At Home: A Short History of Private Life

In the first chapter of At Home, Bill Bryson surveys his own home, an old Norfolk rectory, and considers the career of the young rector for whom it was built in 1851. Thomas JG Marsham would have enjoyed an income of around £500 – £400,000 today. He was, Bryson writes, one of "a class of well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their hands. In consequence, many of them began, quite spontaneously, to do remarkable things". He cites the examples of George Bayldon, whose services were so poorly attended he converted half his church into a hen-house, and Reverend George Garrett, who pioneered submarine design.

They've disappeared now and country vicars are neither rich nor leisured, but Bryson is about as close to a modern equivalent as you can find. At Home has all the hallmarks of being written by someone with a certain sort of intellectual thirst, a lavish income and too much time on his hands, qualities that in our own age are more likely to be found not in clergymen, but bestselling authors.

While Bryson's book purports to be about private life, it's really about whatever takes his fancy. This is Bryson's big book of whims. Home, he claims, is where history ends up. And his method is to lead us on a history of Britain and North America via the rooms in his house. Thus, the chapter on the kitchen is where he discourses on the Duke of Marlborough, who was "said to be so cheap, he refused to dot his 'I's when he wrote, to save on ink". The bedroom is where he brings up an 1878 debate from the British Medical Journal on whether the touch of a menstruating woman could spoil a ham.

In the opening chapter, Bryson tells us that what he suddenly realises is that history is "masses of people doing ordinary things. Even Einstein will have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays or new hammock or how dainty was the ankle on the young lady alighting from the tram across the street". This is a charming notion, but it remains just that. We never do find out what Einstein thought about his holidays or about the ankles of the young lady. Instead, we learn, among much else, that lobsters were once so abundant in Britain that servants sought agreements from their employers that they would not be served them more than twice a week.

Not that this is a problem in itself. It's just that the book isn't really about home. Or it is, only in the sense that home is where we keep the stuff we don't know what else to do with, boxes that, as Bryson says, "are carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want baby clothes that have been kept for 25 years".

Where other people hoard Clarice Cliff pottery or old copies of National Geographic, Bryson hoards facts. He can't resist a well-turned story, a mildly humorous aside, a colourful anecdote. Even his asides have asides. In one instance, when discoursing on the causes of cholera, he mentions a certain Edwin Chadwick, who believed that smells caused disease, and slips in that he also gave Britain the workhouse. As an aside to the aside, he mentions that Chadwick's half-brother happened to emigrate to America where he's considered the father of baseball. And then, because he can't resist, he gives us a footnote on the aside to the aside, pointing out that their father taught science to John Dalton, who is credited with the discovery of the atom, and then lived with Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man led to the French Revolution.

In the last third of the book, there's a mad dash through the greatest hits of the Industrial Revolution for what seems like completeness's sake. It's as if the headmaster has walked in and schoolmaster Bryson has been forced to take the Beatles off the turntable and relate the facts of the spinning Jenny. A mistake, as he's always better off-topic, relating how Charles Darwin draped himself with electrified zinc chains and doused his body with vinegar, and how John Lubbock, the man who gave the world bank holidays, also spent three months trying to teach his dog to read.

So rather than being a book about home or private life, this is an idiosyncratic sweep through the makings of modernity, and there's a sudden swerve at the end, as Bryson concludes with a mini-critique of the age whose birth he's just described. It's almost, well, a sermon, as if Bryson has realised that he really is Thomas JG Marsham's latterday heir. And it begs the question: what subject will the Reverend Bryson choose to turn to next?