At Home - Bill Bryson [173]
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