At Home

by Bill Bryson

  II

  While we are on the topic of how our houses can hurt us, we might pause on the landing for a moment and consider one other architectural element that has throughout history proved lethal to a startlingly large number of people: the walls, or more specifically the things that go on the walls, namely, paint and wallpaper. For a very long time both were, in various ways, robustly harmful.

  Consider wallpaper, a commodity that was just becoming popular in ordinary homes at the time Mr. Marsham built his rectory. For a long time wallpaper—or “stained paper,” as it was still sometimes called—had been very expensive. It was heavily taxed for over a century, but it was also extremely labor-intensive to make. It was made not from wood pulp, but from old rags. Sorting through rags was a dirty job that exposed the sorters to a range of infectious diseases. Until the invention of a machine that could create continuous lengths of paper in 1802, the maximum size of each sheet was only two feet or so, which meant that paper had to be joined with great skill and care. The Countess of Suffolk paid £42 to wallpaper a single room at a time (the 1750s) when a good London house cost just £12 a year to rent. Flocked wallpaper, made from dyed stubbles of wool stuck to the surface of wallpaper, became wildly fashionable after about 1750 but presented additional dangers to those involved in its manufacture, as the glues were often toxic.

  When the wallpaper tax was finally lifted, in 1830, wallpaper really took off (or perhaps I should say really went on). The number of rolls sold in Britain leaped from one million in 1830 to thirty million in 1870, and this was when it really started to make a lot of people sick. From the outset wallpaper was often colored with pigments that used large doses of arsenic, lead, and antimony, but after 1775 it was frequently soaked in an especially insidious compound called copper arsenite, which was invented by the great but wonderfully hapless Swedish chemist Karl Scheele.* The color was so popular that it became known as Scheele’s green. Later, with the addition of copper acetate, it was refined into an even richer pigment known as emerald green. This was used to color all kinds of things—playing cards, candles, clothing, curtain fabrics, and even some foods. But it was especially popular in wallpaper. This was dangerous not only to the people who made or hung the wallpaper but also to those who lived with it afterward.

  By the late nineteenth century, 80 percent of English wallpapers contained arsenic, often in very significant quantities. A particular enthusiast was the designer William Morris, who not only loved rich arsenic greens but was on the board of directors of (and heavily invested in) a company in Devon that made arsenic-based pigments. Especially when damp was present—and in English homes it seldom was not—the wallpaper gave off a peculiar musty smell that reminded many people of garlic. Homeowners noticed that bedrooms with green wallpapers usually had no bedbugs. It has also been suggested that poisonous wallpaper could well account for why a change of air was so often beneficial for the chronically ill. In many cases they were doubtless simply escaping a slow poisoning. One such victim was Frederick Law Olmsted, a man we seem to be encountering more often than might be expected. He suffered apparent arsenic poisoning from bedroom wallpaper in 1893, at just the time people were finally figuring out what was making them unwell in bed, and needed an entire summer of convalescence—in another room.

  Paints were surprisingly dangerous, too. The making of paints involved the mixing of many toxic products—in particular lead, arsenic, and cinnabar (a cousin of mercury). Painters commonly suffered from a vague but embracing malady called painters’ colic, which was essentially lead poisoning with a flourish. Painters purchased white lead as a block, then ground it to a powder, usually by rolling an iron ball over it. This got a lot of dust onto their fingers and into the air, and the dust so created was highly toxic. Among the many symptoms painters tended to come down with were palsies, racking cough, lassitude, melancholy, loss of appetite, hallucinations, and blindness. One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects—an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did. One of those made seriously ill by white lead was James McNeill Whistler, who used a lot of it in creating the life-sized painting The White Girl.

  Today lead paint is banned almost everywhere except for certain very specific applications,* but it is much missed by conservators because it gave a depth of color and a mellow air that modern paints really can’t match. Lead paint looks especially good on wood.

  • • •

  Painting also involved many problems of demarcation. Who was allowed to do what in England was very complicated, thanks to the system of craft guilds, which meant that some practitioners could apply paint, some could apply distemper (a kind of thin paint), and some could do neither. Painters did most of the painting, as you would naturally expect, but plasterers were allowed to apply distemper to plastered walls—but only a few shades. Plumbers and glaziers, by contrast, could apply oil paints but not distemper. The reason for this is slightly uncertain, but it is probably attached to the fact that window frames were often made of lead—a material in which both plumbers and glaziers specialized.

  Distemper was made from a mixture of chalk and glue. It had a softer, thinner sheen that was ideal for plastered surfaces. By the mid-eighteenth century, distempers normally covered walls and ceilings and heavier oil paints covered the woodwork. Oil paints were a more complex proposition. They consisted of a base (usually lead carbonate, or “white lead”), a pigment for color, a binder such as linseed oil to make it stick, and thickening agents like wax or soap, which is slightly surprising because eighteenth-century oil paints were already pretty glutinous and difficult to apply—“like spreading tar with a broom,” in the words of the writer David Owen. It wasn’t until someone discovered that adding turpentine, a natural thinner distilled from the sap of pine trees, made the paint easier to apply that painting became smoother in every sense. Turpentine also gave paint a matte finish, and this became a fashionable look by the late eighteenth century.

  Linseed oil was the magical ingredient in paint, because it hardened into a tough film—essentially made paint paint. Linseed oil is squeezed from the seeds of flax, the plant from which linen comes (which is why flaxseeds are also called linseeds). Its one dramatic downside was that it is extremely combustible—a pot of linseed oil could in the right conditions burst into flame spontaneously—and so almost certainly was the source of many devastating house fires. It had to be used with special caution in the presence of open flames.

  The most elementary finish of all was limewash, or whitewash, which was generally applied to more basic areas, like service rooms and servants’ quarters. Whitewash was just a simple mix of quicklime and water (sometimes mixed with tallow to enhance adhesion); it didn’t last long, but it did have the practical benefit of acting as a disinfectant. Despite the name whitewash, it was often tinted (if rather feebly) with coloring agents.

  Painting was especially skillful because painters ground their own pigments and mixed their own paints—in other words created their own colors—and generally did so in great secrecy in order to maintain a commercial advantage over their rivals. (Add resins to linseed oil instead of pigment, and you get varnish. Painters made their varnishes in great secrecy, too.) Paint had to be mixed in small portions and used at once, so painters had to be able to make matching batches from day to day. They also had to apply several coats, since even the best paints had little opacity. Covering a wall usually took at least five coats, so painting was a big, disruptive, and fairly technical undertaking.

  Pigments varied in price significantly. Duller colors, like off-white and stone, could be had for four or five pence a pound. Blues and yellows were two to three times as expensive, and so tended to be used only by the middle classes and above. Smalt, a shade of blue made with ground glass (which gave a glittery effect), and azurite, made from a semiprecious stone, were dea
rer still. The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process that turns copper domes and statues green—just quicker and more commercial—and it made “the delicatest Grass-green in the world,” as one eighteenth-century admirer enthused. A room painted in verdigris always produced an appreciative “ah” in visitors.

  When paints became popular, people wanted them to be as vivid as they could possibly be made. The restrained colors that we associate with the Georgian period in Britain, or the colonial period in America, are a consequence of fading, not decorative restraint. In 1979, when Mount Vernon began a program of repainting the interiors in faithful colors, “people came and just yelled at us,” Dennis Pogue, the curator, told me with a grin. “They told us we were making Mount Vernon garish. They were right—we were. But that’s just because that’s the way it was. It was hard for a lot of people to accept that what we were doing was faithful restoration.

  “Even now paint charts for colonial-style paints virtually always show the colors from the period as muted. In fact, colors were actually nearly always quite deep and sometimes even startling. The richer a color you could get, the more you tended to be admired. For one thing, rich colors generally denoted expense, since you needed a lot of pigment to make them. Also, you need to remember that often these colors were seen by candlelight, so they needed to be more forceful to have any kind of impact in muted light.”

  The effect is now repeated at Monticello, where several of the rooms are of the most vivid yellows and greens. Suddenly George Washington and Thomas Jefferson come across as having the decorative instincts of hippies. In fact, however, compared with what followed they were exceedingly restrained.

  When the first ready-mixed paints came onto the market in the second half of the nineteenth century, people slapped them on with something like wild abandon. It became fashionable to have not just powerfully bright colors in the home but as many as seven or eight colors in a single room.

  If we looked closely, however, we would be surprised to note that two very basic colors didn’t exist at all in Mr. Marsham’s day: a good white and a good black. The brightest white available was a rather dull off-white, and although whites improved through the nineteenth century, it wasn’t until the 1940s, with the addition of titanium dioxide to paints, that really strong, lasting whites became available. The absence of a good white paint would have been doubly noticeable in early New England, for the Puritans had no white paint and didn’t believe in painting anyway. (They thought it was showy.) So all those gleaming white churches we associate with New England towns are in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon.

  Also missing from the painter’s palette was a strong black. Permanent black paint, distilled from tar and pitch, wasn’t popularly available until the late nineteenth century. So all the glossy black front doors, railings, gates, lampposts, gutters, downpipes, and other fittings that are such an elemental feature of London’s streets today are actually quite recent. If we were to be thrust back in time to Dickens’s London, one of the most startling differences to greet us would be the absence of black-painted surfaces. In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.

  Now we may proceed up the stairs to a room that may never actually have killed anyone but has probably been the seat of more suffering and despair than all the other rooms of the house put together.

  * Scheele independently discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him. In 1786, he was found slumped at his workbench, dead from an accidental overdose.

  * Although lead’s dangers have been well known for a long time, it continued to be used in many products well into the twentieth century. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was often stored in lead-lined tanks. Lead was sprayed onto fruit as a pesticide. Lead was even used in the manufacture of toothpaste tubes. It was banned from domestic paints in the United States in 1978. Although lead has been removed from most consumer products, it continues to build up in the atmosphere because of industrial applications. The average person of today has about 625 times more lead in his system than someone of fifty years ago.

  • CHAPTER XV •

  THE BEDROOM

  I

  The bedroom is a strange place. There is no space within the house where we spend more time doing less, and doing it mostly quietly and unconsciously, than here, and yet it is in the bedroom that many of life’s most profound and persistent unhappinesses are played out. If you are dying or unwell, exhausted, sexually dysfunctional, tearful, racked with anxiety, too depressed to face the world, or otherwise lacking in equanimity and joy, the bedroom is the place where you are most likely to be found. It has been thus for centuries, but at just about the time that the Reverend Mr. Marsham was building his house an entirely new dimension was added to life behind the bedroom door: dread. Never before had people found more ways to be worried in a small, confined space than Victorians in their bedrooms.

  The beds themselves became a particular source of disquiet. Even the cleanest people became a steamy mass of toxins once the lights went out, it seemed. “The water given out in respiration,” explained Shirley Forster Murphy in Our Homes, and How to Make Them Healthy (1883), “is loaded with animal impurities; it condenses on the inner walls of buildings, and trickles down in foetid streams, and … sinks into the walls,” causing damage of a grave but unspecified nature. Why it didn’t cause this damage when it was in one’s body in the first place was never explained or evidently considered. It was enough to know that breathing at night was a degenerate practice.

  Twin beds were advocated for married couples, not only to avoid the shameful thrill of accidental contact but also to reduce the mingling of personal impurities. As one medical authority grimly explained: “The air which surrounds the body under the bed clothing is exceedingly impure, being impregnated with the poisonous substances which have escaped through the pores of the skin.” Up to 40 percent of deaths in America, one doctor estimated, arose from chronic exposure to unwholesome air while sleeping.

  Beds were hard work, too. Turning and plumping mattresses was a regular chore—and a heavy one, too. A typical feather bed contained forty pounds of feathers. Pillows and bolsters added about as much again, and all of these had to be emptied out from time to time to let the feathers air, for otherwise they began to stink. Many people kept flocks of geese, which they plucked for fresh bedding perhaps three times a year (a job that must have been as tiresome for the servants as it was for the geese). A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fissure between billowy hills. Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression “sleep tight”), but in no degree of tension did they offer much comfort. Spring mattresses, invented in 1865, didn’t work reliably at first because the coils would sometimes turn, confronting the occupant with the very real danger of being punctured by his own bed.

  A popular American book of the nineteenth century, Goodholme’s Cyclopedia, divided mattress types into ten levels of comfort. In descending order they were:

  Down

  Feathers

  Wool

  Wool-flock

  Hair

  Cotton

  Wood-shavings

  Sea-moss

  Sawdust

  Straw

  When wood-shavings and sawdust make it into a top-ten list of bedding materials, you know you are looking at a rugged age. Mattresses were havens not only for bedbugs, fleas, and moths (which loved old feathers when they could get at them) but for mice and rats as well. The sounds
of furtive rustlings beneath the coverlet was an unhappy accompaniment to many a night’s sleep.

  Children who were required to sleep in trundle beds low to the floor were likely to be especially familiar with the whiskery closeness of rats. Wherever people were, were rats. An American named Eliza Ann Summers reported in 1867 how she and her sister took armloads of shoes to bed each night to throw at the rats that ran across the floor. Susanna Augusta Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, said that she never forgot, or indeed ever quite got over, the experience of rats scuttling across her childhood bed.

  Thomas Tryon, author of a book on health and well-being in 1683, complained of the “Unclean, fulsom Excrement” of feathers as being attractive to bugs. He suggested fresh straw, and lots of it, instead. He also believed (with some justification) that feathers tended to be polluted with fecal matter from the stressed and unhappy birds from which they were plucked.

  Historically, the most basic common filling was straw, whose pricks through the ticking were a celebrated torment, but people often used whatever they could. In Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home, dried cornhusks were used, an option that must have been as crunchily noisy as it was uncomfortable. If one couldn’t afford feathers, wool and horsehair were cheaper alternatives, but they tended to smell. Wool often became infested with moths, too. The only certain remedy was to take the wool out and boil it, a tedious process. In poorer homes, cow dung was sometimes hung from the bedpost in the belief that it deterred moths. In hot climates, summertime insects coming through the windows were a nuisance and hazard. Netting was sometimes draped around beds, but always with a certain uneasiness, as all netting was extremely flammable. A visitor to upstate New York in the 1790s reported how his hosts, in a well-meaning stab at fumigation, filled his room with smoke just before bedtime, leaving him to grope his way through a choking fog to his bed. Wire screens to keep out insects were invented early—Jefferson had them at Monticello—but not widely used because of the expense.