Saturday, October 9, 2010

Sleep Tight

A history of ordinary life.
When parents kiss their children good night and say, "Sleep tight," it's a fair bet that neither party realizes that the phrase originated in the era of straw-stuffed mattresses. Before the invention of spring mattresses in 1865, bedding would have been suspended by rope lattices that, when they sagged, could be tightened with a key. This is the sort of historical oddity in which Bill Bryson delights, and "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" is stuffed with them.

Did you know, for instance, that the 19th-century vogue for brass beds grew not from anyone's fondness for the metal but from the way a smooth, hard surface discourages climbing vermin?
....Mr. Bryson discovered—and, in these pages, he clearly enjoys relating—that many commonplace objects have fascinating pedigrees. "The history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be," he explains, "but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."
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