Making a House a Home in Georgian England

In Georgian London, a spinster usually didn’t have the money to run her own house and instead had to go live with relatives where she was treated little better than a servant. Being dependent on the master of the house not only for the roof over their heads and food to eat, but also for clothing and just about anything needing money to buy it, didn’t make such a place a home at all.

Such was the fate of Gertrude Savile, living first with her brother and later with her mother and aunt. Her home was her reticule and her diary, until one day she made an unexpected inheritance of such proportions to enable her to set up her own household. Tellingly enough, her diary breaks off at that point, but her housekeeping accounts were kept along with her diary for Vickery to piece together what kind of life she was leading afterwards.

A bachelor had no home either, with no woman to keep the place running he was lost. As setting up house was a costly affair, younger sons often ended up as bachelors whose life would be dominated either by a military career with the barracks as home, or as secretaries to important persons, again reduced to near servant status.

Amanda Vickery freely pilfers what diaries she could find in archives to recreate the feel of a Georgian home. While this proved quite easy with lot of materials found for the upper classes, finding her clues for the less fortunate was more difficult. But household books had survived there as well, and she manages to translate dry accounts into meaningful description. Getting through dozens of boxes of scraps and pieces from clerks rented lodgings to references and single letters that survived, she painted the grander picture of what home meant in Georgian times.

She is able to show how the house and home had become a stage set to receive guests not only for aristocrats but for the merchant cit as well. The accounts tell her what the latest fad in design was, like the yellow wallpaper bought by Gertrude Savile (and this unhappy penchant to decorate their houses in unflattering colours persists in England to this day). Or she may marvel at the aptitude of an alcoholic to write a coherent diary where he mentions the amount of booze he got through every day.

Sacrificing scientific precision for a flowing narrative style many a modern novelist would be well advised to copy, Vickery manages to produce an immensely readable book full of fascinating information about Georgian daily life. Behind Closed Doors: At Home In Georgian England was published by the Yale University Press.

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