If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

 Hello Interwebs!

After a long hiatus I'm back with a plethora of book reviews for the end of January and for all of February. This is for my first (and so far, only) nonfiction book of 2021: If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley. This book was 325 pages long and I read it from December 29, 2020 to January 19, 2021 and gave it 4 stars. As always spoilers may occur after the picture. 

So this book is divided into four sections: the bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and living room to tell the story of how all of these various rooms developed into how we know them today. I first found out about this book because it's a four part series done by the BBC and hosted by Dr. Worsley which is available on YouTube. My library had the book so I read that as well. Each room is linked to the corresponding episode of the documentary on YouTube. 

First up was the Living Room which was probably my least favorite of the four parts if I'm perfectly honest. It takes you from the single great room which was typical in medieval/Tudor homes where everything happened in a single room to the retiring rooms and parlors in the regency and Victorian eras and into the modern age where at first the hearth, the fireplace, was the center of the home's living space which didn't change until the television caught popularity and then the living space moved to center around the television which is how it remains today. It was an interesting look at why living rooms are arranged the way they are and how it came to be that way. 

Second up was the Bathroom which was especially interesting. Despite the belief that people in the past didn't bathe and smelt bad this wasn't exactly true especially in the medieval period where Turkish style communal baths were very popular. Men and women bathed together in these baths and the people were quite clean until they decided that these baths were too close to houses of "ill repute" and closed them. It went through the stages of chamber pots (including handheld ones that a lady could sneak under her skirts and pee in public which was...weird) and water being toted to dressing rooms for quick washing in the mornings. It went on into the public era where baths were luxuries and flushing toilets were commonplace. I didn't know that there were flushing toilets in tudor times and that miles and miles of pipes were laid during the Victorian period in order to lay the first true modern sewer systems. 

The third section was all about the Bedroom and it started back in the great room of those medieval/Tudor homes where everyone except the lord's immediate family slept in the same room where they ate and lived. The first proper bedrooms were for the whole family to sleep in the same bed, which was usually the first huge purchase after marriage (if it wasn't an inherited heirloom) if not the only big purchase. The bedroom gradually became an intimate space for only the person it belonged to, a personal, private place to be. The book went through other activities, besides sex and sleep, that take place in bedrooms such as birth and death. Most people were born in the same bed they died in. 

Finally there was the section about the Kitchen which went from that same great room that was the beginnings of the living room and bedroom to quickly becoming its own separate building due to the fire danger. It remained a separate building, at least for the rich, until  after the first world war when the domestic service industry began to disappear and most people began to do cooking themselves. It covered the development of different time-saving appliances such as the refrigerator, microwave, dishwasher and other appliances. It also showed how it went from housewives becoming reluctant mistresses of the kitchen to the kitchen becoming the center of the home like it once was when the hearth was the center of the home. 

All in all I really enjoyed this book and the corresponding documentary. There's a lot of interesting facts about things we take for granted and how they came to be. In the end I gave it a fairly solid 4/5 stars and I will definitely continue to read books written by Dr. Worsley (I have Jane Austen at Home on my Kindle). Her writing style is very readable and not too much like an academic paper which is sometimes a problem with history nonfiction. I highly recommend this book and the documentary series. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle