At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

Most members enjoyed this entertaining history of domestic life in England and America. The author uses as an organising framework the history of his own house, an English rectory built in 1851.

Bill moves from room to room with an inquiring mind and curiosity about the history of things he sees before him. He discusses the mystery of everyday objects, such as the salt and pepper shakers, and how they came to be a ubiquitous part of our domestic lives - and the technologies which changed our lives forever.

Along the way he ponders the life and times of the first owner, Vicar Thomas JG Marsham, and the role that wealthy English clergy with time on their hands had in advancing technology and our knowledge of the world.

In true Bill Bryson fashion, he ferrets out quirky characters and displays a fascination for the more gruesome facts of previous centuries' everyday lives such as scurvy, the numbers of the dead in centuries-old church burial grounds, rat infestations and the lack of hygiene among early surgeons. He provides us with laugh-out-loud humorous anecdotes, trivia, origins of words, side histories of the domestic life of a variety of well known historical names on both sides of the Atlantic, and meandering colourful deviations which don't seem to have any point, until they do.

It is tempting to provide some of the many tidbits which members recounted at our meeting as giving them delight, but if you haven't read the book that would certainly spoil it for you. Go read it!

Who is Bill Bryson?

 Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951, the son of Bill Bryson Sr, a sports journalist who worked for 50 years at the Des Moines Register, and Agnes May, the home furnishings editor at the same newspaper.

Bill attended Drake University for two years before dropping out in 1972, deciding instead to backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend. He subsequently wrote about some of their hilarious experiences from the trip in his book Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1992).

He decided to stay in Britain after landing a job working in a psychiatric hospital. There he met Cynthia Billen, a nurse, whom he married in 1975. They moved back to Des Moines so Bryson could complete his degree but following that settled in Britain in 1977.

Bill worked as a journalist, chief copy editor and deputy national news editor for a variety of papers. The Brysons moved around the UK. They lived in the Old Rectory in Wramplingham, Norfolk (featured in the book, At Home) from 2003 to 2013. They currently live in rural Hampshire with a small flat in London.

Bill became a dual citizen in 2015. His best selling books include: Notes from a Small Island (1996), A Walk in the Woods (1997) (subsequently made into a move staring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson), Down Under (2000), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006) and The Road to Little Dribbling (2015).

His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) won the Aventis Prize and the EU's Descartes Prize for science communication. It was the largest selling non-fiction book of its decade in the UK.

At Home: a Short History of Private Life was written in 2010. It was followed by: The Body: A Guide for Occupants in 2019.

Bill Bryson was Chancellor of Durham University from 2005-2011. He was made an honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contribution to literature in 2006. In 2007 he was awarded the James Joyce Award by the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society, the first non-Briton to receive this honour, and has a fistful of honorary doctorates from British and American universities.