Behind Closed Doors – At Home in Georgian England

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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

An Englishman's house is his castle after all. This series gets to the bottom of this very British obsession and recreates the interior lives, hopes and dreams of women and men. Gertrude Savile was a morbidly shy spinster clinging on in her brother's house Rufford Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, dependent on him for "every gown, sute of ribbins, pair of gloves, every pin and needle". Even the servants "treated [her] like a hanger on upon the family". In 2009, she wrote and presented the 30-part series A History of Private Life on BBC Radio 4, [10] which received critical acclaim. [11] [12] [13] [14] It has since been made into a BBC CD. [15] The Arts and Crafts movement was popular at the time of the Industrial Revolution and a reaction to the increase in factory-made goods: people wanted attractive, hand-made and original objects.

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But in this series and my book I tried to expand to include men in the story as well as women. People often think that the history of domesticity is predominantly about women. The recognisably modern middle class home was taking shape in the 18th Century when Britannia ruled the waves and became the world's leading manufacturing power. Slapping up wallpaper was one way to transform the look of a room for a fraction of the cost of textile hangings, wood panelling or stucco. She was intent on becoming a professional artist. But her career was to be threatened before it had even begun.' Like all professional artists, Gertrude Jekyll partly trained by copying the paintings of others, and here's her version of Turner's Ancient Rome. I think you can see her personal fascination Angela completed her first degree at the University of Chicago in the department of History. This year she is studying at King’s on the MA in Eighteenth Century Studies, an interdisciplinary programme taught in partnership with the British Museum and convened by Dr Elizabeth Eger in the English department. The MA aims to bring together the study of material and intellectual, cultural and political history and draws upon the extraordinary wealth of eighteenth-century resources in London’s museums and archives. The intellectual energy generated through teaching the MA formed a significant factor in founding the AHRI-funded Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s.

His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Household Accounting in 18th century England’, in Lyndal Roper and Ruth Harris (eds), The Art of Survival: Essays in Honour of Olwen Hufton (link is external)(Past and Present, 2006)., pp. 12-38 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. Matthew, H. C. G.; Harrison, B., eds. (23 September 2004). "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.ref:odnb/59566. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/59566 . Retrieved 24 January 2023. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) Dear Amanda, you clearly have a great deal of knowledge & passion for the subject. As an interior designer, I had looked forward to your programme with a great deal of interest. I'm sad to say that watching the first episode left me quite disappointed. Not only was there very little evidence of the "soft furnishings" aspect, I was left with the impression that, as Katherine mentioned above, you would love to find yourself in Elizabeth Bennett's shoes. Furthermore, and for me most disappointing, you seem to have a great deal more sympathy for men of the time than women. I'm at a loss as to how else to explain how you could find Gertrude's plight (no rights, no control, and no prospect of a more positive future) less pitiable than George Hilton's.

About Amanda Vickery

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? Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (link is external)(Yale University Press, 2009) A history book of the year in the Independent, Guardian, New York Times, Scottish Herald, History Today. Shortlisted for the Hessel-Tiltman History Prize. I was determined not to trespass too much on the themes and interventions of my first book the Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. (2) Above all, I wanted to challenge myself with new sources – account books, ledgers, inventories, surviving furniture, textiles etc – to see if I could wrest a narrative from numbers, bare details and inanimate objects. Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill. The Academy is also a funding body for research, nationally and internationally, and a forum for debate and engagement. None of which suggests anything approaching equality of the sexes among the Membership. In 1777 for instance, by my count of the exhibition catalogues, of 190 exhibitors 15 were women (8 per cent) and of 364 paintings 27 were by women (7 per cent). Yet for all their minority status it is still striking that the female artists are there, and seem to be making a professional living, supported to a degree by the RA.

Professor Tihanov said:"I feel greatly honoured to have been elected to the British Academy. This is a recognition for the outstanding research culture nurtured by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. In the 1870s a style of art known as Impressionism made it easier for people without formal training to paint. 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. Jekyll started as a painter, but suffered from short-sightedness so had to find another form of art.Behind Closed Doors aimed to stimulate debate on physical and psychological interiors. Clearly different stories could be told about Georgian interiors using different sources or asking different questions. There is much work still appearing inspired in part by the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, 2001–6 (a collaboration between Royal Holloway, the V&A and the Royal College of Art). See the special issue of the Journal of Design History (2007) on ‘Eighteenth-Century Interiors’ edited by Hannah Greig and Giorgio Riello; Karen Harvey on Masculinity at Home (forthcoming); Hannah Greig, The Fashionables: London’s Beau Monde in the Eighteenth Century (forthcoming) and for a later period, Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Families and Middle-Class Domestic Interiors in England, 1850-1910. (5) The history of space, the history of objects, the history of interior design and the history of power and emotion are large specialisms engaging a new generation of researchers. I look forward to their findings. Notes far beyond gallery walls and onto a larger canvas.' Gertrude Jekyll is one of the most celebrated garden designers in history.

Thanks Francesca Saggini #12, I am fascinated by houses in fiction too. Not enough room to do the subject justice in 3 hours! 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. She broke absolutely with the formal conventions of the Victorian flowerbed, 'the kind of thing you can still see today in corporation parks or at the seaside.' Here, she seems to have dabbled the white on with a painterly eye, and these flowing free drifts of white and pastel pink.

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I also felt that the camera was slightly too infatuated with her. I could see for myself that she was pleasant to behold, without the point needing to be over-emphasised. I assume this is down to the Director, but it could rub off on the professor and give an impression of vanity, which wouldn't help the audience accept her as a serious expert. When 39-year-old Elizabeth Platt lost her husband to diabetes in 1743, she was left with seven children, unhinged by her grief. Fortunately ‘when she obtained a few hours slumber she dreamed her husband was beside her, and used every tender argument to console and comfort her’. Professor Matthew Hilton,Vice-Principal (Humanities and Social Sciences) at Queen Mary said: "I am delighted that both Galin and Amanda have been elected as Fellows of the British Academy in recognition of their excellent work in the humanities. The pandemic has shown us the importance of these disciplines in understanding and interpreting the world around us. I congratulate them both on this well-deserved achievement." About the British Academy Fellowship