--- product_id: 1375338 title: "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" price: "S$2" currency: SGD in_stock: false reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.sg/products/1375338-at-home-a-short-history-of-private-life store_origin: SG region: Singapore --- # At Home: A Short History of Private Life **Price:** S$2 **Availability:** ❌ Out of Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** At Home: A Short History of Private Life - **How much does it cost?** S$2 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Currently out of stock - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sg](https://www.desertcart.sg/products/1375338-at-home-a-short-history-of-private-life) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description From one of the most beloved authors of our time—more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone—a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home. “Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig­ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture. Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposi­tion imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life. Review: Fascinating, Educational, Humorous ... In Other Words, Vintage Bryson! - Whenever I'm asked about my favorite authors, Bill Bryson always makes the list. Not only has he written a string of humorous yet informative travel narratives, he's also penned a memoir about his 1950s childhood and a variety of non-fiction books on topics as diverse as the English language, Shakespeare and a rather grand attempt at a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson is able to make whatever he is writing about amazingly interesting while also being gently humorous. I've always thought that if Bill Bryson wrote the history and English textbooks for schools, everyone would do their required reading and come away bursting with information and insights. Whenever someone tells me that they don't like nonfiction, I always ask if they've read Bill Bryson. To me, he is the epitome of the accessible nonfiction writer, and I would follow him anywhere. In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, I followed Bryson as he toured his family home, which just so happens to be an old English parsonage. As he goes through each room, he ruminates about why we live the way we do and how the rooms and things in our homes evolved. The journey through the house is riveting and educational--answering such questions as: Why are salt and pepper the two condiments we keep on our kitchen tables? What does "board" mean in the phrase "room and board?" Why are there four tines on a fork? Why do men have a row of pointless buttons on their suit jacket sleeves? Each chapter focuses on a different room, allowing Bryson to explore things such as the history of hygiene in the bathroom, the advent of electricity while poking around the fuse box, and the important issues of sex, death and sleeping while visiting the bedroom. It is an ingenious way to structure the book, and it gives Bryson lots of leeway to ramble about wherever his interests and research took him. For the most part, Bryson focuses on the last 150 years, which encompasses the time from when his home was built until modern times--and also, as Bryson points out, when "the modern world was really born. The book is packed with interesting stories, facts, anecdotes and histories that if I took the time to tell you about all the ones that interested me, I would be writing a book myself. So, I'll content myself with sharing a few excerpts from the book that I highlighted while reading. (And even then I had to cut out a few because I highlighted so many.) On the popularity of hermitages: For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. Statistics on stairs: Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses. On Christopher Columbus: It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers--excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing A more interesting side effect of lead paint: One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects--an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did. On servant-master sleep arrangements: Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master's bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed. The records make clear that King Henry V's steward and chamberlain both were present when he bedded Catherine of Valois. On the difficulties of getting medical care while being a woman: As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman's touch could spoil a ham. On the dangers of life before proper sewer systems: Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected, and the contents often seeped into neighboring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: "Going down into my cellar ... I put my foot into a great heap of turds ... by which I found that Mr Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me." I just adored this book and was engrossed through all 512 pages. This is vintage Bryson, and his fans will not be disappointed. And, if you've never read a Bill Bryson book before, I strongly encourage you to do so. No one presents history with as much humor, accessibility and curiosity as Bryson. (And if there is someone who does, I need to know who it is!) And since we all live in homes of some kind, I'm sure everyone will find something of interest in this book. After all, we are all benefiting from the advances and history described in this book. For my part, I know that I'll never turn on a light, flush a toilet, sit in a chair, or walk up a flight of stairs without thinking of some anecdote from this book. Highly recommended. Review: At Home... in England - As history lesson's go, Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life has a lot going for it. When, after all, is that last time you looked at a fuse box and wondered where it came from? Bryson's thesis, which is that everything you take for granted in your home is the result of a major historical change is right on. I loved reading about the history of lighting, for example, and the reasons why people continued burning candles even after lamps were in common use. Bryson's indepth discussion of pepper debunks a lot of old myths (that pepper was popular mainly because it masked the taste of rotten food) and his interesting explanations of diseases caused by vitamin dificiencies will open a lot of eyes. But one thing you should know about this book is that it is very, very England-centric. Bryson does explain this when the discusses the wide use of servants (even at the height of servant use they were never as common in the United States) and the effect that America had on the export of ice, but he much of the rest of the time he seems to forget that he's got a pretty big American audience reading the book. While he goes on and on about Mrs. Beaton's housekeeping books for example, he leaves out the influence of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School on cooking in the United States. Particularly tedious to Americans might be the extensive discussion of Great Houses, the assumption that it was almost impossible to do certain things yourself (such as laundry) when in fact Americans were doing these things. Bryson seems to like areas where Americans were something like the British. He spends a fair amount of time on the Great Houses of the new rich in America at the end of the 19th century, and spends a bit of time on all the intermarrying that went on between Americans and British aristocrats. He seems to think that 500 wealthy Americans marrying British aristocrats in one year was a huge number--which it was for the British. For the Americans it was a drop in the bucket. Most important the lives of these extremely wealthy people are not nearly as interesting as the day to day home lives of average Americans. Unfortunately Bryson doesn't seem to agree. Bryson's writing on American Great Houses contains one weird error. When discussing the Vanderbilt mansions Bryson describes the way buildings were torn down and says that "By 1947 all had gone. Not one of the family's country houses was lived in for a second generation." Well maybe not lived in but certainly not destroyed. The Breakers, the most famous of the Vanderbilt country houses can be seen in Newport,RI and hosts thousands of tourists each year. A great part of American home tradition does come from England. (As the product of two English grandparents) I know that more than most. I just wish that Bryson had specified in the title that he was talking, for the most part, about England. I have a feeling that many European readers may agree with me, not to mention those from Asia and Latin America. Actually the book made me wish that Bryson would write another book, this one about America and the development of the American home. In the meantime I encourage one and all to dip into a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods for a window into how a Wisconsin family prepared for winter in the late 1870s. ## Images ![At Home: A Short History of Private Life - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71-k+d92bIL.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Media Language, Media Format** options. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fascinating, Educational, Humorous ... In Other Words, Vintage Bryson! *by J***R on November 5, 2010* Whenever I'm asked about my favorite authors, Bill Bryson always makes the list. Not only has he written a string of humorous yet informative travel narratives, he's also penned a memoir about his 1950s childhood and a variety of non-fiction books on topics as diverse as the English language, Shakespeare and a rather grand attempt at a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson is able to make whatever he is writing about amazingly interesting while also being gently humorous. I've always thought that if Bill Bryson wrote the history and English textbooks for schools, everyone would do their required reading and come away bursting with information and insights. Whenever someone tells me that they don't like nonfiction, I always ask if they've read Bill Bryson. To me, he is the epitome of the accessible nonfiction writer, and I would follow him anywhere. In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, I followed Bryson as he toured his family home, which just so happens to be an old English parsonage. As he goes through each room, he ruminates about why we live the way we do and how the rooms and things in our homes evolved. The journey through the house is riveting and educational--answering such questions as: Why are salt and pepper the two condiments we keep on our kitchen tables? What does "board" mean in the phrase "room and board?" Why are there four tines on a fork? Why do men have a row of pointless buttons on their suit jacket sleeves? Each chapter focuses on a different room, allowing Bryson to explore things such as the history of hygiene in the bathroom, the advent of electricity while poking around the fuse box, and the important issues of sex, death and sleeping while visiting the bedroom. It is an ingenious way to structure the book, and it gives Bryson lots of leeway to ramble about wherever his interests and research took him. For the most part, Bryson focuses on the last 150 years, which encompasses the time from when his home was built until modern times--and also, as Bryson points out, when "the modern world was really born. The book is packed with interesting stories, facts, anecdotes and histories that if I took the time to tell you about all the ones that interested me, I would be writing a book myself. So, I'll content myself with sharing a few excerpts from the book that I highlighted while reading. (And even then I had to cut out a few because I highlighted so many.) On the popularity of hermitages: For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. Statistics on stairs: Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses. On Christopher Columbus: It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers--excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing A more interesting side effect of lead paint: One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects--an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did. On servant-master sleep arrangements: Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master's bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed. The records make clear that King Henry V's steward and chamberlain both were present when he bedded Catherine of Valois. On the difficulties of getting medical care while being a woman: As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman's touch could spoil a ham. On the dangers of life before proper sewer systems: Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected, and the contents often seeped into neighboring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: "Going down into my cellar ... I put my foot into a great heap of turds ... by which I found that Mr Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me." I just adored this book and was engrossed through all 512 pages. This is vintage Bryson, and his fans will not be disappointed. And, if you've never read a Bill Bryson book before, I strongly encourage you to do so. No one presents history with as much humor, accessibility and curiosity as Bryson. (And if there is someone who does, I need to know who it is!) And since we all live in homes of some kind, I'm sure everyone will find something of interest in this book. After all, we are all benefiting from the advances and history described in this book. For my part, I know that I'll never turn on a light, flush a toilet, sit in a chair, or walk up a flight of stairs without thinking of some anecdote from this book. Highly recommended. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ At Home... in England *by R***N on November 20, 2010* As history lesson's go, Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life has a lot going for it. When, after all, is that last time you looked at a fuse box and wondered where it came from? Bryson's thesis, which is that everything you take for granted in your home is the result of a major historical change is right on. I loved reading about the history of lighting, for example, and the reasons why people continued burning candles even after lamps were in common use. Bryson's indepth discussion of pepper debunks a lot of old myths (that pepper was popular mainly because it masked the taste of rotten food) and his interesting explanations of diseases caused by vitamin dificiencies will open a lot of eyes. But one thing you should know about this book is that it is very, very England-centric. Bryson does explain this when the discusses the wide use of servants (even at the height of servant use they were never as common in the United States) and the effect that America had on the export of ice, but he much of the rest of the time he seems to forget that he's got a pretty big American audience reading the book. While he goes on and on about Mrs. Beaton's housekeeping books for example, he leaves out the influence of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School on cooking in the United States. Particularly tedious to Americans might be the extensive discussion of Great Houses, the assumption that it was almost impossible to do certain things yourself (such as laundry) when in fact Americans were doing these things. Bryson seems to like areas where Americans were something like the British. He spends a fair amount of time on the Great Houses of the new rich in America at the end of the 19th century, and spends a bit of time on all the intermarrying that went on between Americans and British aristocrats. He seems to think that 500 wealthy Americans marrying British aristocrats in one year was a huge number--which it was for the British. For the Americans it was a drop in the bucket. Most important the lives of these extremely wealthy people are not nearly as interesting as the day to day home lives of average Americans. Unfortunately Bryson doesn't seem to agree. Bryson's writing on American Great Houses contains one weird error. When discussing the Vanderbilt mansions Bryson describes the way buildings were torn down and says that "By 1947 all had gone. Not one of the family's country houses was lived in for a second generation." Well maybe not lived in but certainly not destroyed. The Breakers, the most famous of the Vanderbilt country houses can be seen in Newport,RI and hosts thousands of tourists each year. A great part of American home tradition does come from England. (As the product of two English grandparents) I know that more than most. I just wish that Bryson had specified in the title that he was talking, for the most part, about England. I have a feeling that many European readers may agree with me, not to mention those from Asia and Latin America. Actually the book made me wish that Bryson would write another book, this one about America and the development of the American home. In the meantime I encourage one and all to dip into a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods for a window into how a Wisconsin family prepared for winter in the late 1870s. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Fun, Enjoyable, Informative Read *by T***S on January 3, 2013* Home. I love home. I love my home and I love the very idea, the concept, of home. God is good to give us home, to give us a place where we can just be, a place where we can center our lives. Think about your home, think about how good it is to have a place of your own, a place where you have your stuff and your people and where you live your life, and you'll realize what a calling it was for Christ to have no home, to have no place to call his own. We look at home today, we look at private life, and tend to assume that things have always been as they are now. And yet this is not the case. The home and the private life have developed over time, slowly evolving into what they are today and slowly evolving toward what they will be tomorrow. Home and private life are the twin subjects of Bill Bryson's new book: At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Bryson recently purchased an old Norfolk Church of England rectory as his home and it provides the starting point for his investigations. "Looking around my house, I was startled and somewhat appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, playing idly with the salt and pepper shakers, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea why, out of all the spices in the world, we have such an abiding attachment to these two. Why not pepper and cardamom, or salt and cinnamon? And why do forks have four tines and not three or five?" Those mundane observations and the questions they generated got him started in his quest to understand home. And somehow he makes home, the most mundane place in our lives, utterly fascinating. "If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly." Do you enjoy your home and all its comforts? That's because we humans have been working tirelessly for all these millennia to make home a place of comfort. Slowly, slowly we have gotten to the point we are at today. To add structure to the book, Bryson walks through his home, room by room, and allows each room to be the subject of a chapter. Along the way Bryson offers all kinds of fantastic wanderings, meanderings and observations so that each room really is only a starting place. I am sure there are some who get frustrated by all of the author's wanderings. You'll have to learn to embrace them because they really are the point of the book. Embrace them, and you'll come to love them. Consider this, something he observes while investigating the history of the bedroom. Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung--or frass, as it is known to entomologists. Or how about stairs? Ever paused to think about stairs--how they came to be, and what kind of effect they have on us? Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses. He often traces the history of words that we use all the time but think about seldom. Like toilet. Why on earth is toilet water something you daub on your face and something swirling around the bowl and carrying away your waste? Perhaps no other word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than toilet. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of toile, a word still used to describe a type of linen. Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on the dressing table (whence toiletries). Then it became the dressing table itself, then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory itself. Which explains why toilet water in English can describe something you would gladly daub on your face or, simultaneously and more basically, water in a toilet. He often relies on a subtle sense of humor that often got me laughing out loud. Like here, as he discusses wine: But it is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist. It is impossible to say whether wines are worse now than they were before. Most authorities think not, but such a desperate remedy is bound to nurture lingering doubts among those who are inclined to have them. What is certainly true is that surviving pre-phylloxera wines have attracted a cachet that has led people to part with a good deal of their money and much of their common sense in a quest to possess something so deliciously irreplaceable. In 1985, Malcolm Forbes, the American publisher, paid $156,450 for a bottle of Chteau Lafite 1787. This made it much too valuable to drink, so he put it on display in a special glass case. Unfortunately, the spotlights that artfully lit the precious bottle caused the ancient cork to shrink and it fell with a $156,450 splash into the bottle. Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Chteau Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world's most expensive bottle of wine into the world's most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway. Or like here, when he discusses hygiene (and seriously, be grateful that we live in an age of good hygiene)! As people adjusted to the idea that they might safely get wet from time to time, long-standing theories about personal hygiene were abruptly reversed. Now instead of it being bad to have pink skin and open pores, the belief took hold that the skin was in fact a marvelous ventilator--that carbon dioxide and other toxic inhalations were expelled through the skin, and that if pores were blocked by dust and other ancient accretions natural toxins would become trapped within and would dangerously accumulate. That's why dirty people--the Great Unwashed of Thackeray--were so often sick. Their clogged pores were killing them. In one graphic demonstration, a doctor showed how a horse, painted all over in tar, grew swiftly enfeebled and piteously expired. (In fact, the problem for the horse wasn't respiration but temperature regulation, though the point was, from the horse's perspective, obviously academic.) I could go on and on. This book may not change your life, but I am sure you'll find yourself enjoying it a lot--and hopefully as much as I did. It isn't quite light reading, but it also isn't at all heavy. It's just the kind of book you'll love to read while sitting through a long flight or while crashing on the couch on a Saturday afternoon. Really my only complaints with the book are these: Bryson uses the word agreeable a few too many times and he writes (not surprisingly) from the perspective of one who holds to evolution, something that comes through every now and again. Beyond that, it's just a good, fun, enjoyable, informative read. Buy it for yourself or get it for a gift. You'll love it. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.sg/products/1375338-at-home-a-short-history-of-private-life](https://www.desertcart.sg/products/1375338-at-home-a-short-history-of-private-life) --- *Product available on Desertcart Singapore* *Store origin: SG* *Last updated: 2026-09-18*