A History of Private Life
Historian Amanda Vickery presents a series which reveals the hidden history of home over 400 years, drawing on first-hand accounts from letters and diaries
A History of Private Life - A History of Private Life: Discussion
Responding to Prof Amanda Vickery's new Radio 4 series about the history of private life, Tom Sutcliffe chairs a discussion programme about the meaning of home today.
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A History of Private Life - All My Life is A Struggle With Dirt
How women came to see laundry and the linen cupboard as part of their moral mission, caring for their families and also keeping the household morally pure.
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A History of Private Life - Alternative Homes
Amanda Vickery reveals the hidden history of home over 400 years. In this programme, she explores the enduring pull of a home of one's own.
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A History of Private Life - Bachelors
In the 17th and 18th century, bachelorhood was supposed to be a temporary state best solved by marriage. This programme tells the story of student Dudley Ryder's search for a wife.
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A History of Private Life - Courtship and Setting Up Home
The story of two 18th-century marriages and how the husbands prepared new houses for their bride. One got it right, the other destroyed any chance of a happy partnership.
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A History of Private Life - Domestic Harmony
Family music-making was a way of creating domestic harmony, and it was your best chance of finding a partner.
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A History of Private Life - Domestic Violence
The dark side of private life, and how home became a trap. The diary of Ellen Weeton, who was duped into marriage with a man who abused her, keeping her locked up in a back room.
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A History of Private Life - Dunroamin
For snobs and bohemians, the adjective 'suburban' has always been the ultimate put-down. Prof Vickery listens to the experiences of those who moved there.
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A History of Private Life - Education in the Moral Home
Drawing on diaries she has discovered, Prof Vickery explores home education from the perspective of both mother and child.
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A History of Private Life - Every Man's Home is His Castle
Records from Old Bailey trials reveal how widespread burglary was, and how the law enshrined that, 'the Englishman's home is his castle'.
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A History of Private Life - Exporting the Home
Prof Vickery explores the kind of homes the British struggled to create in India, using the diaries and letters of colonial settlers.
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A History of Private Life - Into the Closet
By the 17th century, privacy meant withdrawing into a closet - a tiny private space in the corner of a room. For women, it was often their only private space.
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A History of Private Life - Kitchen Physic
From rabies to madness and piles, the housewives of the past were expected to concoct medicines which would cure any condition.
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A History of Private Life - Magnificence
The story of a celebrity divorce - a huge scandal, because the husband was the prime minister. The question then, as now, was what was the woman going to walk away with?
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A History of Private Life - Men at Home
Not everyone adhered to polite etiquette - these are the stories of family 'black sheep', and how embarrassing they were.
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A History of Private Life - Mistress and Servants
The fascinating household diaries of Elizabeth Shackleton, trying to run a house in Lancashire with a floating population of unreliable and drunken servants.
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A History of Private Life - Neat and Not too Showy
Moving into the 19th century, Prof Vickery explores the homes of people lower down the social scale and their ideas about how they wanted them to look.
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A History of Private Life - Ornamenting the Home
Sewing was believed to be part of a wife's essential duty in the 17th and 18th century, and also a way of keeping women at home safely occupied.
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A History of Private Life - Pots and Pans
Historian Amanda Vickery presents a series which reveals the hidden history of home over 400 years. Why do pots and pans matter?
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A History of Private Life - Science and Nature at Home
A room constructed entirely of feathers, a hermitage in the garden of a Lincolnshire vicarage - how eccentric homes reflected wider 18th-century ideas about science and nature.
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A History of Private Life - Secrets at Home - Illicit Guests
Stories from adultery cases about women sneaking lovers into the house and how impossible it was to keep anything from prying servants.
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A History of Private Life - Servants
Many servants in the 18th century didn't even have a bed of their own, and maids were notoriously vulnerable to sexually predatory men, to their master's droit de seigneur.
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A History of Private Life - Spinsters
Probably as many as one in five women never married in 18th-century England. What about their story? What did the comforts of home mean for them?
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A History of Private Life - Taste
The story of an 18th-century couple, the Graftons - fashionable, rich, and deeply in love - who spend life together doing up their magnificent houses.
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A History of Private Life - Tea
Thanks to the introduction of tea in the 18th century, even people who were not rich and did not have servants could afford to entertain, and the home was opened up to inspection.
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A History of Private Life - The Bed
Beginning at the heart of private life - in the deep comfort of the matrimonial bed, curtains drawn round the four-poster. What happened next is revealed by 16th-century diaries.
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A History of Private Life - The Garden Indoors
By the mid-19th century, the majority of the British population lived in filthy polluted towns, yet the Victorians contrived increasingly ingenious ways to domesticate nature.
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A History of Private Life - The State in Miniature
The hierarchy within the home was supposed to reflect the well-ordered society outside it. But what do letters from the 16th and 17th centuries tell us about who was in charge?
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A History of Private Life - Things That Go Bump in the Night
Testimonials from witchcraft trials reveal people's darkest fears and fantasies about what happened outside at night, and how their homes protected them.
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A History of Private Life - Widowers
The story of two different widowers and their desperate search for a new wife, based on original material from two unusual sets of diaries which Prof Vickery found in Lincoln.
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A History of Private Life - Widows
The story of the richest widow in 18th-century England, Elizabeth Montagu, and how she spent her late husband's coal fortune.
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