![]() ![]() Aspects of other rooms prompt Bryson to relate stories about the spice trade, the rise of cities, Chippendale furniture, the servant class, kerosene, Gilded Age excess, home gardening, epidemics, mousetraps, electricity, arsenic-laced wallpaper, bats, Central Park, fabrics, water cures and the many ways in which people fall down stairs. In the bedroom, the author considers masturbation, syphilis and Victorian advice on how women could avoid arousal by not using their brains excessively. In the kitchen, Bryson discusses such matters as canning, refrigeration and the serial plagiarist Isabella Beeton’s hugely successful Book of Household Management (1859), which guided homemakers into the 20th century. Indeed, the smoke-filled hall “ was the house” until the introduction of chimneys, which allowed houses to grow upward. The hall, a large barn-like space with an open hearth, was once the most important room in the house. ![]() In each, he finds the stories that make up this discursive romp through British and American life of the last 150 years. Now living in a 19th-century church rectory in Norfolk, England, the author decided to learn about the ordinary things of life by exploring each room in his house. ![]() Bryson ( The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, 2006, etc.) takes a delightful stroll through the history of domestic life. ![]()
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