Publisher Description
Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why did medieval people sleep sitting up? When were the two “dirty centuries?” Why did gas lighting cause Victorian ladies to faint? Why, for centuries, did rich people fear fruit?
In her brilliantly and creatively researched book, Lucy Worsley takes us through the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen. She covers the history of each room and explores what people actually did in bed, in the bath, at the table, and at the stove—from sauce stirring to breastfeeding, teeth cleaning to masturbation, getting dressed to getting married—providing a compelling account of how the four rooms of the home have evolved from medieval times to today.
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“Good fun. Like Bill Bryson’s At Home, but much tighter and more focused on the domestic, where Bryson strays all over the place. Too much focus on the upper classes, whose lives are of course much better documented, but I wish she’d done more to include the domestic lives of the less privileged. I listened to it as an audiobook, and it’s the same reader as Deborah Devonshire’s autobio, which is kind of funny because Chatsworth comes up a few times.”
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Holly (4 out of 5 stars)
