A History of Private Life
Lead Research Organisation:
Royal Holloway University of London
Department Name: History
Abstract
A History of Private Life' will be a landmark 30 part radio series broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in Autumn 2009. It popularizes Amanda Vickery's research at the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, bringing new scholarly findings and rare archival material to the widest possible public. A commitment to 'intelligent argument' on the part of BBC Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer and a desire to report from the research frontier has led the channel to commission the series. 'A History of Private Life' will unlock the front door of the Englishman's castle to peer into the privacies of life at home over the last 400 years, from the Stuarts to the Second World War.
Who has not wandered down an urban street at dusk, glancing through the front windows, wondering about the lives behind? Visiting historic houses is often listed second only to gardening as the favourite leisure activity of the British. When the 1901 census for England and Wales went online in 2002 allowing the curious to find out who had lived at their address a century ago, it had 30 million hits a day, every day for its first week. The server crashed. Curiosity about the domestic lives of others is intense.
Homes promise security, retreat, rest, warmth, food and the basis for both a family life and for full participation in social life. A drawing of a recognizable house with strong walls and curling smoke is a sign for psychologists of a secure childhood. But it is not all delicious casseroles and piano practice behind those yellow curtains, of course, for cruelty begins at home, chaos often reigns, and ceremonies involve work. Nevertheless, the emotion freighted to the very word 'home' testifies to our continued longing for a place of supreme safety. Home-made, home-grown, home-cooked are all promises of true satisfaction. The acute sense of belonging felt by Mole for his dulce domum in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows resonates with us still.
The series recreates the spaces and boundaries which shaped domesticity, the emotions and power relationships which animated it, the hidden labour which sustained it, and the creativity which adorned it. 'A History of Private Life' aims to drag domestic life out of the closet. The story it tells stretches across four centuries.
Traditionally, the house was a universal metaphor for the person and the body. In seventeenth-century popular belief, witches attacked the house through the windows, doorways, chimneys and hearth, just as demons entered the body through its orifices. Fires were said to cackle and blaze when a wizard passed the hearth because the soul of the house was in peril. The household was seen as a microcosm of the state: husbands were to govern wives, masters and mistresses to rule servants, and parents to discipline children. Adult male householders were the top of the tree, yet households could not run without a powerful female administrator at the helm. 'Commonly shrews are good housewives' reasoned an old proverb, acknowledging the tension between proficient housewifery and subordination.
The Georgians celebrated the art of domestic life in paintings, novels, journalism and sermons. The rise of tea drinking transformed the interiors and domestic rituals of everyone with a little surplus to spend. The cult of visiting prized open the doors of the middle-class town house.
The Victorians were devoted to their well-upholstered villas and terraces, promoting the myth that home was a private sphere, sealed off from the sins of commerce, where wives radiated virtue, and men could refresh themselves after a hard day in the real world. Yet the gentleman's club still lured bachelors who could not submit to the suffocations of the crimson parlour.
By the twentieth century, it was a clean and cosy modern domesticity that flourished in the inter-war suburbs, where the wireless played "just Molly and Me, Baby makes three, I'm happy in My Blue Heaven".
Who has not wandered down an urban street at dusk, glancing through the front windows, wondering about the lives behind? Visiting historic houses is often listed second only to gardening as the favourite leisure activity of the British. When the 1901 census for England and Wales went online in 2002 allowing the curious to find out who had lived at their address a century ago, it had 30 million hits a day, every day for its first week. The server crashed. Curiosity about the domestic lives of others is intense.
Homes promise security, retreat, rest, warmth, food and the basis for both a family life and for full participation in social life. A drawing of a recognizable house with strong walls and curling smoke is a sign for psychologists of a secure childhood. But it is not all delicious casseroles and piano practice behind those yellow curtains, of course, for cruelty begins at home, chaos often reigns, and ceremonies involve work. Nevertheless, the emotion freighted to the very word 'home' testifies to our continued longing for a place of supreme safety. Home-made, home-grown, home-cooked are all promises of true satisfaction. The acute sense of belonging felt by Mole for his dulce domum in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows resonates with us still.
The series recreates the spaces and boundaries which shaped domesticity, the emotions and power relationships which animated it, the hidden labour which sustained it, and the creativity which adorned it. 'A History of Private Life' aims to drag domestic life out of the closet. The story it tells stretches across four centuries.
Traditionally, the house was a universal metaphor for the person and the body. In seventeenth-century popular belief, witches attacked the house through the windows, doorways, chimneys and hearth, just as demons entered the body through its orifices. Fires were said to cackle and blaze when a wizard passed the hearth because the soul of the house was in peril. The household was seen as a microcosm of the state: husbands were to govern wives, masters and mistresses to rule servants, and parents to discipline children. Adult male householders were the top of the tree, yet households could not run without a powerful female administrator at the helm. 'Commonly shrews are good housewives' reasoned an old proverb, acknowledging the tension between proficient housewifery and subordination.
The Georgians celebrated the art of domestic life in paintings, novels, journalism and sermons. The rise of tea drinking transformed the interiors and domestic rituals of everyone with a little surplus to spend. The cult of visiting prized open the doors of the middle-class town house.
The Victorians were devoted to their well-upholstered villas and terraces, promoting the myth that home was a private sphere, sealed off from the sins of commerce, where wives radiated virtue, and men could refresh themselves after a hard day in the real world. Yet the gentleman's club still lured bachelors who could not submit to the suffocations of the crimson parlour.
By the twentieth century, it was a clean and cosy modern domesticity that flourished in the inter-war suburbs, where the wireless played "just Molly and Me, Baby makes three, I'm happy in My Blue Heaven".
People |
ORCID iD |
| Amanda Vickery (Principal Investigator) |