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Curtains up on ye olde England
By Andrea Wulf |
December 20, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
"HE allows me not the prviliedg to place a Table or Stool but where he Fancies," Lady Sarah Cowper complained about her husband, Sir William Cowper, in 1706.
He treated her, she insisted, "as a Concubine not as a Wife," by refusing to allow her to pick out wallpaper or decorate the drawing room. This was more than just a dispute about interior decoration. Though bound by their husbands' authority, 18th-century women were expected to be the domestic managers of their family's affairs.
By not consulting his wife in these matters, Cowper revealed himself to be an "absolute tyrant."
The pages of "Behind Closed Doors" are filled with such squabbles. Amanda Vickery, a reader in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, finds them in fashionably decorated Yorkshire mansions and dirty London lodgings, in downstairs kitchens and gilded parlors and gloomy garret rooms.
She opens resolutely shut doors and peeps into the private lives of servants, aristocrats and the "polite and middling sorts" -- merchants, clergy members, doctors and lawyers. "Behind Closed Doors" examines what privacy meant in 18th-century Britain and how people negotiated both their domestic space and their domestic relationships.
Vickery's greatest achievement is to upend the notion that the home was divided into separate spheres in which men were responsible for brick and stone while women ruled over domestic life. Instead, Vickery brilliantly shows that these boundaries were fluid and mutable.
Lady Sarah Cowper's husband meddled with the curtains in the drawing room, and Jonathan Swift was smitten with porcelain, claiming to "love it mightily," while James Hewitt, the mayor of Coventry, spent happy hours matching wall colors to patterned curtains and upholstery fabrics.
There is a plethora of studies about male patronage of architecture and the decorative arts in the Georgian period, but it may come as a surprise that bachelors, husbands, widowers and brothers had such obsessions with the home front. "Those who are incapable of relishing domestic happiness can never be really happy at all," one husband declared after more than 30 years of marriage.
An entire chapter is devoted to bachelors who, instead of parading around town as frivolous dandies -- as they have been portrayed in the past -- often longed for marriage. Many despised their makeshift accommodations and take-away meals, as well as crowded taverns and a maid who might take "my sheets to her own use."
When comparing bachelorhood to marriage, Dudley Ryder, the son of a linen draper, decided he wanted a "constant companion" who would be "always ready to soothe me, take care of me."
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.
He treated her, she insisted, "as a Concubine not as a Wife," by refusing to allow her to pick out wallpaper or decorate the drawing room. This was more than just a dispute about interior decoration. Though bound by their husbands' authority, 18th-century women were expected to be the domestic managers of their family's affairs.
By not consulting his wife in these matters, Cowper revealed himself to be an "absolute tyrant."
The pages of "Behind Closed Doors" are filled with such squabbles. Amanda Vickery, a reader in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, finds them in fashionably decorated Yorkshire mansions and dirty London lodgings, in downstairs kitchens and gilded parlors and gloomy garret rooms.
She opens resolutely shut doors and peeps into the private lives of servants, aristocrats and the "polite and middling sorts" -- merchants, clergy members, doctors and lawyers. "Behind Closed Doors" examines what privacy meant in 18th-century Britain and how people negotiated both their domestic space and their domestic relationships.
Vickery's greatest achievement is to upend the notion that the home was divided into separate spheres in which men were responsible for brick and stone while women ruled over domestic life. Instead, Vickery brilliantly shows that these boundaries were fluid and mutable.
Lady Sarah Cowper's husband meddled with the curtains in the drawing room, and Jonathan Swift was smitten with porcelain, claiming to "love it mightily," while James Hewitt, the mayor of Coventry, spent happy hours matching wall colors to patterned curtains and upholstery fabrics.
There is a plethora of studies about male patronage of architecture and the decorative arts in the Georgian period, but it may come as a surprise that bachelors, husbands, widowers and brothers had such obsessions with the home front. "Those who are incapable of relishing domestic happiness can never be really happy at all," one husband declared after more than 30 years of marriage.
An entire chapter is devoted to bachelors who, instead of parading around town as frivolous dandies -- as they have been portrayed in the past -- often longed for marriage. Many despised their makeshift accommodations and take-away meals, as well as crowded taverns and a maid who might take "my sheets to her own use."
When comparing bachelorhood to marriage, Dudley Ryder, the son of a linen draper, decided he wanted a "constant companion" who would be "always ready to soothe me, take care of me."
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.
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