Bill Bryson, 2010
Translation. T. Trefilova, 2012
Edition in Russian AST Publishers, 2014

In the old days, solitude was not understood in the same way as it is today. Even in the 19th century, lying down to sleep with a stranger in the same bed in an inn was commonplace, and diarists often wrote how disappointed they were when a stranger arrived late in their bed. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams had to share a bed in an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and they fought all night over whether or not to open the window.

Servants often slept at the foot of the master's bed, so that any request of the master could be easily fulfilled. From written sources it becomes clear that the chamberlain and the master of the horse of King Henry V were present in the bedroom when the king slept with Catherine of Valois. The diaries of Samuel Pepys say that a maid slept on the floor of his matrimonial bedroom as a living alarm in case of a robbery. In such circumstances, the bed curtain did not provide the necessary privacy; besides, it was a haven for dust and insects, and drafts easily inflated it. Among other things, the bedside curtain could be a fire hazard, as, indeed, the whole house, from thatched flooring to thatched roof. Almost every home economics guide warned against reading by candlelight in bed, but many ignored this advice.

In one of his works, John Aubrey, a 17th-century historian, tells a funny story concerning the wedding of Thomas More's daughter Margaret and a certain William Roper. Roper came one morning to More and announced that he wanted to marry one of his daughters - it doesn't matter which one. Mor then led Roper into his bedroom, where the daughters slept in a low bed pulled out from under their father's. Bending down, More deftly took hold of "a corner of the sheet and suddenly pulled it off the bed." The girls slept completely naked. Sleepily expressing displeasure at being disturbed, they rolled over on their stomachs and fell asleep again. Sir William, admiring the view, announced that he had examined the "goods" from all sides, and lightly tapped his cane on the bottom of sixteen-year-old Margaret. “And no hassle with courtship!” Aubrey writes enthusiastically.

Whether all this is true is unknown: Aubrey described what happened a century later. It is clear, however, that in his time no one was surprised by the fact that More's adult daughters slept next to his bed.

A serious problem with beds, especially during the Victorian period, was that they were inseparable from the most problematic activity of that era - sex. In marriage, sex is, of course, sometimes necessary. Mary Wood-Allen, in her popular and influential book What Young Women Need to Know, assures her young readers that it is permissible to have physical intimacy with her husband, provided that it is done "in the complete absence of sexual desire." It was believed that the moods and thoughts of the mother at the time of conception and throughout pregnancy deeply and irreparably affect the fetus. Partners were advised to have sex only with mutual sympathy, so as not to produce a handicapped child.

To avoid arousal, women were asked to spend more time in the open air, not to do anything stimulating, including not to read or play cards, and above all, not to strain their brains beyond what was necessary. It was believed that education for a woman is just a waste of time; in addition, it is extremely dangerous for their fragile organisms.

In 1865, John Ruskin wrote in one of his essays that women should be trained until they were "practically useful" to their husbands, and no more. Even the American Catherine Beecher, who was, by the standards of that time, a radical feminist, passionately defended the right of women to a full education, but asked not to forget: they still need time to put their hair in order.

For men, the main task was not to drop a single drop of sperm outside the sacred bonds of marriage, but they also had to observe moderation in marriage. As one respected expert explained, the seminal fluid, remaining in the body, enriches the blood and strengthens the brain. The one who mindlessly consumes this natural elixir becomes weak both spiritually and physically. Therefore, even in marriage, it is necessary to protect your spermatozoa, because due to frequent sex, the sperm liquefies and a sluggish, apathetic offspring is obtained. Sexual intercourse with a frequency of no more than once a month was considered the best option.

Masturbation, of course, was categorically excluded. The consequences of masturbation were well known: virtually every disease known to medicine, including insanity and premature death. Onanists - "poor, trembling, pale creatures on skinny legs, crawling on the ground," as one journalist described them - aroused contempt and pity. “Every act of masturbation is like an earthquake, an explosion, a fatal paralytic stroke,” declared another. Practical research clearly proved the harm of masturbation. The physician Samuel Tissot described how one of his patients was constantly drooling, had an ichor running from his nose, and he also “defecated right in bed without noticing it.” The last three words made a particularly strong impression.

Moreover, the habit of masturbation was automatically passed on to children and weakened the health of unborn offspring in advance. The most thorough analysis of the dangers associated with sex was offered by Sir William Acton in his work "The functions and diseases of the reproductive organs in children, youths, adults and old people, considered from the point of view of their physiological, social and moral relations", first published in 1857. . It was he who decided that masturbation leads to blindness. It is Acton who owns the oft-quoted phrase: “I must say that sexual experiences are practically inaccessible to most women.”

Such ideas dominated society for a surprisingly long time. “Many of my patients have told me that they first masturbated while watching a musical show,” says Dr. William Robinson gloomily and, most likely, not without exaggeration in his 1916 study of sexual disorders.

Science has always been ready to come to the rescue. Mary Roach's Curious Parallels in Science and Sex describes one of the anti-lust devices developed in the 1850s, a spiked ring worn around the penis before bed (or at any other time); its metal points pricked the penis if it swollen unholy. Other devices used electric current, which unpleasantly, but effectively sobered up the lustful man.

It is worth noting that not everyone shared these conservative views. As early as 1836, the respected French physician Claude François Lallemand published a three-volume study linking frequent sex with good health. This impressed the Scottish physician George Drysdale so much that he formulated the philosophy of free love and unrestrained sex in his work "Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion". The book was published in 1855 in an edition of 90,000 copies and translated into eleven languages, "including Hungarian," the National Biographical Dictionary specifically notes, which loves to focus on trifles. It is clear that the society longed for more sexual freedom. Unfortunately, society as a whole accepted this freedom only a century later.

Perhaps it is not surprising that in such a tense atmosphere, successful sex for many people was an unattainable dream - for example, for the same John Ruskin. In 1848, the great art critic married nineteen-year-old Euphemia Chalmers Grey, and things didn't work out for them from the start. They never got married. Euphemia later said that, according to Ruskin, he imagined women not at all as they really were, and that she made a repulsive impression on him on the very first evening, and therefore he did not make her his wife.

Not getting what she wanted, Effy sued Ruskin (the details of her application to invalidate the marriage became the property of the tabloid press in many countries), and then ran away with the artist John Everett Millais, with whom she lived happily and from whom she gave birth to eight children.

True, her escape was completely inopportune, because Millais was painting a portrait of Ruskin just at that time. Ruskin, as a man of honor, continued to pose for Millais, but the two men never spoke to each other again.

Ruskin's sympathizers, who were many, pretended that there was no scandal at all. By 1900, the whole story had been successfully forgotten, and W. G. Collingwood was able, without blushing with shame, to write his book "The Life of John Ruskin", in which there is not even a hint that Ruskin had ever been married and that he in a panic, he ran out of the bedroom, seeing the hair on the female bosom.

Ruskin never got over his sanctimonious prejudices; he didn't seem to be trying very hard. After the death of William Turner in 1851, Ruskin was assigned to sort out the works left by the great artist, and among them were several mischievous watercolors of erotic content. Terrified, Ruskin decided that Turner wrote them in a "state of madness", and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all watercolors, depriving posterity of several priceless works.

Meanwhile, Effie Ruskin, having escaped from the shackles of an unhappy marriage, began to live happily. This was unusual, since in the 19th century divorce cases were always decided in favor of husbands. To get a divorce in Victorian England, it was enough for a man to simply declare that his wife had cheated on him with another. However, a woman in a similar situation had to prove that her husband committed incest, indulged in bestiality or some other serious sin, the list of which was very short.

Until 1857, all property and, as a rule, children were taken away from a divorced wife. Under the law, such a woman was completely powerless; the degree of her freedom and unfreedom was determined by her husband. In the words of the great legal theorist William Blackstone, a divorced woman renounces "herself and her own individuality."

Some countries were a little more liberal. In France, for example, a woman could divorce her husband if adultery took place, but only on the condition that the adultery took place in the marital home.

English law, on the other hand, was characterized by extreme injustice. There is a case where a certain woman named Martha Robinson was beaten for years by a cruel, mentally unbalanced husband. In the end, he infected her with gonorrhea, and then seriously poisoned her with drugs for sexually transmitted diseases, without the knowledge of his wife, pouring powders into her food. Broken both physically and mentally, Martha filed for divorce. The judge listened carefully to all the arguments, and then closed the case, sending Mrs. Robinson home and advising her to be more patient.

Belonging to the female sex was automatically considered a pathological condition. Men almost universally thought that when they hit puberty, women got sick. The development of the mammary glands, uterus, and other reproductive organs "takes away the energy that each person has a limited supply," according to one authority. Menstruation has been described in medical texts as a monthly act of willful negligence. “If a woman experiences pain at any point during a monthly period, it is due to disturbances in dress, diet, personal or social habits,” wrote one reviewer (obviously a man).

Ironically, women were indeed often ill, because the rules of decency did not allow them to receive the necessary medical care. In 1856, when a young housewife from Boston, from a respectable family, tearfully admitted to her doctor that she sometimes involuntarily thought not about her husband, but about other men, the doctor prescribed a number of harsh remedies for her, including cold baths, enemas and careful douching with borax, recommending to exclude everything exciting - spicy food, light reading, and so on.

It was believed that because of light reading, a woman had unhealthy thoughts and a tendency to tantrums. As one author gloomily concluded, “In young girls who read romance novels, there is arousal and premature development of the genital organs. The child physically becomes a woman a few months or even years before the time appointed by nature.

In 1892, Judith Flanders writes about a man who took his wife for an eye exam; the doctor said that the problem was a prolapse of the uterus and that she needed to remove this organ, otherwise her vision would continue to deteriorate.

Sweeping generalizations were by no means always true, since not a single doctor knew how to conduct a correct gynecological examination. As a last resort, he gently probed the patient under the covers in a dark room, but this did not happen often. In most cases, women who had complaints about the organs located between the neck and knees shamefacedly showed their sore spots on mannequins.

In 1852, an American physician proudly wrote that "women prefer to suffer from dangerous diseases, out of scrupulousness rejecting a full medical examination." Some doctors refused to apply forceps during childbirth, explaining that women with a narrow pelvis should not give birth to children, because such an inferiority could be transmitted to their daughters.

The inevitable consequence of all this was an almost medieval neglect of female anatomy and physiology by male physicians. There is no better example of professional gullibility in the annals of medicine than the famous case of Mary Toft, the ignorant female rabbit breeder of Godalming, Surrey, who for many weeks in the autumn of 1726 fooled the medical authorities, including two royal physicians, by assuring everyone that she could give birth to rabbits.

It became a sensation. Several doctors were present at the birth and expressed complete surprise. Only when another royal physician, a German named Kyriacus Ahlers, carefully examined the woman and declared that it was all just a hoax, did Toft finally confess to the deception. She was briefly sent to jail for fraud and then sent home to Godalming; no one else heard of her.

The understanding of female anatomy and physiology was still far away. In 1878, the British Medical Journal engaged in a lively long discussion with readers on the subject: can the touch of a cook who is currently menstruating ruin a ham?

According to Judith Flanders, a British doctor was removed from the medical register because he noticed in his printed work that the discoloration of the mucous membrane around the vagina shortly after conception is a reliable indicator of pregnancy. This conclusion was completely fair, but extremely indecent, because in order to determine the degree of color change, one had to first see it. The doctor was forbidden to practice. Meanwhile, in America, the respected gynecologist James Platt White was kicked out of the American Medical Association for allowing his students to be present at the birth (of course, with the permission of the women in labor).

Against this background, the actions of the surgeon Isaac Baker Brown seem even more extraordinary. Brown became the first gynecological surgeon. Unfortunately, he was led by deliberately false ideas. In particular, he was convinced that almost all female ailments are the result of "peripheral excitation of the nerve in the external genitalia with a center in the clitoris."

Simply put, he believed that women masturbate and this leads to insanity, epilepsy, catalepsy, hysteria, insomnia and a host of other nervous disorders. To solve the problem, it was proposed to remove the clitoris surgically, thereby excluding the very possibility of uncontrolled arousal.

Baker Brown was also convinced that the ovaries are bad for the female body and should also be removed. Before him, no one had tried to cut out the ovaries; It was an extremely difficult and risky operation. Brown's first three patients died on the operating table. However, he did not stop and operated on the fourth woman - his own sister, who, fortunately, survived.

When it was discovered that Baker Brown had been cutting out women's clitoris for years without their knowledge or consent, the medical community reacted violently and furiously. In 1867, Baker Brown was expelled from the Society of Obstetricians of London, ending his practice. Doctors have finally accepted the importance of a scientific approach to the intimate organs of patients. The irony is that, as a bad doctor and, apparently, a very bad person, Baker Brown, like no one else, contributed to the advancement of women's medicine.

“A Brief History of Everyday Life and Private Life”, of course, is not at all short - 640 pages in small print - but it is fascinating from the first letter to the last. It would seem that nothing special: facts and stories related to household items. However, the narrator's love of detail, his way of presenting the information, and the fluidity of his presentation make this non-fiction book an extremely enjoyable read. “A Brief History ...” is a kind of antipode of another science pop, “Pinball Effect”, which I did not like for the fragmentation of information and the author's throwing from one subject to another. Here, the stories are remembered - however, some of them are also repeated, which is a little annoying.

The house is an amazingly complex object. To my great surprise, I found that whatever happens in the world - discoveries, creations, victories, defeats - all their fruits eventually end up in our homes in one way or another. Wars, famines, the industrial revolution, the Age of Enlightenment - you will find traces of them in your sofas and dressers, in the folds of curtains, in the softness of down pillows, in the paint on the walls and in the water running from the tap. The history of everyday life is not just the history of beds, cupboards and stoves, as I vaguely assumed before, it is the history of scurvy, guano, the Eiffel Tower, bed bugs, theft of dead bodies, and almost everything else that has ever taken place in the human life. The house is not a refuge from history. Home is the place where the story eventually leads.

Bryson takes as a basis the former residence of an English parish priest in a village in Norfolk County and travels through the rooms: hall, kitchen, pantry and pantry, switchboard, living room, dining room, basement, corridor, office, garden, “plum room”, stairs, bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, nursery, attic. For almost every piece of furniture, he has a long story with a bias in previous centuries. Table? Well, for example: a simple board used to serve as a dining table, which was placed on the knees of diners, and then hung on the wall again - since then the word board has come to mean not only the surface on which they eat, but also the food itself. Bed? You can talk about medieval materials for stuffing mattresses for a long time and in detail. And behind the salt and pepper shakers, there is a trail of the most bloody and creepy stories. And here is a remarkable description of how the ritual of tea drinking appeared in the British Empire:

Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from 13,000 pounds to nearly 1.2 million pounds, and quadrupled over the next thirty years. Tea was noisily sipped by the workers and elegantly savored by the ladies. It was served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was the first drink in history that did not belong to any special class and also had its own ritual time of reception, called tea drinking. Making tea at home was easier than coffee, and it paired especially well with another pleasant ingredient that suddenly became available to mediocre city dwellers - sugar. The British, like no other nation, are addicted to sweet tea with milk. For a century and a half, tea was the heart of the East India Company, and the East India Company was the heart of the British Empire.

Not everyone liked the tea right away. The poet Robert Southey told of a certain country lady who received a pound of tea as a gift from her city friend, when this drink was still a novelty. Not knowing what to do with it, she boiled it in a saucepan, put the leaves on sandwiches with butter and salt, and served them to the guests. They bravely chewed on the unusual treat, declaring that it tasted interesting, if somewhat strange. However, in places where they drank tea with sugar, everyone was happy.

True, the author sometimes leaves for areas that are not too connected with everyday life. For example, talking about comfort, he talks about the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, and in the chapter about the garden he talks about the problem of burials. However, all topics turn out to be reinforced concrete interconnected: private life is not only a house, it is also a person. And about cemeteries in England in the 19th century. no less interesting to read than about the history of furniture.

... The cemeteries were so crowded that it was almost impossible to dig into the ground with a shovel and not accidentally pick up someone's decaying hand or other part of the body. The dead were buried in shallow, hastily dug graves, and were often exposed, dug up by animals or raised to the surface of their own accord, as stones in flower beds do. In such cases, the dead had to be reburied.

The townspeople, mourning their deceased loved ones, almost never visited their graves and did not attend the funeral itself. It was too hard and also dangerous. Putrefactive odors were said to deter visitors. A certain Dr. Walker testified at a parliamentary inquest that the gravediggers, before disturbing the coffin, drilled a hole in it, inserted a tube into it and burned the escaping gases - this process took up to twenty minutes.

Dr. Walker personally knew one man who disregarded this safety measure and immediately fell down, "slain like a cannonball, gassed from a fresh grave." “If this gas is inhaled, not mixed with atmospheric air, instant death will occur,” the committee confirmed in a written report, adding grimly, “Although mixed with air, it leads to serious illnesses, usually ending in death.”

“A Brief History…” is good for everyone except for one thing: there is no list of sources. Bryson, of course, indicates here and there monographs and works from which he got the facts, and my fragmentary knowledge of some subjects suggests that his information is reliable, but still it is a little strange to see stories without references to the original data. Of course, if you attach a footnote to every little thing, then the book will double in size and become completely unreadable, but a list of at least the main literature in which the author excavated would be desirable.

In general, “A Brief History of Everyday Life and Private Life” is incredibly informative and useful - for the scientific pop it is relatively easy to perceive, without losing its nutritional qualities. So let your curiosity run wild: learn about the history of various products and home furnishings, be horrified by the plight of medieval servants and read about old misconceptions about women and sex.

In the summer of 1662, Samuel Pepys, then a promising young officer in the naval department, invited his boss, Commissioner of the Admiralty Peter Pett, to dinner at his home in Seasing Lane, next to the Tower of London. The twenty-nine-year-old Pips probably hoped to impress his boss, but when he was served a plate of sturgeon, he was horrified to find in it "a bunch of swarming small worms."

Pips almost burned with shame: even at that time, people rarely found such violent manifestations of life in their plates. But they often had to deal with the fact that the food was stale or suspicious in composition. Poor storage conditions led to the fact that the products quickly deteriorated or they were tinted and diluted with dangerous and completely unappetizing substances.

Food counterfeiters resorted to truly diabolical tricks. Gypsum, alabaster, sand, dust and other inedible things were often added to sugar and other expensive seasonings and spices. Candle or lard was added to the oil. A tea lover, according to various authoritative sources, could easily, without knowing it, drink an infusion of anything from sawdust to powdered sheep's excrement. In one carefully inspected shipment of tea, Judith Flanders writes in her book The Victorian House, a little more than half was real tea, the rest of the load consisted of sand and earth. Sulfuric acid was mixed into vinegar (for greater pungency), chalk into milk, turpentine into gin. Copper arsenide made vegetables greener and jelly shiny. Lead chromate gave a golden hue to bread and rolls, and mustard a brighter color. Lead acetate was used to make drinks sweeter, and red lead improved the appearance of Gloucester cheese (although, of course, it did not make it healthier).

It seems that there was no such product that cunning shopkeepers could not "improve" and reduce the price with the help of various fraudulent manipulations. Tobias Smollett writes in his popular novel Humphrey Clinker's Travels (1771):

As recently as yesterday, I saw a filthy saleswoman on the street, washing the dust from cherries with her own saliva, and, who knows, some lady from St. with mangy fingers a Saint-James tradeswoman. About some dirty mess, which is called strawberries, and there is nothing to say; it is shifted with greasy hands from one dusty basket to another, and then served on the table with disgusting milk mixed with flour, which is called cream.

The bread was especially good. Let's give the floor to Smollett again:

The bread I eat in London is an indigestible dough mixed with chalk, alum and bone ash, tasteless and unhealthy in equal measure.

Such accusations were common at the time and probably had been made much earlier (recall the line from Jack and the beanstalk: "I'll crush his bones and make my own bread"). The earliest mention of the widespread methods of falsifying bread was found by me in an anonymous pamphlet entitled "The Revealed Poison, or the Terrifying Truth", written in 1757. A pamphlet on behalf of a certain "doctor, our good friend" authoritatively stated that "bags of old bones are often used by some bakers" and that "crypts with the dead are plundered in order to add uncleanness to the food of the living." Almost at the same time, another similar pamphlet was published - "The Origin of Bread, Fairly and Dishonestly Made", written by physician Joseph Manning, which stated that bakers usually add bean flour, chalk, white lead, slaked lime and bone marrow to the dough. ash.

This notion of ancient bread persists even today, although more than seventy years ago, Frederick Philby, in his classic work "Falsification of Foods" (1934), proved that these accusations were unfair. Philby tried to bake bread using the same undesirable impurities, those proportions and baking technology that were described in the revealing pamphlets. However, all the loaves, except for one, either turned out to be hard as a stone, or did not bake at all. Most of them had a disgusting smell and taste. Some took longer to bake than the "correct" bread, which means falsification would actually be less economically viable. Not a single adulterated loaf was edible.

The fact is that bread is a delicate product, and if you add the wrong ingredients to it, even in small quantities, it will immediately be noticeable. However, the same can be said about almost all food products. It is hard to imagine a person who drinks a cup of tea and does not realize that half of the tea leaves consisted of metal filings. Some falsifications undoubtedly took place, especially when it came to improving the color or giving the product a fresher look, but in the main the cases described are either isolated or fictional, and this certainly applies to all bread impurities (with the exception of burnt alum, oh which we will discuss in more detail later).

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of bread in the English diet of the 19th century. For many people, bread was not just an important addition to dinner, but the meal itself. Up to 80% of the family budget, according to bread historian Christian Petersen, went to food, and 80% of this amount was taken by bread. Even the middle class spent two-thirds of their income on food (today this figure is about one-quarter), mostly on bread. The daily diet of a poor family, according to almost all sources of the time, allegedly included several ounces of tea and sugar, vegetables, one or two slices of cheese, and sometimes quite a bit of meat. Everything else is bread.

Since bread was such an important food item, there were strict laws governing its composition and weight, and threatening severe penalties for violating them. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined ten pounds for each loaf sold or sentenced to a month in the workhouse. At one time, unscrupulous bakers were threatened with deportation to Australia. These laws kept bakers on their toes, as bread loses weight during the baking process due to moisture evaporation, and it is easy to make an accidental mistake. To be on the safe side, bakers sometimes added one extra loaf for every dozen they sold, hence the expression baker's dozen.

However, alum is a different matter. This chemical compound, which is double aluminum sulfate, has been used as a fixative for paints and also served as a lightening agent in all types of manufacturing processes, including leather processing. Alum is excellent at bleaching flour and is completely harmless in this case. The fact is that it requires very little alum: only three or four tablespoons per 280-pound bag of flour, and such a negligible amount will not hurt anyone. Generally speaking, alum is even now being added to foods and drugs. It is a standard ingredient in confectionery baking powder and vaccines. Alum is sometimes added to drinking water for its cleansing properties. They make lower grades of flour - quite good in terms of edibility, but not very attractive in appearance - quite acceptable for mass consumption, thereby allowing bakers to more efficiently use the wheat they have. In addition, alum served as a “drying” agent.

Foreign components were not always added to products in order to increase the volume of the latter. Sometimes they were there by accident. In 1862, a parliamentary inspection of bakeries found that many of them were "full of cobwebs, which have become heavy from adhering flour and hang down in long tufts," ready to fall into the first pot or pan. Insects scurried along the walls and countertops. Ice cream sold in London in 1881 contained human hair, cat hair, insects, cotton fibers and the like, but this was more the result of poor sanitation than a fraudulent attempt to increase the weight of the product. At the same time, a London confectioner was fined "for giving his sweets a yellow tint by adding to them the pigment left over from painting the cart." However, the very fact that such incidents attracted the attention of newspapers speaks of their exclusivity.

Smollett's Humphrey Clinker's Travels is a long novel written as a series of letters. He paints a vivid picture of English life in the 18th century, so even now he is often quoted and used as a source. In one of the most colorful episodes, Smollett says that milk is carried through the streets of London in open buckets,

where do the slops that splash out of doors and windows, the spitting and tobacco chewing of pedestrians, the splashes of dirt from under the wheels, and all sorts of rubbish thrown by unfit boys for fun, go; pewter measures, soiled by babies, are again immersed in milk, selling it to the next buyer, and to top it all off, all kinds of insects from rags of dirty filth, which they call thrush, fall into this precious mess.

The fact that the genre of this book is satire, and not at all documentary prose, is usually not taken into account. Smollett wrote his novel while outside of England: he slowly died in Italy, where he died three months after its publication.

However, I by no means want to say that in those days there were no bad foodstuffs in England. Of course there were, and the main problem was infected and rotten meat. Smithfield Market, London's main meat market, was notorious for its filth. One eyewitness to the parliamentary inspection of 1828 said that he saw "a thoroughly rotten cow carcass, oozing yellow muddy fat." Cattle that were driven into the city from afar often turned out to be exhausted, sick, good for nothing. Sometimes the cattle were all covered with ulcers. Sheep were sometimes skinned alive. So much spoiled goods were sold at Smithfield Market that it was even dubbed cagmag - a slang expression that means "rotten".

Even if the intentions of the producers were pure, the products themselves were not always fresh at the table. It was not so easy to deliver perishable products to remote markets in an edible state. Wealthy people have long dreamed of seeing overseas dishes or out-of-season fruits on their tables, and in January 1859, almost all of America was closely watching a ship that sailed in full sail from Puerto Rico to New England, carrying three hundred thousand oranges. When the ship arrived at the port of destination, more than two-thirds of the cargo had rotted into a fragrant porridge. Manufacturers from even more remote areas did not even count on such a result. Huge herds of cattle grazed in the endless pampas of Argentina, but the Argentines had no way to deliver meat to Europe or North America, so most of the animals were processed into bone meal and fat, and the meat was simply thrown away. Trying to help them, the German chemist Justus von Liebig in the middle of the 19th century proposed a technology for making meat extract, a kind of bouillon cubes, later called "Oxo", but this was not of great help.

A way had to be found to keep food fresh for much longer than nature intended. At the end of the 18th century, the Frenchman Nicolas Francois Appert published a book entitled The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substance for Several Years; The book was a real sensation. The essence of the Upper system was that the products were placed in glass jars, which were hermetically sealed, and then slowly heated. This method usually gave a very good result, but the sealing was not always reliable, sometimes air or dirt got into the jars, and as a result, buyers had gastro-intestinal disorders and poisoning. Because Upper's banks were not completely secure, they were treated with caution.

In short, before the food hit the table, a lot of trouble could happen to it. So when a wonderful product appeared in the early 1840s that promised to solve the problem of freshness, it was received with great joy. Oddly enough, this product was the well-known ice.

• publishing house AST, Moscow, 2014, translation by T. Trefilova

Some time after we moved into the former English rectory in an idyllic but featureless village in Norfolk, I went up to the attic to see where the source of the unexpectedly discovered mysterious leak was. Since our house does not have an attic staircase, I had to use a high stepladder to, long and indecently squirming, climb through the ceiling hatch - that's why I didn't go there before (and then I didn't feel much enthusiasm for such excursions).

Climbing at last to the attic and somehow getting to my feet in the dusty darkness, I was surprised to find a secret door in the outer wall, which was not visible from the yard. The door opened easily and led me out into a tiny space on the roof, little more than a table top, between the front and back gables. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural nonsense, but this one seemed completely incomprehensible: why was it necessary to make a door where there was no obvious need for it? However, there was a wonderful view from the platform.

When you suddenly see a familiar world from an unusual angle, it always fascinates. I was fifty feet above the ground; in central Norfolk this height already guarantees a more or less panoramic view. Directly in front of me stood an old stone church (our house once served as an addition to it). Further, slightly downhill, at some distance from the church and the pastor's house, there was a village, which both of these buildings belonged to. On the other side rose Wymondham Abbey, a mass of mediaeval splendor dominating the southern horizon. Halfway to the abbey, in a field, a tractor rumbled, drawing straight lines on the ground. The rest of the landscape was serene and sweet English pastoral.

It was especially interesting for me to look around, because just yesterday I wandered around these places with my friend Brian Ayres. Brian had recently retired and had previously been the county's archaeologist and probably had the best knowledge of Norfolk's history and landscapes. However, he had never been to our country church, and was very anxious to see that beautiful old building, older than Notre Dame, and about the same age as the cathedrals at Chartres and Salisbury. However, Norfolk is full of medieval churches - as many as 659 pieces (their number per square mile is the largest in the world), so they do not attract too much attention.

Have you ever noticed,” Brian asked as we entered the churchyard, “that country churches almost always seem to be buried in the ground? - The church building really stood in a shallow depression, like a weight on a pillow; the foundation of the church was about three feet below the surrounding churchyard. - Do you know why?

I confessed, as I often did in Brian's company, that I had no idea.

It's not at all that the church is sinking, - Brian explained with a smile. - This rises the church cemetery. How many people do you think are buried here?

I cast an appraising glance at the tombstones:

Do not know. Man eighty? Hundred?

I think you a little bit you underestimate,” Brian replied with good-natured equanimity. - Think yourself. Such a rural parish has an average of 250 people, which means that about a thousand adults die in a century, plus several thousand little poor fellows who never had time to grow up. Multiply this by the number of centuries that have passed since the building of this church, and you will see that there are not eighty or one hundred dead here, but twenty thousand.

(All this, as we remember, takes place a step away from my front door.)

- Twenty thousand? I asked in astonishment.

My friend nodded calmly.

Yes, that's a lot. That's why the earth rose three feet. He paused for a moment, giving me time to digest the information, then continued: “There are a thousand parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all these centuries of human activity by a thousand, and it turns out that we have before us a significant part of material culture. - He waved his hand at the bell towers that rose in the distance: - From here you can see ten or twelve other parishes, so in fact you are now looking at a quarter of a million burials - and this is here, in rural silence, where there have never been serious cataclysms.

From Brian's words, it became clear to me why archaeologists find 27,000 antiques a year in pastoral and sparsely populated Norfolk - more than in any other county in England.

People were losing things here long before England became England. Brian once showed me a map of archaeological finds in our parish. Something was found in almost every field - Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, Bronze Age burials, Viking estates. In 1985, a farmer walking through the field discovered a rare Roman phallic pendant near the very border of our property.

I imagine a man in a toga standing very close to my yard; he bewilderedly pats himself from top to bottom, discovering that he has lost a valuable piece of jewelry; just think: his pendant lay in the ground for seventeen or eighteen centuries, survived endless generations of people engaged in a wide variety of activities, invasions of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans, the birth of the English nation, the development of the monarchy and everything else, before it was picked up by a farmer of the late 20th century, for sure very surprised by such an unusual find!

So, standing on the roof of my own house and looking at the landscape that suddenly opened up, I was amazed at the oddities of our life: after two thousand years of human activity, the only reminder of the outside world remains a Roman phallic pendant. Century after century, people quietly went about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, having fun, and I suddenly thought that history, in essence, consists of such ordinary things. Even Einstein spent most of his intellectual life thinking about a vacation, a new hammock, or the graceful leg of a young lady who got off the streetcar across the street. These things fill our lives and thoughts, but we do not attach serious importance to them. I don't know how many hours I spent at school studying the Missouri Compromise or the War of the Scarlet and White Roses, but I would never have been allowed to spend as much time on the history of food, the history of sleep, sex or entertainment.

I figured it might be interesting to write a book about the ordinary things we deal with all the time, to finally notice them and pay homage to them. Looking around my house, I realized with fear and some confusion how little I know about the world of everyday life around me. One afternoon, when I was sitting at the kitchen table and mechanically turning the salt and pepper shakers in my hands, I suddenly asked myself: why, in fact, with all the variety of spices and seasonings, do we revere these two? Why not pepper and cardamom or, say, salt and cinnamon? And why does a fork have four tines and not three or five? There must be some explanation for such things.

As I dressed, I wondered why all my jackets had a few useless buttons on each sleeve. On the radio they talked about someone who “paid for housing and a table,” and I was surprised: what kind of table are we talking about? Suddenly my house seemed like a mysterious place to me.

And then I decided to take a trip around the house: go through all the rooms and understand what role each of them played in the evolution of privacy. The bathroom tells the story of hygiene, the kitchen tells the story of cooking, the bedroom tells the story of sex, death and sleep, and so on. I will write the history of the world without leaving home!

I confess I liked the idea. I recently finished a book in which I tried to comprehend the universe and how it formed - a task, frankly, was not an easy one. Therefore, I thought with pleasure of such a clearly defined, limitless object of description as the old parsonage in the English countryside. Yes, this book can easily be written in slippers!

Bill Bryson

Brief history of everyday life and private life

Jess and Wyatt

Introduction

Some time after we moved into the former English rectory in an idyllic but featureless village in Norfolk, I went up to the attic to see where the source of the unexpectedly discovered mysterious leak was. Since our house does not have an attic staircase, I had to use a high stepladder to, long and indecently squirming, climb through the ceiling hatch - that's why I didn't go there before (and then I didn't feel much enthusiasm for such excursions).

Climbing at last to the attic and somehow getting to my feet in the dusty darkness, I was surprised to find a secret door in the outer wall, which was not visible from the yard. The door opened easily and led me out into a tiny space on the roof, little more than a table top, between the front and back gables. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural nonsense, but this one seemed completely incomprehensible: why was it necessary to make a door where there was no obvious need for it? However, there was a wonderful view from the platform.

When you suddenly see a familiar world from an unusual angle, it always fascinates. I was fifty feet above the ground; in central Norfolk this height already guarantees a more or less panoramic view. Directly in front of me stood an old stone church (our house once served as an addition to it). Further, slightly downhill, at some distance from the church and the pastor's house, there was a village, which both of these buildings belonged to. On the other side rose Wymondham Abbey, a mass of mediaeval splendor dominating the southern horizon. Halfway to the abbey, in a field, a tractor rumbled, drawing straight lines on the ground. The rest of the landscape was serene and sweet English pastoral.

It was especially interesting for me to look around, because just yesterday I wandered around these places with my friend Brian Ayres. Brian had recently retired and had previously been the county's archaeologist and probably had the best knowledge of Norfolk's history and landscapes. However, he had never been to our country church, and was very anxious to see that beautiful old building, older than Notre Dame, and about the same age as the cathedrals at Chartres and Salisbury. However, Norfolk is full of medieval churches - as many as 659 pieces (their number per square mile is the largest in the world), so they do not attract too much attention.

Have you ever noticed,” Brian asked as we entered the churchyard, “that country churches almost always seem to be buried in the ground? - The church building really stood in a shallow depression, like a weight on a pillow; the foundation of the church was about three feet below the surrounding churchyard. - Do you know why?

I confessed, as I often did in Brian's company, that I had no idea.

It's not at all that the church is sinking, - Brian explained with a smile. - This rises the church cemetery. How many people do you think are buried here?

I cast an appraising glance at the tombstones:

Do not know. Man eighty? Hundred?

I think you a little bit you underestimate,” Brian replied with good-natured equanimity. - Think yourself. Such a rural parish has an average of 250 people, which means that about a thousand adults die in a century, plus several thousand little poor fellows who never had time to grow up. Multiply this by the number of centuries that have passed since the building of this church, and you will see that there are not eighty or one hundred dead here, but twenty thousand.

(All this, as we remember, takes place a step away from my front door.)

- Twenty thousand? I asked in astonishment.

My friend nodded calmly.

Yes, that's a lot. That's why the earth rose three feet. He paused for a moment, giving me time to digest the information, then continued: “There are a thousand parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all these centuries of human activity by a thousand, and it turns out that we have before us a significant part of material culture. - He waved his hand at the bell towers that rose in the distance: - From here you can see ten or twelve other parishes, so in fact you are now looking at a quarter of a million burials - and this is here, in rural silence, where there have never been serious cataclysms.

From Brian's words, it became clear to me why archaeologists find 27,000 antiques a year in pastoral and sparsely populated Norfolk - more than in any other county in England.

People were losing things here long before England became England. Brian once showed me a map of archaeological finds in our parish. Something was found in almost every field - Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, Bronze Age burials, Viking estates. In 1985, a farmer walking through the field discovered a rare Roman phallic pendant near the very border of our property.

I imagine a man in a toga standing very close to my yard; he bewilderedly pats himself from top to bottom, discovering that he has lost a valuable piece of jewelry; just think: his pendant lay in the ground for seventeen or eighteen centuries, survived endless generations of people engaged in a wide variety of activities, invasions of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans, the birth of the English nation, the development of the monarchy and everything else, before it was picked up by a farmer of the late 20th century, for sure very surprised by such an unusual find!

So, standing on the roof of my own house and looking at the landscape that suddenly opened up, I was amazed at the oddities of our life: after two thousand years of human activity, the only reminder of the outside world remains a Roman phallic pendant. Century after century, people quietly went about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, having fun, and I suddenly thought that history, in essence, consists of such ordinary things. Even Einstein spent most of his intellectual life thinking about a vacation, a new hammock, or the graceful leg of a young lady who got off the streetcar across the street. These things fill our lives and thoughts, but we do not attach serious importance to them. I don't know how many hours I spent at school studying the Missouri Compromise or the War of the Scarlet and White Roses, but I would never have been allowed to spend as much time on the history of food, the history of sleep, sex or entertainment.

I figured it might be interesting to write a book about the ordinary things we deal with all the time, to finally notice them and pay homage to them. Looking around my house, I realized with fear and some confusion how little I know about the world of everyday life around me. One afternoon, when I was sitting at the kitchen table and mechanically turning the salt and pepper shakers in my hands, I suddenly asked myself: why, in fact, with all the variety of spices and seasonings, do we revere these two? Why not pepper and cardamom or, say, salt and cinnamon? And why does a fork have four tines and not three or five? There must be some explanation for such things.

As I dressed, I wondered why all my jackets had a few useless buttons on each sleeve. On the radio they talked about someone who “paid for housing and a table,” and I was surprised: what kind of table are we talking about? Suddenly my house seemed like a mysterious place to me.

And then I decided to take a trip around the house: go through all the rooms and understand what role each of them played in the evolution of privacy. The bathroom tells the story of hygiene, the kitchen tells the story of cooking, the bedroom tells the story of sex, death and sleep, and so on. I will write the history of the world without leaving home!

I confess I liked the idea. I recently finished a book in which I tried to understand the universe and how it formed - a task, frankly, was not an easy one. Therefore, I thought with pleasure of such a clearly defined, limitless object of description as the old parsonage in the English countryside. Yes, this book can easily be written in slippers!

But it was not there. The house is an amazingly complex object. To my great surprise, I discovered that whatever happens in the world - discoveries, creations, victories, defeats - all their fruits eventually end up in our homes in one way or another. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment - you will find traces of them in your sofas and chests of drawers, in the folds of curtains, in the softness of down pillows, in the paint on the walls and in the water running from the tap. The history of everyday life is not just the history of beds, cupboards and stoves, as I vaguely assumed before, it is the history of scurvy, guano, the Eiffel Tower, bed bugs, theft of dead bodies, and also almost everything else that has ever taken place in the human life. The house is not a refuge from history. Home is the place where the story eventually leads.