Behind Closed Doors

At Home in Georgian England

Amanda Vickery

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780300188561
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Frühneuzeitliche Geschichte

From the award-winning author of The Gentleman's Daughter, a witty and academic illumination of daily domestic life in Georgian England.

In this brilliant work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings, genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper, servants with only a locking box to call their own.

Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer's ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long eighteenth century. Through the spread of formal visiting, the proliferation of affordable ornamental furnishings, the commercial celebration of feminine artistry at home, and the currency of the language of taste, even modest homes turned into arenas of social campaign and exhibition.

The basis of a 3-part TV series for BBC2.

"Vickery is that rare thing, an…historian who writes like a novelist."—Jane Schilling, Daily Mail

"Comparison between Vickery and Jane Austen is irresistible…This book is almost too pleasurable, in that Vickery's style and delicious nosiness conceal some seriously weighty scholarship."—Lisa Hilton, The Independent

"If until now the Georgian home has been like a monochrome engraving, Vickery has made it three dimensional and vibrantly colored. Behind Closed Doors demonstrates that rigorous academic work can also be nosy, gossipy, and utterly engaging."—Andrea Wulf, New York Times Book Review

1

THRESHOLDS AND BOUNDARIES AT HOME

The dusk spreads from the river. Candles are being lit all over London. The clatter of shuttering echoes and answers as every house in the Georgian metropolis fortifies itself against the advancing dark. The November gloom hastens lodgers home; they scurry back with sausages, oysters and a pennyworth of tea. At a house at the corner of Shoe Lane in the City, the landlord, a carpenter, is still away at his workshop, and the landlady is seeing her tenants in, unlocking the street door and the individual rooms for her three newest inmates, a laundress, a fruit-seller and a journeyman cabinetmaker. They exchange words on the cold stairs: she has changed their linen today. (Has she snooped through their things again? Almost certainly.) In the second-floor front chamber, the journeyman lights his fire, and then scuttles next door to the alehouse to fetch his dinner on a tray. Loosening his breeches, he empties his pockets and stashes the coin in the hiding place he has carved in the leg of the oak bed. Unusually, the landlady's linen press stands open in the corner. She must have forgotten to relock it. The journeyman runs his hands over the second-best sheets, all initialled and numbered with red embroidery silk. Tempting, but he wants a quiet life, and he has had worse quarters than these. The fruit-seller heats her sausages over the hearth in the second-floor back chamber. Warmer, she idly unlocks her box (she carries the key always in her pocket), checking over her shifts, Sunday-best gown and handkerchiefs. Her small stock of valuables – cash, a watch, a silver teaspoon and a ring – she keeps always on her person. In the draughty front garret, the young laundress eats her oysters, locks away some ribbons in her box and hides some coins in a hole in the wainscot. Sometimes she has to share her bed with passing girls and she is no fool. Presently, the maid of all work leaves by arrangement to visit a relative, and because the landlady must pop out to the alehouse for beer, she leaves the street-door key in the custody of her trusty, a mature needlewoman and widow who rents the first-floor back chamber. The widow can't complain: she holds her own room key and just now she is making her supper in the family kitchen, as she has done at this hour every night for the past seven years. Errand accomplished, the landlady takes back her keys, locks the kitchen and retreats to the ground-floor parlour to await her husband. By 9 o'clock everyone is gathered back in. The apprentice beds down in the back garret with the two little boys of the house, the maid in the warm back kitchen on a truckle bed, her bulging tie-on pockets stuffed under her pillow. At 10 o'clock the landlady locks the tenants, servants and children in their rooms for the night. The landlord hefts the iron bar across the street door, padlocks the door to the back lane and double-checks the window shutters. Only streetwalkers and housebreakers are lurking about now, he tells his wife as he lights her to the first-floor front chamber. In their curtained conjugal bed, in shift and shirt, husband and wife rehearse the details of their day. The landlady puts the keys under her pillow and settles to sleep, just as the watch calls out the hour of eleven.¹

Where in this story does personal privacy reside? The very idea of private life is a creation of the early modern period, according to Philippe Ariès, and England is the birthplace of privacy. Between 1500 and 1800 the family changed from an economic institution that suppressed the individual, to an introspective emotional unit built round children, a haven from snooping strangers. These psychological shifts were inscribed in the fabric of houses, in the introduction of small rooms for withdrawal and solitude, and the provision of corridors and multiple staircases to separate personal quarters from circulating traffic. Privacy was entrenched in western Europe by the late eighteenth century, reaching its apotheosis in the Victorian home. However a unilinear advance of privacy from early glimmerings to modern conquest has long been contested by historians of the family. Homes may be havens in a heartless world, but they are also nurseries of conflict, so privacy is not necessarily a higher goal of civilisation. Early modernists argue that a notion of privacy in family life pre-dates the Georgians. Privacy may have been harder to obtain in the early modern period, argues Linda Pollock, but it is wrong to assume that it was not sought after. The Stuart gentry were spied on and gossiped about, yet they had ‘a well developed sense of privacy’, based on a ‘desire for concealment and a predisposition towards secrecy’. In this reading, then, privacy is increasingly equated with the hidden. In parallel, feminists have long been concerned with what might be concealed within families, such as violence against women, and there is some debate about how far an alleged privatisation of the family drove abuse indoors and out of sight.²

The discussion of privacy in family history runs in parallel, but not quite in dialogue with, the reassessment of the public and private that has gone on in eighteenth-century gender and cultural history in the wake of a reassessment of Habermas (who identified an emergent public sphere of political debate and opinion in Georgian print and clubs). Though the public/private conceptual dichotomy was invoked in many discursive contexts in the long eighteenth century, it was rarely deployed to characterise an inside/outside, female/male division of space. In fact, what writers designated as belonging to the private sphere tended to vary according to the particular public they were counterposing. Consequently, privacy for eighteenth-century historians is a moveable feast, rather different from both Ariès' private life, and Pollock's secrecy.³

Nevertheless, the issue of privacy still haunts the history of space. Architectural history has furnished a story of advancing physical privacy for the most privileged. ‘Servants no longer bedded down in the drawing room, or outside their master's door or in a truckle bed at his feet but in attics and separate annexes’, Mark Girouard explained. The introduction of back stairs from the later seventeenth century meant that ‘the gentry walking up stairs no longer met their last night's faeces coming down’. The Stones concluded that the architecture and equipment of segregation, from staff staircases to bell pulls linked by wires to the servants' halls, expressed a growing elite longing for privacy. For Christoph Heyl, post-Fire terrace architecture combined with polite protocols like the visiting card saw the ‘creation of the middle class private sphere’ in Georgian London. Yet a demand for privacy or distance from servants ‘cannot be read straight from the fabric of contemporary buildings’, warns Tim Meldrum. ‘Is it not possible … that the advent of bells to summon servants may have simply originated with a fashionable distaste for shouting …?’⁴ Meldrum also poses the important question of exactly whose privacy is under discussion here: patently not that of the servant.

This chapter returns to the issue of privacy in a domestic context, by recreating the interior for ordinary householders in London. Not that London was typical of national experience, but it was immensely significant. London households were larger and more complex than their provincial counterparts because of the co-residence of servants, lodgers and apprentices. On the other hand, at least one in six adults, half the entire urban population, experienced London life in the period.⁵ And immigrants needed housing. Wealth and taste (largely Palladian) were the foundation stones of the great Georgian building boom, decreed Sir John Summerson in his landmark celebration of the elegant terraces and squares of Georgian London. Architectural history, however, now seeks to move beyond the celebration of Georgian uniformity to retrieve diversity. Smaller London houses have been overlooked, argues Peter Guillery, an omission that reinforces a misleading picture of fashionable innovation and neat standardisation. Even the new brick-built terrace with its smooth façade could conceal irregularity. Where houses were let in tenements, and a room was available on the same floor in a next-door house, sometimes a door could be knocked into the party wall.⁶ Yet for all the internal confusion, the integrity of the perimeter remained a keystone of legal, customary and spiritual understandings of home, as we shall see.

This chapter opens the door of the London house to consider how internal space was conceptualised, demarcated and policed, using the records of the Old Bailey, the principal criminal court in London. Witnesses rich and poor alike invoked an understanding of personal territories in their use of terms like ‘private house’ as opposed to public house or inn, ‘private gardens’ as opposed to communal turf, ‘private door of my house’, ‘little private boxes’ and ‘private shop mark’, as well as psychological individuality and introversion in concepts like ‘private doubts’, ‘private information’, to ‘be private’, that is, to keep one's own counsel, or to act ‘as private as possible’, that is, unobserved.⁷ This is not, however, an exercise in semantic mapping, nor does it enlarge on privacy as a conceptual abstraction. It is an exploration of some of the lived meanings, practices and technologies of privacy broadly defined. I am revisiting ‘the private’ in some of its simplest dictionary definitions, looking at the claim and defence of private property and personal possession, but also the capacity and mechanisms to achieve seclusion and withdrawal, refuge, security and secrecy – some of the less concrete associations of privacy in the Oxford English Dictionary.⁸ This chapter translates metaphysical abstractions like the public and the private into everyday rituals and physical objects, though revealing that these procedures were themselves freighted with conceptual meaning for the protagonists. The concrete way in which boundaries were materialised was replete with metaphorical resonance.

The threshold of the house was an ideological boundary of great power, yet the domestic interior was no haven. Nevertheless, it was the place where an individual might expect to defend his or her personal property and most ‘private matters’ with a battery of devices, from locks and keys to personal boxes and secret drawers. In the final analysis, access to a small place of privacy held out a promise of some autonomy and independence. Existing discussions of spatial privacy, with their allusions to back stairs, bell pulls and visiting cards, are predicated on the experiences of a narrow elite, yet a concern with personal space can be found throughout the social pyramid, even if its enjoyment was unequally distributed. Life with no vestiges of privacy was understood to be a most sorry degradation, which stripped away the defences of the spirit.

The external perimeter of the house was a frontier in custom and law. The house had long been a universal metaphor for the person and the body. The weak points of the house were its orifices: the doorway, the windows, the chimney and hearth, but without them a house was an airless prison. Around 1600, when Lauderdale House was built in the London suburban village of Highgate, a basket containing two shoes, a candlestick, a goblet, two strangled chickens and two live chickens was walled up behind the hearth on the first floor. This bundle was discovered only in 1963 and its context is obscure, but the offering evokes the mystical meanings of home and the centrality of hearths to the sustenance and safety of a family. Surely these gifts had a talismanic power and were sacrificed as a propitiation of the supernatural? In folk tales, fires were said to cackle and blaze when a wizard passed over because the soul of the house was in peril. The hearth became a metonym for domesticity, encapsulating both a sense of emotional core and life-sustaining warmth. The analogy between the house and the body was ancient and widespread. Unglazed holes in the earliest primitive houses were known as the wind eye, the origin of our window. If windows were eyes, the doors represented the mouth, vagina or anus, and the hearth the breast, heart, soul or womb. Apertures symbolised points of human vulnerability. Ink thrown on windows and excrement daubed on the door were visceral attacks on the person, and were read as such. In popular belief, witches attacked the house through the windows, doorways, keyholes, chimneys and hearth, just as demons entered the body through its orifices.⁹ And while the offence of witchcraft was abolished in England in 1736, superstitious counter-magic survived for centuries. Londoners buried ‘witch bottles’ under the threshold or behind the hearth well into the 1700s, and horseshoes nailed ‘on the threshold of doors … to hinder the power of Witches that enter the house’ were still to be seen in Monmouth Street in the 1790s. House-shaming customs persisted long into the 1800s and beyond.¹⁰ The house/body analogy was not expunged by the Enlightenment.

The new-built metropolitan brick house gave onto the street in ways that emphasised the importance of the boundary; the basement area was seen as domestic moat, defended with iron railing. Travellers claimed that London house fronts vied with those of the Netherlands for cleanliness, ‘even the large hammers and locks on the door are rubbed and shine brightly’, and of course the whitened doorstep was a lodestone of working-class respectability till at least 1945. The doorway was the archetypal liminal boundary, where servants loitered and respectable housewives took up post.¹¹ The open door was universally understood as an invitation. National celebrations were often marked by a collective illumination, and patriots were required to show a candle or risk the consequences. A light glowing in the window of the house announced a vigil, the eye of the house sleeplessly searching for its lost inhabitant.

‘The Englishman's home is his castle’ was already a hoary cliché of English Common Law by 1700.¹² The Westmorland Justice of the Peace Richard Burn, author of the most authoritative eighteenth-century manual for magistrates, was stirring on the protections offered the house in criminal law:

Man's home or habitation is so far protected by the law, that if any person attempts to break open a house in the night time, and shall be killed in such attempt, the slayer shall be acquitted and discharged. And so tender is the law in respect of the immunity of a man's house, that it will never suffer it to be violated with impunity.

Breaking and entering a house in the night-time constituted the hanging offence of burglary, even if the burglar failed in the attempt to steal. House-breaking in the daytime where any inhabitant was put in fear, even if nothing was taken, was still a capital felony. Eavesdroppers and nuisances could be prosecuted, such as a neighbour blocking, damaging or removing sewers and gutters, and blocking light to one's rooms, and a householder was entitled to gather up to eleven fellows for the defence of his or her home. ‘For a man's house is his castle, for safety and repose to himself and his family.’¹³

The law recognised the customary inviolability of the domestic threshold. Property in private possession was under private control, so an owner was permitted to use, alienate and control the land as they saw fit. If private property was invaded an owner had recourse to the civil law action of trespass for damages. Then again, the government, the church, the courts and parish constables were empowered to enter privately controlled properties under specific circumstances. Constables could gain a warrant to enter a private house without a householder's consent, if they were in breach of the law. Officers in a civil suit could not break an outer door or window, ‘if he doth he is a trespasser’, but if they found these open, or was let in, ‘he may break open inward doors if he find that necessary to execute his process’. Officers of the excise could inspect the houses of brewers. Ecclesiastical jurisdiction empowered the church courts to monitor the goings on in a household where sin was suspected. Even the implementation of building regulations could involve a visitation from parish officials. Nevertheless, all these intrusions required a warrant or legislation to authorise public entrance into private houses. ‘Concerning the breaking open of the doors of the house in order to apprehend offenders … that law never allows of such extremities, but in cases of necessity.’¹⁴ English law recognised that in principle the domestic threshold was sacrosanct; in fact, the law had erected a fortification around it.

It was the classic responsibility of the head of household to patrol the boundaries and lock up fast at night. ‘Shutting in’ was a universally recognised hour, after sunset, but before bedtime, a fateful moment that set in motion a ritual ceremony of fortification. The street door could be locked with an integral lock, padlocks, internal bolts, iron bars and wrought-iron chains. Sir John Fielding recommended that windows be fitted with bars in the shape of a cross. Bells, trip wires, servants sleeping across the doorway an...