of the house? I don’t need another retelling of Victorian ladies being suffocated by their corsets. I do, however, want to know about the materialist history of Victorian fashion as a means of understanding and interpreting personal boundaries in polite society. 

    It’s also quite telling that I find the bibliography section more fascinating than the content itself. It serves to show there have already been numerous books published on the subject, and that we really don’t need this one that ends up feeling like a ginormous waste of time.