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 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.