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Bill Bryson's
At Home

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An Excerpt from Bill Bryson's At Home

THE DRAWING ROOM

I

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. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition.
Comfortable
meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole's day no one did.

Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older
withdrawing room
, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
drawing room
was challenged in more refined circles by the French
salon
, which was sometimes anglicized to
saloon
, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that
saloon
came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile.
Salon
, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments.
Parlor
, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French
parler
, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.

Drawing room
is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By mid-century it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by
sitting room
, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was
lounge
, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America,
living room
came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove
parlor
out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.

Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived to make his drawing room the most comfortable room in the house, with the softest and finest furnishings. In practice, however, it was probably anything but comfortable for much of the year, since it has just one fireplace, which could do no more than warm a small, central part of the room. Even with a good fire going, I can attest, it is possible in the depths of winter to stand across the room and see your breath.

Though the drawing room became the focus of comfort in the home, the story doesn't actually start there; it doesn't start in the house at all. It starts outdoors, a century or so before Mr. Marsham's birth, with a simple discovery that would make landed families like his very rich and allow him one day to build himself a handsome rectory. The discovery was merely this: land didn't have to be rested regularly to retain its fertility. It was not the most staggering of insights, but it changed the world.

Traditionally, most English farmland was divided into long strips called furlongs and each furlong was left fallow for one season in every three—sometimes one season in two—so that it could recover its ability to produce healthy crops.
*
This meant that in any given year at least one-third of the nation's farmland stood idle. In consequence, there wasn't sufficient feed to keep large numbers of animals alive through the winter, so landowners had no choice but to slaughter most of their stock each autumn and face a long, lean period till spring.

Then English farmers discovered something that Dutch farmers had known for a long time: if turnips, clover, or one or two other amenable crops were sown on the idle fields, they miraculously refreshed the soil and produced a bounty of winter fodder into the bargain. It was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What
was
understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically. Moreover, because more animals lived through the winter, they produced heaps of additional manure, and these glorious, gratis ploppings enriched the soil even further.

It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed. Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad. Now, thanks to the simple expedient of crop rotation, agriculture was able to settle into a continuous, more or less reliable prosperity. It was this long golden age that gave so much of the countryside the air of prosperous comeliness it enjoys still today, and allowed the likes of Mr. Marsham to embrace that gratifying new commodity: comfort.

Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull's new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically, too, from between twenty and forty bushels an acre to as much as eighty.

The new vitality was also reflected in breeding programs. Nearly all the great cattle breeds—Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire
*
—were eighteenth-century creations. Sheep likewise were successfully manipulated to become the bundles of unnatural fleeciness we see today. A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds. Underneath all that lovely fleece, sheep were gratifyingly plumper, too. Between 1700 and 1800, the average weight of sheep sold at Smithfield Market in London more than doubled, from thirty-eight pounds to eighty. Beef cattle expanded similarly. Dairy yields went up, too.

All this was not without cost, however. To make the new systems of production work, it was necessary to amalgamate small fields into large ones and move the peasant farmers off the land. This enclosure movement, in which small fields that had formerly supported many were converted into much larger enclosed fields that enriched a few, made farming immensely lucrative for those with large holdings—and soon in many areas that was almost the only kind of holding there was. Enclosure had been going on slowly for centuries, but it gathered pace between 1750 and 1830, when some six million acres of British farmland were enclosed. Enclosure was hard on the displaced peasant farmers, but it did leave them and their descendants conveniently available to move to towns and become the toiling masses of the new Industrial Revolution—which was also just beginning and was funded to a very large extent by the surplus wealth enjoyed by the ever-richer landowners.

Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This didn't always represent a notable advance in beauty—at one time in the eighteenth century, eighty-five open-cast coal mines could be seen from Chatsworth House, or so it has been said—but it did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. Still others made money from leasing land to railways or building canals and controlling rights of way. The Duke of Bridgewater earned annual returns of 40 percent—and really returns don't get much better than that—from a canal monopoly in the West Country. All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest—almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked. Many people were born into a world in which they had to do virtually nothing with their wealth but stack it. The third Earl of Burlington, to take one example of many, owned vast estates in Ireland—some forty-two thousand acres in all—and never visited the country. Eventually he was made lord treasurer of Ireland and still never visited it.

This wealthy elite and their offspring covered the British countryside with stout and rambling expressions of this new
joie de richesse
. By one count, at least 840 large country houses were built in England between 1710 and the end of the century—”dispersed like great rarity plums in a vast pudding of a country,” in the exuberant words of Horace Walpole.

Extraordinary houses need extraordinary people to design and build them, and perhaps none was more extraordinary—or at least more unexpected—than Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726).
*
Vanbrugh came from a large family—he was one of nineteen children—that was well-to-do and of Dutch extraction, though they had been settled in England for nearly half a century by the time Vanbrugh himself was born.

“A most sweet-natur'd gentleman, and pleasant,” wrote the poet Nicholas Rowe of Vanbrugh, who seems to have been well liked by everyone who met him (with the notable exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, as we shall see). A portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made when Vanbrugh was about forty, shows an agreeable man with a pink, well-fed, rather ordinary face framed—indeed,all but overwhelmed—by a periwig of baroque magnificence, as was the fashion of the day.

For the first three decades of his life he displayed no particular sense of direction. He worked in a family wine business, went to India as an agent for the East India Company—then still a fairly new and undistinguished enterprise—and finally took up soldiering, though without much distinction there either. Sent to France, he was arrested as a spy almost as soon as he stepped ashore and spent nearly five years in prison, albeit in reasonable, gentlemanly comfort.

Prison appears to have had a galvanizing effect on him, for upon his return to England he became with remarkable swiftness a celebrated playwright, producing in rapid succession two of the most popular comedies of his day,
The Relapse
and
The Provok'd Wife
. Featuring characters with names like Fondlewife, Lord Foppington, Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and Sir John Brute, the plays may seem just a touch heavy-handed to us but were the height of drollery in that overdone and highly fragranced age. It was pretty risqué stuff. One scandalized member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners said that Vanbrugh “had debauch'd the stage beyond the looseness of all former times.” Others loved his plays for exactly the same reasons. The poet Samuel Rogers thought him “almost as great a genius as ever lived.”

Altogether Vanbrugh would write or adapt ten works for the stage, but meanwhile, and with no less startling abruptness, he also turned his talents to architecture. Where
this
impulse came from was as much a mystery to his contemporaries as it is to us. All that is known is that in 1701, at the age of thirty-five, he began work on one of the grandest houses ever built in England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire. How he persuaded his friend Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle—described by one architectural historian as “rather nondescript but obviously uncontrollably wealthy”—to underwrite this seemingly insane ambition is no less uncertain. This was not just a big house, it was a place that was positively and determinedly palatial, built “on a scale previously the prerogative of royalty,” in the words of Vanbrugh's biographer Kerry Downes. Clearly Carlisle saw something in Vanbrugh's rough sketches, and Vanbrugh, it must be said, did have the backup of a real architect of undoubted gifts, Nicholas Hawks-moor, who had twenty years of experience but was oddly content to work as Vanbrugh's assistant. It seems also that Vanbrugh may have worked for free. (No indication of money changing hands has ever been found—and on both sides these were men who kept track of such things.) In any case, Carlisle dismissed the distinguished architect he had been planning to use, William Talman, and gave the novice Vanbrugh free rein.