Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England



Yale University Press, http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300154535, 10/09/10



 By Amanda Vickery, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, p. 382

Turning to the material culture of 18th century England, Vickery studies how men and women of all classes created a home through their use and procurement of domestic goods and crafts. Gentlefolk saw the explosion of consumer goods during the Georgian Age, but servants could only count a locked box as private space within their employer's home.  Vickery offers a very good history of how male and female acquisitiveness took different paths: affluent men and women kept separate account books within a single household; designers created "masculine" (Palladian) and "feminine" (Rococo) pieces of furniture as rooms within homes became smaller and their use more specialized.  She offers a fun reading of wallpaper and color in domestic space. 

In addition, this book is notable for the sensitive analysis of single women within polite society; given household dynamics of the time, it was far better to be a widow than a spinster.  Vickery writes, "Hierarchy, rank, dependence and independence were the categories used to make sense of the household and the individual's role within it.  One's place in the hierarchy was determined by age, gender, birth order and access to personal capital."*  Virgins were at the bottom of the ladder.  There was no institutional provision in England for women to live apart from a family, and spinsters were expected to be foster mothers, nursemaids or to perform some other role for their kin.

I loved Vickery's reassessment of embroidery, needlepoint and other domestic arts within the discipline of art history.  Vickery helped curate the Mary Delany exhibition at The Yale Center for British Arts that showed how spectacular and peculiar domestic craft could be in the Georgian Age.


*p. 203.