Four star review, originally posted here on June 30th, 2024.
I’m not sure if books can get much more niche than this. A couple months ago I was in London, and our very last act as tourists was to stop by the Sir John Soane Museum. We didn’t really know what we were getting into going in, but it turns out this museum is awesome. Long story short, a famous successful architect had the world’s craziest private collection of art and artifacts, and decided to blow out the back of his townhouse and the neighboring townhouses to display all this stuff. When he died, he left the house and collection to the government under the stipulation that they leave everything displayed exactly is he left it. And… that’s exactly what happened. One quirk of this arrangement is that there is literally no signage anywhere explaining what the heck anything is. It’s literally thousands of incredible pieces, but the visitor is left stumped as to why it’s there or why it might matter. You can buy a guidebook (it’s only 3 pounds, which we was a bargain because the museum itself is free), which was definitely better than nothing and pointed out a couple key notes about Soane and his collection in each room. There were staff in each room who seemed happy to answer our questions about both Soane and his room, and we peppered them accordingly. One of them held up this book in response to one of our many questions (I think it was “Did Soane smoke?”) and said “I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing no because if he did, it likely would have been mentioned in here.” Wouldn’t you know it, the book was available in the gift shop, and here we are.
So that’s the target audience for this book; people who got a tiny smidge of information about this dude because they visited his informationless museum, but who were so inspired by the visit that they want to learn anything they can about this guy. So, yeah, pretty niche. The second target audience is anyone who loves getting into the minutia of history regarding domestic life. This book isn’t exactly a riveting biography; instead, it is a semi-dry list of mostly mundane facts about the running of a household, organized into chapters by category. Someone put a bunch of time and effort into digging through Soane’s receipts (literal receipts) to figure out what he bought and when. From that we’re learning which food he ate and where he bought it, how he paid an 18th century HOA fee to cover lamplighting costs in the communal park, and what a pain it was for his wife to find pet-friendly AirBnBs at the beach. We know which servants went to the nuthouse and which were alcoholics. We discover at what time the Soanes’ ate their meals. In short, we learn about the everyday lives of seemingly everyday people (but in this case, one of those everyday people had a crazy hobby that involved blowing out wall to build a museum.)
If this sounds like a pan, it is not. I love learning this stuff. In learning history we so often focus on political events, on world leaders, and major movements. But even the historical figures we know by name had to live in a house and pay the cable bill (or whatever their equivalent was at the time), so to me it was fascinating to compare how our mundane lives can be so similar, yet so different, across the centuries. That being said, they’re not going to be making any movies out of this one, if you know what I mean. There were occasional hints at some potentially juicy drama (the tension between Soane and his youngest son being the most obvious, but not explored here in enough detail to satisfy my morbid curiosity), but that drama was layered matter-of-factly between pages and pages listing mundane household details.
If you’re looking for a page-turner, this isn’t it. If you’re a big nerd like me who plans to be in London anytime soon, then both this museum and this quick little book might be for you.
Helga without the H 