Krishna
We have reviewed many of Bill Bryson’s books earlier here. For two examples, see A Short History of Nearly Everything and A Walk In The Woods. I deliberately chose these two as examples because I have noticed a personal preference. More of this later.
Bill Bryson has a unique writing style that makes all his books very readable for the general public. He mixes humour with research and presents them very well. However, I have a peculiar reaction to his books – which brings us back to the two examples. I tend to ‘kind of’ like his travel writing (Notes from a Small Island and the previously mentioned A Walk In The Woods being two examples) but don’t find them fascinating. The reading public definitely does, judging from the reception those books are getting. However, his other books – especially A Short History of Nearly Everything and this particular book – are fabulous. They fascinate, astonish and entertain.
And the plot of this book is also very clever. How can you write a book about your own home and make it interesting? Just expand the scope but in context. If you are talking about homes in general, talk about the outlandish homes (Crystal Palace, which comes next in this review for example or the countless extravaganzas Americans built – often with very little thought – which are not mentioned here.). If you want to talk about the Passage, go deep into the history of telephones because that is where people used to keep one. If you are talking about gardens, talk about the types of gardens and how tastes change.
Mind you, all those are fascinating to read, especially when fashioned into the incomparable prose for which Bill Bryson is justly famous. But I was marveling about the clever idea for the book which is really about history and very colourful personalities who populated it, than about stuff that he found in his own home (a converted rectory in England).
He starts off at the strange story of the Crystal Palace which was the biggest structure built in just five months in 1850. The personalities involved are intriguing and fascinating and why they chose to build it is even more amazing – to house a temporary exhibition like the Paris Exhibition of those times, but only grander. (And then dismantling it was a vague but unplanned for premise of the undertaking!) The group was completely inexperienced except for an architect in the group of four. The idea was from Henry Cole, a civil servant (who incidentally invented the Christmas Card tradition). The architect who was the sole member who had built large structures, Isambard Brunel, who has unworkable grandiose plans for the structure. Lurching from one disaster to another, the project was rescued by a twenty two year old gardener (yes, a gardener and yes, the youngest of the group who gatecrashed in) called Joseph Paxton who was a favourite of the sponsor, Prince Albert.
The gardner presents an excellent design for the crystal palace, wins the selection and builds it like no other – in record time! – presumably to talk about the windows that we have now, when glass became cheap – coincidentally by elimination of two taxes just when Paxton needed lots of it.
He leaves this subject to talk about church and priests. There were two different types of priests : regents (who were economically well rewarded) and vicars (initially their stand-in. The term derives from the word vicarious ). Priesthood was entitled to revenue from farmer’s land, making them rich. They were not expected even to be pious!! Though ordination to Church of England required a university degree, it may as well be in English and not divinity or theology. With no work (many just read from boilerplate sermons from a book) and lots of money, many indulged in hobbies. One had a large poultry farm and also created an Icelandic language dictionary. Another invented the power loom – a foundation machine to accelerate the Industrial Revolution already under way. Reverend Jack Russell bred a new type of Terrier, that even today bears his name. Another wrote a scientific treatise on dinosaurs and became a leading world expert on coprolites. (No need to look it up : it means ‘fossilized faeces’.) The alarmist Malthus who predicted that humankind will perish from overpopulation was a British clergy as well. Another was a founding father of modern archaeology, while also finding time to invent a famous trout fishing fly.
In Dorset, one became an authority on spiders and another wrote a history of dirty jokes. One invented the submarine. Wow! Another was a poet of distinction but also stoned with opium and seen in pink fez at all times. One discovered Uranus! Bayes, a shy and retiring clergyman was behind the advanced and famous Bayes theorem.
The Crystal palace, when it opened to the public, held many wonders. First, Americans sent their sample tools and machines which proved to a disbelieving public that the ‘tobacco chewing hillbillies across the pond’ were quietly building the next industrial empire! For another, there were enough spaces in the washrooms and they even flushed! This started the trend among the visitors to install one such ‘flushing toilet’ in their homes. Another wonder was that the common people (‘the great unwashed’) were allowed to mingle with the elite and even Chartists (who were the scoundrels agitating to clean up rotting borough and even dared to ask for universal male suffrage) would cause sabotage.
He talks of a severe storm that uncovered a buried set of houses, mostly preserved except for their roofs, that was built five thousand years ago!
Many oddities about the settlement are discussed. For instance, there were no doors at ground level – people must have climbed on top of the houses until they reached ‘theirs’. The fields were far away, no grazing lands nearby – in fact it is a puzzle as to why it was situated where it was, and why it was packed in while the entire country was extremely sparsely populated.
Along the way, you get some etymological lessons too – for instance, corn in England used to refer to any grain at all or other round objects – hence the corns on your feet. Corned beef got its name due to the round rock salt used to cure it; in America because of the primacy of maize, corn came to mean just that particular grain.
He goes in the same awe inspiring style about each part of the house. The hall, once was a single room that was the entire house. Whoever lived there were ‘family’ and it included servants etc as the word was related to ‘familiar’.
The upper chambers were called ‘solars’ but the term did not have anything to do with sunlight or sun. It came from ‘solive’ a french word for joist. They were simply rooms that were built on joists and so were at an elevated level!
They had slaves too. The slaves could marry and own property! An old English word for slave is ‘thrall’ so even today, when we are enslaved by a strong emotion, we are ‘enthralled’.
More such thrilling descriptions follow. Furniture was carried along when people moved from place to place and so chairs had wheels for easy movement. (Even today French word for furniture is mobil and Italian word is meubles).
The floor consisted of straw and since it collected ‘spittle and vomit, urines of dog and men, spilled beer, remnants of fish meal and other filth’, they simply put another layer of straw over it when it became too dirty. (A heaven for rats and other house pests).
Dinner table was just a board on trestles in rich houses and just a board in poorer ones. The latter ones were balanced on many knees when in use!) Also the cupboard was simply a board that held all the cups – if the family had any. Rugs were too precious to put on the floor so were stored away and brought out to be hung on the walls on special occasions. Incidentally the term board in room and board is an expansion of the dining board to mean the whole facility where you stay.
Seating was on plain benches – in French bancs, the origin of the word banquet. Chairs did not come into usage until 1600 and were used to show authority. That is why the prime person “chairs” the meeting and “chairman” of the company is an important person.
They did not eat lamb or beef as those animals were too precious (for wool and muscle power respectively) to be killed and anyway those meat were proscribed by the religious restrictions – three days of the week had to be allocated to fish, for instance. During Lent (and some others) all land based flesh was forbidden (which left mainly fish). Until the time of Henry VII, failing to observe ‘fish days’ was at least theoretically punishable by death.
Glass was so prized that in 1590 an alderman in his will ‘left the house to his wife but the windows to his son’. Cabinet was a diminution fo cabin – where valuable stuff was kept – then came to denote the room where important meetings were held and leapt from there to the room where the king met the ministers and then morphed to denote the ministers themselves. Wardrobe was initially a room for storing apparel and gradually came to mean both a piece of furniture and ones full set of clothes!
To say more would not just be a critique but a summary of the fabulous material so let me stop here with the etymological delights found in the book.
He also talks about the fabulous rumours about food adulteration in ancient times and why they are wrong in terms of wilful bread contamination. (The hygienic aspects of food preparation were awful and so contaminants were mixed in inadvertently and the details are both awful to read and fascinating at the same time). Meat was another matter. It was uniformly awful (even if people could afford meat only rarely).
There are more fun facts – though, in my opinion, not as astounding – about how the houses got lit at night. From tallow and candle (the differences between the two are themselves very interesting, as described in the book) to whale oil to kerosine – all before electricity and all for hundreds of years.
Another trivia piece related to etymology : One of the lighting devices was called Drummond light, which lit up a piece of lime (or phosphorous) to produce a very intensely bright light, which could be focused to a particular place. Theatres used it to shine light on actors, whence the term in the ‘limelight’ comes from.
If, like me, you are wondering how that particular room got named ‘the drawing room’, Bill kindly explains. It is a shortening of the original name ‘The withdrawing room’ meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy. Parlour, another word in American usage, came from French ‘Parler’ or ‘talk’. It was originally a room where monks could go to in order to confer with each other.
He then wanders off to the dining room and the main subject – food. Especially the discovery of balanced food and the discovery of the importance of vitamins and minerals in food. It is so surprising that humans took so long to discover the concept of a balanced diet, even though droves were dying due to deficiency of one essential item or another (scurvy included).
When at last citrus juice was identified as the best way to cure scurvy, Naval Board of Britain used lime juice instead of lemon juice since it was much cheaper; which is why British sailors became known as limeys.
What is also fascinating is how unhygienic and jam packed the corpses were buried in church grounds. Enough vapours from the rotting bodies escaped that it made people faint or fall grievously ill. The figures quoted are nearly unbelievable!
Some of the funniest descriptions are reserved for the bedroom. The stuffing of the mattresses, the sleeping conditions, the sexual ‘instructions’ by experts and the views on masturbation are all so hilarious. There were aids to combat the sexual arousal in men – a kind of a bracelet with iron pins that would prick the organ if they, even when the man was sleeping, grew to more than the allowed size dictated by the ring size.
He talks about nobles having sex with servants present in the room and even grown up daughters sleeping nearby! When he talks about sex, he talks about syphilis, to which the only cure (when symptoms got to the third and most painful stage) was mercury for a long time, prompting the adage ‘A night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury’. Mercury, of course, did not really cure syphilis but had very bad effects on the body to boot.
Smallpox, which killed by the millions, was so called to distinguish it from the ‘great pox’ as syphilis was called then.
Talking of nursery, he goes into the history of how dangerous pregnancy and childbirth were, both to the child and the mother.
His descriptions on the communist leaders is also breathtakingly fabulous. He talks about Frederich Engels who is from a business family and fabulously wealthy – he inherited the fortune and kept it through his excellent business acumen. However, he was an admirer and a close friend of Karl Marx. While raging against the proletariat, he enjoyed all the trappings of wealth, including a mistress on the side, company ownership and extravagant lifestyle! Karl Marx, if anything, was even stranger. On the one hand he formulated communist manifesto but on the other, he was married to an aristocrat and was proud enough to mention it everywhere. In addition, he sent his children to exclusive private schools. His wife’s inheritance was not enough to support his extravagant lifestyle so he accepted a job as foreign correspondent in The New York Tribune but there was one problem : Marx’s english was not good! So Engels wrote all his articles and Marx collected the salary. Even that was not enough so Engels for years embezzled money from his own company and provided funds to Marx to live in style.
Charles Darwin was to be a clergyman, if his father’s plans had come true. Once he wrote the seminal work on evolution, he locked it up in his drawer and left it there for nineteen years! He thought (correctly) that the subject was too hot for discussion at that time, as it upset a whole lot of religious folks including his father and an uncle.
A brilliant book, with Bill Bryson’s trademark wit, deep research, excellent presentation and a wide perspective. A thoroughly enjoyable read, it does not get much better than this!
9/10
== Krishna