A History of Private Life More about the series

Amanda Vickery

Professor in History at Royal Holloway, University of London

The research behind the series

I have spent my entire career chiselling precious personal nuggets out of unpromising archives. Early on in my London University PhD, I realized that I'd far rather read love letters than Acts of Parliament. Even in a county record office in a 1960s development on an out-of-town roundabout, research can be electrifying. The past lives again when a lock of red-gold hair, undimmed by time, falls from a bundle of manuscripts. And what researcher's heart would not lift at the words ... "please burn this letter that no mortal eyes may read it"?

The importance of the past lies as much in the history of relationships and private rituals as in public institutions like universities and parliament. I am fascinated by how people lived their day-to-day lives, their secret struggles and their longings.

Stories and feelings are the heartbeat of the past - for the long-dead were once as vital as us, and their complexities just as vivid. The task of the historian is to breathe life into them once more. We are trained to recreate past ways of thinking and feeling. Why should historians leave questions of character and choices, dilemmas and drama to the novelist?

Not that writing the history of private life is especially easy. House, home and domestic life are so fundamental as to be almost invisible. Diarists and letter-writers often only felt moved to comment at times of crisis. The history of home hides in plain sight. It took some ingenuity to recreate what people in the past thought so important that it went without saying.

I have pieced together a narrative from courtship letters, confessions and wills, diaries and autobiographies, inventories, advertisements, burglary trials, and upholsterers' ledgers to bring to life a history so taken for granted that it was rarely put into words.

We hear the voices of men and women of very different backgrounds relating the problems and pleasures, successes and catastrophes of domestic life: the London bachelor who longed to be married, but worried about bad breath and impotence; the Lincolnshire widower who carried on an affair with his housekeeper and was tortured by guilt; the Scottish architect camped in London, who summoned his sisters from Edinburgh to shore up his household; the Oxfordshire wife whose psychopathic husband censored her correspondence and drove her to hide in the closet.

Making the series

Elizabeth Burke gave me my first break on radio and I have always wanted to work with her to learn more about the art, craft and mystery of creating truly atmospheric broadcasts. Researching and writing 30 scripts is a mammoth undertaking, but luckily I won an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship which bought me precious time to work intensively with Loftus Productions. Drafting a script a week reminded me of the torture of writing a weekly essay as an undergraduate - but instead of a tutorial, I had a weekly meeting with Elizabeth where we thrashed out what would work best for radio and how to balance case studies and historical narrative. Thanks to Elizabeth I learned how to translate research into intelligent entertainment and written argument into spoken scripts. We thought long and hard about the balance of the different themes and moods. I will never forget the day that Elizabeth told me my script on widowhood was just too depressing and I had to brighten it up somehow!

Academic scholarship can be a lonely business. There is just no substitute for years sat alone reading documents - a patient, solitary detective. But I am not a natural hermit, so collaborative working was a real pleasure for me. I leapt at the opportunity to communicate my research to an audience far beyond the academy - the intelligent listening public.

At this point, the diarists and letter writers I have studied are like old friends to me. Yet hearing talented actors like Deborah Findlay breathe life into my documents was entrancing. Voices that have echoed in my head for years will now be heard by thousands of people.

Another revelation was the power of music and song to elaborate arguments. For instance, Bach's Cello Suites express the religious discipline of private prayer and are the exact musical equivalent of the devotions I explore in the programme on the closet (the little rooms off bedrooms which were built in the 17th century). Cheeky masculinity is to the fore in the Tinkers' Songs which accompany our programme on Pots and Pans - as one likely lad offered at the back kitchen door: "Go tell the lady of this place I've come to clout her kettle!" In "The Housewife's Lament", one of our favourite songs:

There's too much botherment goes to a bonnet
Too much ironing goes to a shirt
Nothing is worth the time you spend on it
All of my life is a struggle with dirt.

These heart-breaking and witty verses are a delight and woven in throughout to give a rich texture to the narrative. The songs are the equivalent of images in a book. We use them not just to illustrate my arguments, but to drive the story on.

About Amanda Vickery

Amanda is the prize-winning author of The Gentleman's Daughter (Yale, 1998) and Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, 2009). She has lectured on all aspects of British social, political and cultural history from the 17th century to the present. Her greatest weakness is a love of clothes, though some would say chatting runs fashion close as her favourite hobby.

• www.amandavickery.com
• Royal Holloway, University of London : Amanda Vickery

Further Reading

• Philippe Aries, A History of Private Life (1989), vols III and IV
• Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (1998)
• John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America (2007)
• Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009)
• Rafaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture 1500-1800 (2002)
• Maurice Howard, The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (2007)
• Peter Thornton, Seventeenth Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (1978)
• Amy M Froide, Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England (2005)
• Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (2007)
• Margaret Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic interiors, 1750-1850 (2007)
• Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857 (2005)
• Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (1980)
• Charlotte Gere and Lesley Hoskins, The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior (2000)
• Aynsley and Grant (eds) Imagined Interiors (2006)
• Nancy Cox: 'A Flesh pott, or a brasse pott or a pott to boile in': Changes in Metal and Fuel Technology in the Early Modern Period and the Implications for Cooking', in Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe (eds), Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (2000), pp. 143-157.
• Sara Pennell: 'Pots and Pans History: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England', Journal of Design History, vol 11, no 3 (1998
• Sarah Pennell, 'Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England', in Victoria E. Burke & Jonathan Gibson (eds), Early Modern Women's Manuscript Writing (2004)
• Deborah Cohen: Household Gods (2006)
• Elizabeth Buettner: Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, 2004)
• Georgina Gowans: 'Imperial Geographies of Home: Memsahibs and Miss-Sahibs in India and Britain, 1915-1947', Cultural Geographies (2003), 10, pp. 424-441.
• Claire Langhamer: The Meanings of Home in Post-war Britain, Journal of Contemporary History (2005), 40 (2), pp. 341-362.
• Catherine Horwood: Potted History: The Story of Plants in the Home (2007)