I’m on another Bill Bryson kick, and recently reread A Short History of Nearly Everything and A Walk in the Woods as well, but I don’t have much to say about those other than that they’re both great, so I’m going to focus on At Home: A Short History of Private Life.
At Home’s conceit might be the stragest of all of Bryson’s work. It is generally described as a history of domestic life, an encapsulation that is ostensibly accurate, but also a lot tidier and more constrained than the actual work. Essentially, Bryson takes readers on a narrated tour of his home, an 18th century rectory in rural England, and uses each room as a jumping off point to discuss related themes. Some rooms lend themselves to these themes more directly than others—the bathroom leads pretty obviously to sanitation and hygiene—but it is the odder offshoots that are probably the most rewarding. The Hall, for example, seems liek a pretty drab subject for a history, but it is actually among the most fascinating in the book, detailing as it does the rise of the modern house as we now know it. This is because early houses were essentially nothing but halls, with private rooms coming to be alongside a shift in human ideas of domesticity and privacy.
The book can have a bit of an odd sock drawer flavour at times, and Bryson isn’t afraid to go off on tangents, expounding on the lives of dust mites or regailing us with such underestimated household dangers as staircases and paint, but on rereading I was struck by how well the whole thing holds together. As he did later in his work One Summer: America 1927, Bryson weaves together disparate strands into a rich and diverse tapsetry, one that highlights the texture of individual fibres without undercutting the harmony of the whole. His trademar kwit and humour is evident throughout.
Though arguably one of his more forgotten books, At Home is by no means Lesser Bryson. It’s an excellent piece of work, and well worth a read.