At Home, Reading with Friends: Chapters 18-19, The Nursery and the Attic

Nicole

Bacon or a book? 

While wading through Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic, I leaned that in 1760s Williamsburg, for about the same amount of money, I could have purchased Thobias Smollett’s History (of England) or 30 hogs.¹  

I turned this proposition over in my mind for several days.  Did colonial-era Williamsburgers even eat bacon? (yep, click here to learn more about bacon in CW)  Would a woman like me have had more need for a lifetime supply of bacon and valuable livestock or several weeks' worth of reading (and possibly a lifetime of "social distinction")?

Just as some books surprise and deceive readers today, dummy boards surprised and deceived viewers in early America.  Dummy board -- Pig Feeding from a Bowl, Great Britain, 1750-1800, oil on wood, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, W.81-1926

I doubt that any historical Williamsburg, VA, woman ever paused to consider such a ridiculous choice.  (The answer is clear: borrow the book and buy the piggies.)  Yet even when some aspects of a book put you off (such as frequent appearances of words like hermeneutics and ontological), good books--like Warner's The Letters of the Republic and Bryson's At Home--give you something to think about. 

Regular readers know that I have given Bill Bryson’s At Home little praise.  I have deemed at least a handful of facts to be false or misleading.  I have questioned why a book that lends itself to good illustration provides little.  And I have lamented that Bryson missed grand interpretative opportunities embodied in the object that inspired the book: his own home.  Is it ironic that a book about private life leaves Bryson’s private life out of the picture entirely?  Perhaps I ask too much.

Despite all this, my disappointment with At Home reinforces my determination to write quality books that will appeal to my historian and public historian colleagues as well as to the general public.  And I did, in fact, learn some new things about material life along the way thanks to Bryson, and he deserves some credit for bringing the concept of historicizing private life to a twenty-first-century Barnes & Noble-browsing audience.

Bacon or Bryson?

Like my imagined 1760s Williamsburg maiden, ultimately, I'd borrow the book and buy the bacon.


Notes
1. Michel Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 26.

***And for those of you who are interested in Berlin work (which has been featured periodically on this blog), my article on the topic was recently published in Winterthur Portfolio.  ***

Tyler

Those of you who have followed our At Home adventure since it began over a year ago and those who have stopped in along the way have probably realized that Nicole and I often played a good cop/bad cop routine. And after finishing the book, I’m still inclined to give it good marks for effort. Did it have errors, missteps, simplifications, and a distinct carelessness in describing how things might have changed across the centuries? Yes. Bryson’s study, already read by countless book groups across America, will probably generate as many new false cocktail conversation factoids as it dispels. Sure, people weren’t really shorter back then, and not that many women actually died from catching their petticoats on fire and early Americans did not select “HL” hinges and “cross and Bible doors” to reflect their piety. But, I suppose, such stories will be told for some time to come whether or not people read At Home. Docents and everyday folks will tell them until they realize that history is too deep, rich, and complex to reduce to quips and quirks. Bryson might not have realized this, but in another way he hit the nail on the head.* At Home was more like following an old docent around an old house on an old tour than he could possibly have dreamed. So for those of us who enjoy a good read and an occasional flaw to expose, it wasn’t a bad read, either.     

*If this were At Home, this footnote would describe the etymology of the phrase. I’ll give Bryson one thing, he likes his words.

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home, Chapters 16-17: The Bathroom and the Dressing Room

Tyler

Nicole and I are a little tardy in our review of Bill Bryson’s At Home chapters on the bathroom and dressing room, probably the result of a combination of end-of-the-year business and a slight loss of momentum as we near the end of the book. These two chapters are as diverse as the past sections; in his discussion of bathrooms, Bryson introduces the reader to the histories of bathing, toilets, and water-borne diseases like cholera. In “The Dressing Room,” Bryson begins his discussion with Ötzi, the “Iceman” who died some five thousand years ago and was recovered in the Alps in 1991. Ötzi was one of the most unique prehistoric humans ever recovered because he died suddenly (from an arrow embedded in his back, as most recent studies conclude) and was left on the mountainside with all his clothing and equipment. Aside from the many unsolvable mysteries of Ötzi, his discovery provided an absolutely unparalleled glimpse into the material culture of ancient man, including clothing. Bryson uses Ötzi’s prehistoric revelations and mysteries as an introduction to the broader history of human dress, makeup, wigs, and other adornments. And, of course, no history of clothing would be complete without some nod to George “Beau” Brummell, the arbiter of fashion in the Regency era (Brummell was not “asexual” as Bryson states; in a recent biography, Ian Kelly makes the convincing case that Brummell died from an advanced case of syphilis). Cotton and underwear feature heavily in Bryson’s chapter as well, and I won’t spend time detailing factual missteps and over-generalizations.

 On a recent visit to our local public library (yes, they do still exist, and for good reason), I picked up a copy of At Home on CD, as read by Bryson himself. I was curious to hear the author read his own work because the book is often so conversational and meandering that it reminds one of a sort of Victorian after-dinner parlor talk. I was not disappointed, and Bryson’s prose is equally effective (if somewhat drowsy) in the spoken word. This is where his real genius lies, I believe. In synthesizing enormous troves of scholarly (and less-than-scholarly) literature, inaccuracies are inevitable. And maybe that’s part of the appeal. At Home should be looked upon less as an incontrovertible history and more as a casual digestion of subjects. I wouldn’t trust some of Bryson’s details any more than I would the innumerable trivial points, misconceptions, and urban legends that arise in a cocktail conversation, but they sure make for good listening.

Nicole

Today, we opt for "non-surgical cosmetic procedures for the face" or the application of creams and potions when it comes to turning back the clock or hiding unsightly acne.  But as Bryson explains in "The Bathroom," our early modern ancestors turned to less invasive solutions for these beauty crises.  Many applied beauty "patches" or pastes to hide (and sometimes call attention to) facial blemishes such as pimples, small pox scars, and syphilis scars (pg 386). It is believed that these beauty patches were made from fabric such as black silk into a variety of whimsical designs ranging from stars to horses.  Beau Brummell, for example, may very well have sported a prancing pony.  Patch boxes--which came in a variety of shapes and sizes--like the one pictured below stored these little whimsies.

Patch-box, Charles Gouyn's Factory, London, ca. 1749-1754, Porcelain, enamel, and gilt, 3.5 cm x 4.1 cm, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 414:277-1885.

Featuring a woman's face bespeckled with black marks, this patch box embodies the complex way eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century individuals conceived of beauty patches.  On this patch box, are the spots natural, or are they patched? If they are patches, what is the nature of what they are concealing?  Pierre-Joseph Boudier de Villemer's early nineteenth-century beauty guide suggested that using patches reflected a woman's desire to "change Nature by endeavouring too anxiously to improve it."¹ One mid-eighteenth-century commentator published his perspective on patches in a New York newspaper. Here, "Antiquo" suggested that patches concealed evidence of bad deeds but that patches were acceptable if they concealed more innocent blemishes like acne. Antiquo even saw patches as metaphors for "polite oaths" in speech. For example, phrases or patches such as "upon my soul" concealed or dressed-up more sinister sayings.²

We cannot be certain how the original user of this patch box thought about their own visage, but we can imagine the possibilities. From wigs to patches, Bryson's book sifts through hundreds of seemingly frivolous cultural phenomena that carry subterranean meanings when readers dig a little deeper.

Footnotes

1. Pierre-Joseph Boudier de Villemer, The Friend of Women: Translated from the French, trans. Alexander Morrice (Philadelphia: John Conrad and co, 1803), 81-82.

2. Antiquo, [opinion], New-York Gazette (New York), November 5, 1750.

Further Reading

For more on wigs, see Lynn Festa, "Personal Effects:  Wigs and Possessive Individualism,” Eighteenth-Century Life 29, 2  (2005):  47-90.

A Mousetrap of My Own

A few Sundays ago, Tyler and I ventured across the Delaware River to Salem, New Jersey, to go antiquing. We found an antique mall with lots of interesting stock and friendly staff who were ready to offer discounts and a joke. As we trolled the stalls, a man we had run into at another shop down the street crouched protectively over vintage records and other collectibles as if we were going to rip them out from underneath him. Unfazed, we proceeded through the stalls, chattering and picking stuff up, making notes of what we thought about buying and what we wanted to research.

Before we made it through a fifth of the booths, I was shocked to spot a wooden mousetrap like the one I wrote about a few months ago while discussing Bill Bryson's At Home.



Nicole's Mousetrap, 15.5" H x 17.25" W x 5.2" D.
Bryson pictured the "little nipper" trap James Henry Atkinson patented in 1897, but I wanted to find out what kind of mousetrap Mr. Marsham was likely to have used soon after moving into his home in the 1850s. So I posted an example of a mousetrap at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1800-1850), a handcrafted creation of wood and string. Yet I was not expecting to find one on a day of casual antiquing, as I gathered that these contraptions were somewhat rare. Indeed, the V&A explained that "Few such mouse traps survive today as most were worn out and thrown away." And this one, resembling a tall tool box caddy, includes three weights (rather than one) that were chamfered around the top edges.

Despite my intense interest in the object, I did not buy the trap that day. I wasn't ready to commit. Who saves a mousetrap, anyway? Are there mouse remains at the bottom of the tray? I peered into the caddy and lifted the weights, spotting nothing more than dust and dings. What would I do with a mouse trap?

I pined over the trap for a week.  At the end of the said week, Tyler kindly returned to purchase the trap on my behalf and nearly lost it to an older man who couldn't get over the contraption's novelty. As I have written before, buy it when you see it. In this case, I still got what I wanted. Now, the trap rests upon a stack of over-sized decorative arts and furniture reference books, a prized piece of vernacular sculpture, poised to receive its next victims.

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 14-15, The Stairs and the Bedroom

Nicole

In chapter fifteen on The Bedroom, Bryson situated “many of life’s most profound and persistent unhappinesses” inside the bedroom (320). I doubt that misery always played out in the bedroom (particularly before too many people actually had such private spaces), but in this chapter, Bryson touched upon things I’d like to discuss briefly: sleeping tight and amputation.

Let’s start with the former. Before the box spring there were bed ropes. In house museums, we talk a lot about how tightening such ropes inspired the saying “sleep tight.”

Makes sense, right?

Bryson proudly perpetuated this popular wisdom on page 321, but it turns out he is wrong. Even I believed this ol’ house museum tale until I decided to check up on Bryson’s conclusion (since we have identified a few incorrect or questionable interpretations of private life in At Home).

Where are we to turn for someone to set us straight?

Colonial Williamsburg has published several articles online in which CW interpreters corrected house museum myths about early American life such as “people were shorter” and “most people were illiterate." On sleeping tight, we learn from the master interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg that in early America, sleep tight meant sleep well and was not related to tightening bed ropes.

Yet bed ropes were, in fact, tightened, and I did not know how the ropes were tightened until this past summer when I decided it was time to look it up. I found a great demonstration on YouTube, brought to you by interpreters at Log Cabin Village in Forth Worth, Texas.

These chapters raised several historic site interpretation issues that deserve more nuanced attention. Below, Tyler comments on one more.

But first: There is no easy segue way from bed ropes to amputation. Let me begin by suggesting that many early Americans made amputations-—a seemingly private event, as Bryson framed it-—a public affair by reporting on it in newspapers or in other ways such as commemorating it in stone. As I hinted in a previous At Home post, this past summer, I spent some time researching a gravestone in one of Newport’s graveyards. The gravestone commemorates the death of one woman’s two babies as well as her 1786 arm amputation. The singular aspect of the gravestone is that it includes a realistic likeness of the amputee’s arm alongside traditional stylized “soul effigies” and the like. If you would like to learn more about the public memory and meaning behind this private incident, come to Newport and hear my talk at the Newport Historical Society’s Annual Meeting on Thursday, September 22, 2011.

Tyler

As usual, these chapters are filled with interesting tidbits about topics as diverse as the frequency of fall fatalities (some 12,000 every year in the U.S., 306), mourning attire (perhaps not as strictly regimented as Bryson suggests), cremation, and some rather gruesome sexual deterrents. But one of the things which caught my attention amidst this hodgepodge was Bryson’s discussion of wall-coverings, including both wallpaper and paint (314-319). Bryson notes the famous recent repainting of Thomas Jefferson’s dining room at Monticello from a muted Wedgewood blue to a brilliant chrome yellow, which, according to the most recent scientific studies, was its original hue. You, too, can elevate your own living space to Jeffersonian heights, without the more insidious toxic qualities of the original color, with a little help from Ralph Lauren. Something that’s easy to miss in the recent trend towards rediscovering the vibrant side of the painted past is the equally impressive range of subtle colors historic interiors featured. The “stone colours” of the eighteenth century were much more diverse, textural, and evocative than we might think. For an interesting discussion of these hues and others, check out this interview with historic paint consultant Patrick Baty.

Even his paint cards look appealing!

Further Reading

Colonial Williamsburg published a good number of its recent history magazine issues online. The research is sound and fascinating and can be useful in all sorts of interpretive situations. Click here to learn more.

The "serial newsletter" Enfilade is published in blog format by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture. The newsletter is updated often and includes calls for papers, informational interviews such as the one to which Tyler linked above, book and exhibition reviews, and more. The blog is a great resource for anyone who studies eighteenth-century cultural and social history.

Reading Bill Bryson’s At Home: Chapters 12 and 13: The Garden and The Plum Room

Tyler

In these two chapters, Bryson takes us on a tour of the grounds and exteriors of our Western homes. We tramp around cemeteries and topiary gardens. Bryson’s own “Plum Room,” so named for its wall color, serves to introduce us to famous architects and bibliophiles. Bryson’s notes on Thomas Jefferson, perhaps America’s most notable sometime architect and lifetime book hound, got me thinking about my own fascination with books. Despite numerous moves across several states, I have still held onto a staggering amount of books (although luckily for now fewer than Jefferson’s own 10,000+). My own interests are not quite as eclectic as Jefferson’s, but I do find reasons to keep volumes on subjects as diverse as household insects, polar exploration, and early American furniture. Many of these sub-collections are products of my various jobs and degrees, like the several dozen archaeology books I usually sequester on some lone shelf. And against my better judgment, I still find books almost everywhere I go. I religiously stop at used bookstores and rarely leave empty-handed. For me, these little adventures are where I encounter fascinating treasures I’ve never heard of, even in genres in which I’ve delved for years. I also like to think that in an age of internet bookstores and internet media, I’m helping to support an institution—the brick-and-mortar bookstore—that represents a connection to the first citizens of our nation.

Perhaps in a decade or two there will be no more books rolling off the presses as we move into a world of e-readers. But for me, there is nothing like reaching up to my shelf and finding the reference I’m looking for, nothing like feeling the comfortable weight of a book in my lap, nothing like knowing that in each of these volumes is a wealth of human learning, creation, and art. So that’s why, wherever I end up, I’ll have my own Plum Room, filled with these textual treasures. I like to think that Jefferson would be proud.

Nicole

In January of 2008, I took a two-week field trip to London and Bath while I was pursuing my M.A. We visited many museums and other sites of cultural significance including Beckford's Tower in Bath (Bryson mentions Beckford and his eccentricities on several occasions throughout the book). According to Bath Preservation Trust, Beckford intended for the tower to serve as a "study retreat" and as a place for Beckford to store and display his "art and rare books" collections (swell idea, Beckford!). The Tower turned out to be fascinating, but upon our arrival, I could barely get past the graveyard situated next to the tower.

Our gracious and informative host had begun her tour at the Tower, but I was mesmerized by the Lansdown Cemetery next door.

As I snapped several photos, one of my professors called me back to the group. The cemetery remains among my favorite sites visited (however fleetingly) during those two weeks. But I never stopped to think about why.

For one, as Bryson suggests, sites for buying the dead--whether they are seventeenth- or eighteenth-century public burying grounds or private church yards or nineteenth-century park-like or landscaped cemeteries---are attractive places. In his chapter on the garden, Bryson links the nineteenth-century garden-type cemetery movement to domestic gardening and a growing interest in designing healthy outdoor recreational spaces (270-272). These ruminations brought to mind my current research on a gravestone in one of Newport, Rhode Island’s, cemeteries.

A gravestone?

Until this summer, I admit that I never thought that I would study cemeteries or grave markers. I live across from a cemetery in a sleepy town in Delaware, but until now, it was just atmosphere. I had unfairly associated others’ grave marker enthusiasm with antiquarian interests gone awry. A cemetery is a cemetery is a cemetery, I thought...until you start to look more closely at the grave marker materials, shapes, designs, and the cemetery configurations.

And the people.

In many cases, learning about the people underneath the stones would be nearly impossible if the stones did not survive. In some cases, cemeteries make private life painfully public.

The most striking aspect of cemeteries is that, since many are open to the public, they serve as unique opportunities for anyone to study material culture up close and personal. No white gloves or stanchions here. Cemeteries allow interpreters of material culture to bring the public into the field (literally) to think about a range of historical themes such as everyday life and family relations, race, social status, the craft of stone-cutting and carving, commemoration practices, and how all these things change over time and are different across a single town or between two countries. Cemeteries long abandoned or minimally cared-for also present individuals and groups with opportunities to engage in preventative conservation. In short, cemeteries are ideal object study laboratories, and they can be found just about everywhere.

I did not have a chance to walk around Lansdown Cemetery that day in January. But when I return, I will do more than gape at its eerie beauty. Instead, I will think more critically about what I can learn about the past from being up close and personal among the grave markers and the people for whom they were erected.

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 10-11, The Passage and The Study

Nicole

In chapter 11, Bryson explains that Mr. Marsham likely used his study to write sermons, receive parishioners, etc. (237-238). Today, Bryson and his family relegate old furniture to the space and, he claims, rarely enter the room except to check the mouse traps. Bryson uses this as a segway into talking about the history of rodents and other pests in western culture. Bryson elects to illustrate an object associated with rodent and pest control: the mousetrap (239). Yet the mousetrap he illustrates—the classic “nipper” mousetrap invented by James Henry Atkinson in 1897—would not have been used around the time of the home’s mid nineteenth-century construction. By focusing on this contraption, Bryson may lead some readers to believe that there were no mouse traps until the nipper came along. As you can imagine, this is not the case. Instead, prior to the time when the nipper was available, Marsham may have used a model resembling a bulky wood-working tool:

Mousetrap, Pine, England, 1800-1850, The Victoria and Albert Museum London, W.10-1934. According to the V&A, "The top block was raised and food put in, to tempt the mouse into the trap. When the mouse went in and pressed down a balance in the centre of the bottom board, the heavy block fell down and killed it."
Humans captured unsuspecting mice using variations on the V&A trap. Click here to view one collector’s “Antique Mouse and Rat Trap Gallery.” (There is a hobby for every soul.)

Bryson does not speculate on how Marsham used his study beyond the brief mention on pages 237-238, but we can speculate on what his mouse trap may have resembled.

Tyler

What struck me about these two chapters – amidst Bryson’s discussions of ironwork, ostentatious mansions, and bed mites – was a passing reference to Ohio. Ohio?, I thought, Well, that’s where I am! I spent several years here as an undergraduate and am now back to teach an archaeological field school, but I am no native. Ohio does have things going for it, though. One of which, apparently, is a block of concrete houses in Newark, Ohio, built by Thomas Edison, whose escapades in this building medium Bryson mentions. You can see a small image of these homes in the second entry here.

Concrete is, for clarity’s sake, the building material created when powdered cement is mixed with sand or gravel and water. Newark’s little architectural treasures stand only a few miles from some of the most remarkable prehistoric earthworks in North America. As Bryson tells us, workers created houses after Edison’s plans by pouring the concrete into giant molds that even included bathroom fixtures. In Pennsylvania, historian Henry Mercer also employed concrete to create his home, “Fonthill,” and a museum for his collection of early American tools and other objects. Mercer’s workers carefully created these edifices in sections, framing each part of walls and columns with wood paneling that left impressions of grain lines still visible in parts of the buildings. To create coved cathedral ceilings, they formed sand and sod into a mound, covered it in concrete, and then removed the earth section once the concrete had dried. Both Edison and Mercer believed in concrete, but it never really caught on with the rest of the world.

In the meantime, their creations remain about as solid as the day they were poured.

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 6-7, The Fuse Box and The Drawing Room, PART II

Tyler

With looming deadlines and other school factors at work, it’s taken me a bit to gather my thoughts about these two chapters of At Home. Nicole adeptly discussed the (unfufilled) potential of Bryson’s commentary on style. My one interesting connection with these chapters is that I read them by candlelight (lighting being the focus of Bryson’s “Fuse Box” chapter) after the power went out one evening. I’m not sure how many people keep candles around anymore, but I had a few stashed in a tin cup and I dutifully lit them up. Bryson is right; reading by candlelight requires you to get right up next to the candle. You can read in dim light, of course, but within a foot or so of a single candle the pages are crisp and clear. But there is also comfort what might seem an inconvenience. The light is soft, and the pages glow, rather than reflect white light as they might with electricity. When the power snapped suddenly back on an hour later, part of me was disappointed. Perhaps the convenience of electricity has caused us to forget a more primal comfort with the colors and functions of fire. If I could encourage you to do one thing this week, it would be to turn off your lights and sit down with a book in front of the glow of a candle for an hour. There is no better way to understand the past than by experiencing it.

(Scroll down or click here to read Nicole's entry on the same section.)

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 6-7, The Fuse Box and The Drawing Room

Nicole

“The Fuse Box” supplies readers with an overview of the history of lighting and heating. Bryson focuses on specific types of energy sources such as gas and individuals involved in developing new lighting and heating technologies such as Thomas Edison. Bryson describes Edison as “not a wholly attractive human being,” noting that Edison “stole” patents and manipulated the press (130). Perhaps this explains why my father, whose family is of Croatian descent, had grown up learning that Franjo Hanaman, a Croatian man, was the inventor of the light bulb (and not Edison). Either way, this discrepancy highlights the fact that technological advances are nuanced and attributable to many people, something that can be difficult to highlight in a book with such a broad interpretive framework.

But enough about the fuse box. At the start of the chapter on the drawing room (in many American contexts, this room became known as the parlor and later, the living room), Bryson summarizes the history of private life as “a history of getting comfortable slowly” (135). Despite this statement, Bryson does not discuss the history of comfort at length. Instead, after a foray into the history of professional architects and some elite building efforts gone wrong, Bryson presents a superficial summary of the cabinetmaking trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He cites the ever popular furniture design books issued by Thomas Chippendale (1718-1799), George Hepplewhite (1727?-1786), and Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806) as a means through which to comprehend the expanding professional class's relationship to the expanding market for household objects during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While these design sources were very influential and remain important touchstones in the field today, Bryson misses the opportunity to interpret design sources that would have been popular around the time that his home was built in 1851 and to explore how his house illuminates the narrative's larger themes.¹

Bryson’s home, which was designed by Edward Tull of Aylsham, was inhabited by a member of the mid nineteenth-century professional class: a clergyman, Thomas John Gordon Marsham (13). We cannot be sure how the drawing room in this "cautiously Gothic" home was used, as this home seems to have included a drawing room as well as a more formal parlor for less intimate socializing (13).² We also do not know how the home was decorated. Did its furnishings reflect its "cautiously Gothic" exterior? Without this information, we can use the year in which it was built--1851--as a jumping off point for thinking about what print culture (such as prescriptive literature addressing home decor or furniture design sources) or events (such as international exhibitions) may have influenced the ways in which the original owner or his contemporaries lived their private lives.

Based on a survey of extant printed sources at the Winterthur Library, the 1850s was a transitional period for domestic interior decoration print culture. Compared to the late nineteenth century, relatively few examples of European English-language prescriptive literature that specifically address home decoration were published in the 1850s. Therefore, we must look to publications conceived in the tradition of Chippendale et. al. that feature furniture designs.

What was the height of furniture fashion in the 1850s, and would we expect to find it in these furniture design books? Snodin and Styles note that mid nineteenth-century interior decoration trends and popular taste more generally can be characterized as the “battle of the styles”—or, an era in which consumers could select furnishings designed in any number of styles. After the 1851 Exhibition, they explain, the Gothic, or “design reform” more generally, exploded.³ Thus, when Bryson’s house was built in 1851, cutting edge design featured the “gothic revival” aesthetic, as represented by this table at the Victoria & Albert Museum.⁴

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin designed this oak table, and John Webb manufactured it between 1852 and 1853. This table was designed for a house in Sussex. Victorian & Albert Museum, London, W.26-1972.
Despite the vogue for Gothic taste, many consumers resisted full-blown manifestations of Gothic aesthetics and continued to embrace rococo or baroque motifs rather than more restrained Gothic design motifs. (Marshman's "cautiously Gothic" home's exterior may represent this trend.) For example, P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction... (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853), features primarily rococo motifs and little suggestion that more streamlined aesthetics represented by the Gothic table above were coming into vogue. Thomson's furniture style itself might be considered conservative or mainstream; in addition, the format and content of Thomson’s book are also traditional, featuring brief explanatory essays on furniture construction and furniture function within rooms. As such, Thomson’s book is reminiscent of those issued by the likes of Chippendale and Sheraton.⁵ However limiting, immoral, or unattractive some consumers may have considered the style that pervades Thomson's designs, Thomson’s book gives us some idea as to the possibilities this aesthetic presented to home owners.⁶ According to Thomson, the "drawing-room...furniture and decorations afford full scope for the display of taste in the owner."⁷ This "taste" could manifest itself in a variety of ways. For example, sofas may have been plain or ornate:“Drawing Room Sofas,” Detail, Plate LVIII (top), and “Drawing Room Sofas,” Detail, Plate LIX or Plate LX (bottom), P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction… (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853). (The Winterthur Library: Printed Books and Periodicals Collection.) Photos by author.
These were not the only options. Indeed, in the preface to his design book, Thomson notes how “comparatively easy it is to adapt [furniture designs] to the kind of work required” and goes on to explain that these designs “may, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely, by engrafting the decorations of one on the forms of another.” Although Thomson’s book does not feature any outright examples of the more up-and-coming Gothic taste, it does include some examples of design supposedly gleaned from “the Great Exhibition”—the Exhibition Bryson evokes at the beginning of the book—perhaps anticipating a move among some taste makers toward a less neo-rococo/neo-baroque aesthetic, or acknowledging the far-reaching influence of the Great Exhibition:

Note the that the motif at bottom right features the Great Exhibition year: 1851. “Details From The Great Exhibition,” Plate XCIX, P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction… (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853). (The Winterthur Library: Printed Books and Periodicals Collection.) Photos by author.
Thomson’s design book gives us some idea as to the range of fashionable (if not conservative) interior design possibilities available to consumers such as clergyman Marsham in the 1850s. Although we can't be sure what Marsham's "cautiously Gothic" home looks like, it probably represented a transitional era in architectural aesthetics and possibly home use when it was built. Similarly, Thomson's furniture design book represents transitional furniture design presentation strategies that were influenced by new ways to spread information about interior decoration such as international exhibitions.⁸

For all we know, Bryson’s home may have been furnished with the latest in Gothic design, Thomson's fussy rococo sofas, rickety secondhand relics---or all of the above. Much like we pick and choose decorating ideas from a variety of sources today, many of our mid-nineteenth-century predecessors did the same, combining the latest styles with well-loved family heirlooms.⁹ If we had a better idea as to how the home was furnished, we might be able to guess how the home (and the drawing room in particular) was used and what private life meant to Marsham. Furthermore, if we could compare Marsham's consumption habits to others in his town or to other clergymen, we might be able to draw larger conclusions about that region’s or that profession's relationship to national or international consumption or design trends. Despite the dearth of information on these points, at the very least, we can imagine that Marsham lived in an era that witnessed dynamic changes in the ways that people designed their private lives "at home" with their things.

(Tyler’s comments will be posted soon!)

Notes

1. The term design sources encompasses printed sources that contemporary scholars reference when interpreting material culture. Design sources can range from furniture maker’s design books to portfolios of well-known domestic or institution architecture to floral motifs used for executing needlework.

2. The etymology of terms such as drawing room and parlor are complex and vary slightly whether one is studying American as opposed to European interiors. The point here is that drawing rooms, parlors, etc., were both pubic and private spaces and were probably used slightly differently in every home, particularly in homes (such as Bryson's) that had more than one such space.

3. Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & The Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500-1900 (New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 356-357.

4. Also pictured in Snodin and Styles, 350.

5. P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction… (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853).

6. According to Marlborough Rare Books, which currently has a copy of Thomson's book for sale, "Governor Sir William Denison replaced the original furniture of the Government House of Sidney in 1857 with more sophisticated 'modern' designs, which were based on Thomson’s book."

7. Thomosn, 36.

8. Katerine C. Grier notes that in an American context, the proliferation of parlors in public spaces such as hotels probably influenced the American trend toward creating "comfortable" parlors (or drawing rooms)prior to the influence of events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, c1988), 19.

9. In Kristen Wilson’s introduction to Livable Modernism, she uses her two grandmother's 1930s interior decorating as a means through which to explain how one era may have embraced a variety of styles. One of grandmothers had a traditional, “Colonial Revival” 1930s home interior, and her other grandmother had a “radically austere” modern 1930s home interior. Kristen Wilson, Livible Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 3.


Further Reading

For a recent exhibition featuring nineteenth-century watercolor interiors that present a range of nineteenth-century interiors, see Gail S. Davidson, House Proud: Nineteenth-Century Water Color Interiors from the Thaw Collection (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, c2008).

For more on the history of production, design, and consumption of objects in mid nineteenth-century Britain, see Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & The Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500-1900 (New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

For a recent interpretation of the design of the nineteenth-century domestic interior, see Stefan Muthesius The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior (New York: Thames & Hudson, c2009).

For more on the history of comfort in a domestic environment (particularly in an American context), which Bryson mentions in passing, see John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities & Design in Early Modern Britain & Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c2001), and Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, c1988).

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 4-5, The Kitchen and The Scullery and Larder

Tyler

In Chapter IV (“The Kitchen”), Bill Bryson narrates the processes of preserving, preparing, and eating food in the historical home. As Nicole discussed in our last entry, both the timeframe and class of Bryson’s “home” is somewhat ambiguous, although he generally returns to middle- and upper-class Victorians. In Chapter V (“The Scullery and Larder”), we enter the world of household servants. Bryson revels in narrating the oppressive conditions of servant life. Don’t get me wrong, like most other modern individuals, I am more sympathetic with servants than masters (see for example, certain entries on my own blog). But Bryson obscures something when he presents servants as defenseless and exploited and masters as naively incompetent at best and malicious at worst. The secret here is that many households were something like small businesses. As some readers may know, a recent Masterpiece Theatre series, Downton Abbey, highlighted the upstairs-downstairs dimension of English country house life in the Edwardian period. Such households relied upon as well as supported the work of many individuals. And while the master was certainly the biggest beneficiary of a household’s functions, he was also intimately symbiotic with his servants. Yes, a master’s fortune might enable a lavish and sometimes extravagant lifestyle, but it also supported the livelihoods of many others. This was how it had been in England for centuries, with a manor house forming the nucleus of complex networks of production and consumption. Into the Victorian age, the relationship of masters and servants continued to be one of close interdependence. Until later technological and social revolutions enabled more people to live independently, the wealthy household was the workshop of many servants. But it was also their home.

Nicole

I mentioned in some of my earlier posts about At Home that Bryson’s study gives me a popular touchstone for comparing the American history of “private” life. In chapters 4-5, Bryson presents readers with a supposedly American perspective, but his perspective is limited to one individual serving as a representative of the entire country: Thomas Jefferson. I’m not sure why Bryson suddenly integrates this particular founding father as the token gardener and slaveholder, but the resulting perspective is grossly trivialized and oversimplified. In “The Kitchen,” we learn that Jefferson was not only “the author of the Declaration of Independence” but “also the father of the American French fry” (80). In “The Scullery and Larder,” we learn that work completed by servants in England was often completed by enslaved individuals in America. Jefferson, we learn, “owned more than two hundred slaves” (109). If Bryson’s goal was to be more comprehensive with his American perspective, he might have done better to include some anecdotes about Elizabeth Drinker’s diary, for example.¹ Drinker was a wealthy Philadelphian whose mid-late eighteenth-century diary is a treasure trove including insight into many aspects of daily life, including servants. Of course, Bryson’s British perspective might have spurred him to focus on more internationally known figures such as Jefferson.

In any case, these two chapters are not lacking in entertaining details. For example, Bryson discusses one woman, Hannah Cullwick , who worked as a servant for the man to whom she was secretly married. If that isn’t odd enough, there are extant photos of her taken by her husband. In three, she is pictured in the midst of her daily tasks. In a fourth, she is posed topless as a chimney sweep wearing a lock and chain around her neck (106). Perhaps Cullwick is well-known to those who study British cultural and social history, but she was new to this Americanist. As off the wall as anecdotes such as the Cullwick story seem, they show readers the interpretive potential seemingly mundane topics such as the history of private life hold for writers such as Bryson.

Notes

1. The in-text link is to an abridged version of Drinker’s diary. I suggest that you read it in its entirety if you can.

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 2-3, The Setting and The Hall

Nicole

For all the Americanists out there, what this book does well is remind us that our history as “Americans” does not go back nearly as far as does the history of the English. In London, the Roman ruins scattered throughout the city are old—not the medieval cathedrals. Falling in step with his countrymen, in “The Setting,” Bryson provides his readers with a sweeping pre-history of not only England but Civilization—and its first homes—more generally.

From “The Setting,” Bryson moves on to the evolution of the home. “The Hall” is so titled to invoke the “first” way in which we referred to a permanent (or semi-permanent) home (49). I was expecting a deconstruction of his own home’s front hall (see, for example, Ames’ brilliant Death in the Dining Room), but instead I read about the increase in homes’ rooms over time (suiting evolving preferences for privacy) and the developments in indoor plumbing…and that is where I stopped and realized that Bryson is really only giving us one story, the story of the “upper” classes. For example, Bryson explains that “In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers…Often this private room had a small cell or alcove off it, generally known as the privy (61). However, what Bryson does not note is that this indoor bathroom arrangement would have been available to the wealthiest individuals and their families. Most people made do with chamber pots shoved into dark corners or outdoor privies. In short, Bryson’s observations on excretion relate to the finest homes. To be sure, there are similarities in how the “home” evolved in general, but there is no monolithic home.

So, what about class? The nature of Bryson’s book, filled with unqualified generalizations such as those related to bathrooms, prevents Bryson from teasing out stories based on class differences. How would the bathrooms or bathroom facilities that preceded Bryson’s Rectory look and how would they have been used depending on whether we were peeping into the home of a laborer or a countess, and is it possible to explain with more detail why the Rectory’s Hall or bathroom facilities look the way they did when the home was first built? I doubt this, seeing as all we learn about the rectory hall in question is that it is a “shrunken vestibule” (65).

Tyler

Bryon’s past is squalid, illogical, and uncreative. Of course, I don’t really blame him for portraying history this way. He is the tour guide for a modern audience who would in fact view most historical homes as dirty, uncomfortable places. If you were to be transported back to medieval Britain, you would also certainly react with the same disgust that Desiderius Erasmus did, as cited by Bryson (51). But it is essential to remember that, like Erasmus, we have been raised in a society that values certain aspects of life which were ignored for much of human history. These things were not ignored because people were unenlightened. The individuals who lived in the past were not simply ignorant version of ourselves, content to live in squalid conditions because no one had told them about germs. Thousands of years of homemaking had created a complex world which seems quite alien to us today. People did not live with smoke-filled rooms because they were too stupid to invent the chimney. A central hearth provided the best possible heating for a small house, and smoke helped preserve foodstuffs in the rafters and keep out insects. People did not sit on the floor because no one had stopped to think up a chair. In fact, according to much recent historical thought, even the idea of comfort itself is a cultural development of fairly recent vintage (see John Crowley’s The Invention of Comfort).

I don’t mean to sell Bryson short. There are hints of relativism in his work, the idea that we must consider another culture without adding our own system of values, and he is writing in a way that makes the past evocative and intriguing. But we cannot view the past as simply another primitive culture to be ogled like rain forest tribesmen in an old copy of National Geographic. If we really want to understand people in the past, to react to them as humans no slower, smaller, or simpler than us, it is important to consider their own view of their worlds. Their entire way of thinking was a product of their culture, and it is well worth our time to set aside condescension, and maybe even consider our own peculiar ways.

Take our own homes, for example. Why do most new houses place the garage at the forefront, almost as if it was the most important aspect of a home’s façade? Or our foodways. Why do we refrigerate thinks like mustard and jam, foodstuffs that were literally invented to avoid spoilage well before artificial coolants? As for our clothes – are our outfits really more comfortable than the past, or do we simply believe we are comfortable because that’s what we have learned? These are only three examples of products of our own culture that may seen as illogical to the future as a central hearth. And it’s important to remember that we’re just as much creatures of our culture as anyone has ever been.

Further Reading

Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room & Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities & Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c2001).

Katherine C. Grier, Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-class Identity, 1850-1930 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapter 1, The Year

Tyler

For Bill Bryson’s purposes in At Home, 1851 featured two significant events. The first was the construction of the parsonage that will be the basis for his book. The second was the “Crystal Palace” Exhibition in London, which brought together technological, botanical, mechanical, and ethnographic marvels inside an enormous glass-and-iron showplace. This was the first “World’s Fair,” and it made a lasting impression on the Western world’s idea of human progress and the material world.

Bryson’s first chapter combines a narration of the Exhibition with a discussion of Anglican parsons, many of whom lead fascinating lives. There are problems in this chapter: the Reverend George Garret, for instance, did lead a fascinating life, but he did not “invent the submarine” (16), and shop windows were used for retail display long before the invention of plate glass (11). But Bryson opening his book with the Crystal Palace is more than just serendipitous. In a myriad of ways, the Exhibition changed how we view things. It not only showcased the latest developments in the material world, but it also democratized this viewing experience in new and exciting ways. Common laborers and working families mingled with society elite and marveled at hardware, textiles, ceramics, and innumerable other objects. The exhibition spurred trends in both consumption and anti-consumption, contributing to the popular conception of the cluttered Victorian home and the self-conscious simplicity of the aesthetic and arts and crafts movements. If Bryson plans to talk about our homes and our things in the “modern” era, there are few better places to start than the Crystal Palace, where more people than ever before were confronted with the dizzying array of entirely new material culture.

Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London in 1851.
I also want to mention two other aspects of Bryson’s account that got me thinking. England is, by comparison to the United States, a remarkably small country, a point driven home when Bryson discusses the close proximity of many notable parsons (19). I will be interested to see whether Bryson considers how this difference in physical space might have contributed to later developments on both sides of the Atlantic. On a different note, I was interested to see that Bryson openly acknowledges his use of computerized searches of digitized sources when explaining the relative commonality of religious figures in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (18). This technique has made processing and surveying large amounts of historical data surprisingly simple, and I will be curious to see how Bryson continues to use such data as the book progresses.

Nicole

It was not clear to me at first why Bryson opened this chapter with the Crystal Palace until several pages into the chapter when he noted that the Palace was contemporaneous with the “home” at the center of this book. Indeed, Bryson draws a stark contrast between England’s seemingly slow-paced mid-century (private) country home and its vivacious (public) capital. However, as he explains, the rectors and vicars who populated the countryside had enough time on their hands to develop ideas (such as Malthusian theory) that many would deem as progressive and imaginative (or at least as new) as what the Crystal Palace represented. In this way, Bryson supplies readers with an English context for the era in which his home was imagined and built. Many details Bryson presents—-such as the distinction between country rectors and vicars—-had never been explained to me before, and for that, I am thankful.

I must trust that many of the points Bryson presents are, in fact, accurate since the printed version of the book does not include footnotes. As Tyler pointed out, some of his facts are spurious. I, too, balked at the extended discussion of the history of glass-making. Shop windows were “possible” prior to the mid-nineteenth century. See, for example, the images under the section “Premises—Exteriors” that were featured in a Bodleian Library exhibition titled A Nation of Shopkeepers: Trade Ephemera from 1654 to 1860 in the John Johnson Collection. I would need to check Bryson’s source to determine what he meant by this, but perhaps he meant that shop windows of a certain size became possible thanks to mid-nineteenth-century changes in glass-making. I wonder if this lack of clarity of some points will detract from my appreciation of the book’s larger conclusions.

Where are the footnotes? Books written for popular audiences often include abbreviated or informal footnotes that do not conform to standard scholarly styles such as those set forth in The Chicago Manual of Style, but this is the first book I have read that publishes the notes online. (The print version of the book includes a bibliography.) The problem is that the notes that are posted online are for the English printing of the book (I would love to know the story behind the two different book covers: American; English). Therefore, the notes are a few pages off the American edition, making the quest for sources a bit more laborious than I would have preferred.

Despite the footnotes issue, I look forward to learning more about private Victorian English life so as to equip myself to draw better informed comparisons regarding private Victorian American life. As Tyler suggested, Bryson's book lends itself well to churning the imaginations of emerging scholars such as ourselves regarding comparative domestic material life studies.

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: The Introduction

Nicole:

Bryson’s introduction sets the scene for us. The study revolves around his “Old Rectory” Victorian home in Norfolk, England, and Bryson’s goal is to develop a deeper understanding of his immediate surroundings through a “painfully selective” object study of his home (5). Despite my initial reservations, Bryson’s introduction resulted in my thinking more charitably about his work. It starts off by recounting a provocative suggestion made by a local archaeologist that the local church appears to be sinking because the land surrounding it is actually rising thanks to the displacement it has experiences due to the thousands of burials it has seen over the years.

Really?

It seems plausible. Maybe the archaeologist (Tyler) has some insight into that.

I was most satisfied with Bryson’s conclusion that his study specifically—and studies of domestic life more generally—is not only about “sofas and chests of drawers” but that it is also about “scurvy…and the Eiffel Tower…and just about everything else that has ever happened” (5). In other words, this is not the study of an antiquarian but of a social historian. (That’s not to say that such a study couldn’t benefit from an antiquarian’s or connoisseur’s touch.) As such, Bryson seeks to explore the history (from about 150 years ago to today) of mundane facts of life ranging from cleanliness to foodways. Thanks to my interest in everyday life and cleanliness, health, labor, and the body in particular, I am familiar with many of the scholarly works that have been published on these topics.¹ Does Bryson offer new insights?

As this agenda suggests, although Bryson’s study evolves around his own “private” home, many of these issues have very public implications. The material conditions under which one “uses the restroom,” for example, are in part dictated by ideas and practices related to public health. Despite the titular emphasis on the private, however, from what I can tell by surveying the illustrations (none of his home) and from Bryson’s comment that he and his house are real but that he will not identify the actual location of the home, Bryson’s home inspires questions but does not appear visually as primary material evidence. Although Bryson is inspired by objects, his engagement with the objects may not satisfy the traditionally trained material culturalist/connoisseur who values both close object study and social historical interpretations.

Regardless, I look forward learning more about his interpretation of the history of private life and seeing what he can add to a growingly vibrant discussion.

Notes

1. See, for example, Kathleen M. Brown, ,Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, c2009), Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, At Home: The American Family, 1750-1870 (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1989), Katherine C. Grier’s Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, c1988), John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, c1990), Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), and more.

Tyler:

Unlike Nicole, I welcomed Bill Bryson’s most recent book with open arms. I’ve read him before, found his books interesting and funny, and even heard him speak once. I am not worried about Bryson’s traipsing over my own academic territory; his subject is, after all, far broader than I care to tackle any time soon.

As Nicole alluded to, the archaeologist in me appreciates Bryson’s immediate insertion of our earthbound material record. I don’t know whether his church is sinking or the earth is rising. But having pulled prehistoric stone tools from the dirt of the Ohio Valley and nineteenth-century clay pipes from the mud of the Thames, I am firmly convinced that humans have left a lasting and readable mark on just about every patch of soil ever inhabited. I’ll be interested to see if Bryson employs this resource to its full potential in his study.

I am not so much concerned that Bryson offers new insights as I am with the interpretive potential of his book. I do not expect him to introduce any paradigm-shifting epiphanies into the field of material culture studies. But perhaps he can do what many academics fail to and make our field of study accessible to a broader audience. As he states with more than a little foreshadowing in his introduction, “it is always quite thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before” (1).

Bryson’s goal will be to entertain and inform his (lay) reader, and what better way to do so than through using a recognizable and tangible framework, the Euro-American “home”? His own house will be a springboard from which to launch into the wider universe of material culture, one with which his readers can identify. I don’t expect him to be an expert scholar, but rather to exercise his own expertise in consolidating and synthesizing information on behalf of readers beyond the field. For me, this will be the gauge of the book’s success. So I’ll be watching Bryson closely. Unlike his previous writings on linguistics, hiking, or the universe, this will be a subject I’ve really read up on. And whether he’s traipsing through a churchyard or academic library, he had better tread carefully.

Up Next: Stayed Tuned! I will announce the next reading soon.

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life

I first came upon Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life a few months ago while taking a study break at my local Barnes & Noble. “At Home? Private life?” What audacity!, I thought to myself. That is what I study and what others (the giants upon whose shoulders I stand…or balance myself precariously) in my field study. What does Bryson know about home and private life? I leafed through the table of contents, decided that it might be worth a look (you never know) over winter break, and promptly forgot about it.

Within a few days, Tyler, who has a great material culture blog titled All Dressed Up With No Place to Go: Run(a)way Fashion in Early America, noted that one of our professors had At Home on his desk. I interrupted with my reservations on the tome. In short order, I was kindly scolded for not being more open-minded about Bryson’s book and his qualifications to conduct such a study. Since that conversation, Tyler received a copy of At Home for Christmas. He proposed that we read a chapter or so each week and discuss it. I upped the ante and suggested that we post the discussion on one of our blogs. After all, the book is receiving far more exposure than any material culture scholarship we produce will receive, and so it is important to follow and assess how the public at large may come to know more about material culture, material life, everyday domestic life, collecting, antiques, etc.

And so, here we are. Over the coming weeks, Tyler and I will be reading and discussing Bryson’s At Home, and portions of that discussion will be posted here at Picking For Pleasure. Please feel free to read along with us and comment on our postings. We won't have time to cover everything, so please chime in with your reactions and insight. We will try our best to let you know what we are reading and when we will be posting on that portion of the book so that you can follow along with us. If you’re not reading along with us, not to worry – we will give a synopsis of the contents of each section so that you can still appreciate the discussion. It may take us a while to finish the book, as we are both graduate students with demanding schedules. Regardless, we hope that such reading discussions may become an occasional feature at Picking for Pleasure. We hope you enjoy the discussion!

First up: The Introduction (p 1-5). We will post on 14 January 2011.

Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life (New York: Doubleday, 2010). Visit the publisher's web site for several links to purveyors of the book. You can also borrow a copy from your local library, of course!