I’m making my way through Bill Bryson’s oddly titled At Home: A Short History of Private Life (oddly because it often reads more like a history of building materials and inventions than of private life) and learning about the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851, gas lighting, Palladian architecture, falls down stairs and the quality and hues of 18th-century paints.

What the book makes abundantly clear is just how recent the comfortable home of today actually is. How not too long ago people slept on mattresses full of vermin, huddled around a single candle and bathed once a year.

A passage I read last night mentions that in the second half of the 19th century the world still lacked two very basic colors — “a good white and a good black.” So “all those gleaming white churches we associate with New England towns are in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon” and the glossy black front doors, railings and gates of London are new, too. In fact, Bryson writes, “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.”

What was missing, then, was contrast, at least in a decorative sense. What a soft, muted palette that world must have had. What would it have been like to live in that world, to see those colors, rather than the ones we have now?