Behind Closed Doors

At Home in Georgian England. In this work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. She introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings, genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper, servants with only a locking box to call their own. She makes ingenious use of upholsterer's ledgers, burglary trials, and other unsusal sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival during the 18th century.