At Home - Bill Bryson [172]
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