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Today I have a rare treat for you- a close look at a nearly forgotten ladies accomplishment: paper filigree work.
Poor Elinor Dashwood: in order to learn more of Lucy Steele’s entanglement with Edward Ferrars, she has to volunteer to join her in making a filigree basket for Annamaria Middleton, whom Jane Austen describes as a spoilt child:
“Perhaps,” continued Elinor, “if I should happen to cut out, I may be of some use to Miss Lucy Steele, in rolling her papers for her; and there is so much still to be done to the basket, that it must be impossible, I think, for her labour singly, to finish it this evening. I should like the work exceedingly, if she would allow me a share in it.”
Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 23
Playing cards with the cold Lady Middleton or having heartrending talks with spiteful, scheming Lucy? Not much of a choice is it?
Rolledpaper work, filigree work, or as it is now known, quilling, was a popular pastime for accomplished young ladies in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. The first known forms of this type of decoration, which is made by decorating items with many, many rolled and pinched or crimped pieces of paper, set in pleasing patterns, date from the 15th and 16th centuries.Predominantly using gold and silver covered paper, filigree work was then used to decorate items with religious significance- pictures of saints etc.- however, shortly after the Reformation in England,when “idolatrous” objects were discouraged, the practice died out. In the mid 17th century the art was revised in England ,and was often used in conjunction with stump work embroidery to decorate mirrors and caskets. In the 18th century it became a popular pastime for young ladies. Most were content to work on small pieces, as in Annamaria’s basket, and pieces like this tea caddy dating from about 1800, below:
You can see that the patterns formed by the rolled pieces of paper give a similar effect to filigree work made from strings or threads of precious metals such as gold or sliver, hence its name.
Some ladies were more accomplished than others, and were more ambitious too. Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of George III,was known to have ordered and received a cabinet especially constructed so that she could cover it with filigree work. It was described as a box made for filigree work with ebony mouldings, lock and key and also a tea caddy to correspond…
A cabinet of this type of work still exists and that is what I would like to show to you now. It appeared on the BBC’s Bargain Hunt Programme on Wednesday 2nd November, and was chosen by the programme’s presenter,Tim Wonnacott formerly of Sothebys ,as the object he most coveted in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Cheshire.
Here is Tim, standing next to the cabinet, which dates from the last years of the 18th century:
It has a stand, and is 4 feet 10 inches tall, 2 feet wide and 1 foot 5 inches deep.
The exterior is decorated with prints, filigree work and freshwater pearls:
The prints have been coloured, then applied to the cabinet and then finally varnished to give the appearance of oil paintings. In the image above you can see that the side panels are decorated as well as the doors.
If you take a close look at the decoration on the doors, you can see the tightly rolled pieces of paper…
which have been affixed to the surface of the cabinet. Note that the pattern comes not only from the way the pieces have been rolled but also from the use of papers of different colours.
The doors are also decorated with strings of freshwater pearls…
which are set in the form of swags. They help “display” the varnished prints in a decorative manner…
..so that the pictures hang pendant from the swags:
The sides are decorated in a stunning pink pattern: butterflies dance among the whirls of paper
The programme showed us something that is not normally seen- the interior of the cabinet:
The interior is stunning. The colours are almost as they were when it was made 200 years ago, because, of course, they have been protected from attacks of the sun and dirt. The reverses of the doors were not shown to us in detail but I can tell you that they are lined with painted satin bordered with glass jewels.
The centre panel of the cabinet again contains a varnished print, but this time it is set around with cut steel pieces-a very fashionable material at the time for buckles and jewellery, for despite its dull sounding name , it actually sparkles like cut stones.
This would have glittered and shone in the candlelight of a late 18th century sitting room, such a wonderful effect.
The interior of the cabinet is furnished with many small drawers, all decorated with filigree work:
You can see them in these two illustrations:
Here are some close-ups of the filigree work patterns on the drawers:
…here you can see a pattern of pink leafage set amongst a ground of aqua coloured paper rolls
Another leafage pattern this time in pale green, plus a star pattern..or is it a flower?
Another complex star/flower pattern with green leafage
These patterns were not necessarily the brainchild of the woman working them. Patterns could be purchased and some were printed in women’s magazine of the time. This one, below, shows very similar leafage and flower designs to the ones used on the cabinet:
This was first published in The New Ladies’ Magazine for 1786. In the same magazine there was an advertisement for the finest filigree work which could be seen at the first shop in Mount Street by Berkeley Square.
A statement in the same magazine promoted the craft, noting that paper filigree work was thought eminently suitable for the “female mind”:
The art affords an amusement to the female mind, capable of the most pleasing and extensive variety ; it may be readily acquired and pursued at a very trifling expense.
Perfect for Lucy Steele then, a woman with a certain amount of native cunning but no great intellectual gifts. I wonder if Jane Austen’s ire had been raised by reading such pronouncements, and that is why she gave such an occupation to Lucy…it is entirely possible, don’t you think?
However that may be, I think the cabinet on show here displays staggering levels of expertise. I can agree with Tim Wonnacott that I’d love it in my own home.
Yesterdays episode of the BBC2 programme, The Antiques Road Trip, a spin-off from the BBC1 programme, Bargain Hunt, was partly filmed in Chawton,
and featured Jane Austen’s House Museum.
I thought you might like to see some images from it.
The programme is a gentle jaunt about the country in the company of two auctioneers/experts who buy and sell antiques on the way, all the profits to benefit charity. The programme makes stops at various spots of interest along the road trip route, and in episode 15 of the third series, Paul Laidlaw took the opportunity to pay a visit to the Jane Austen House Museum.
He was greeted at the door by Louise West, the museum’s curator…
and was taken to see the dining room…
where the tiny but very important table where Jane Austen sat, revised and wrote all six of her finished novels
was admired and wondered about.
He also visited the new study area in the museum- which used to house its tiny shop ( now in a much larger and better situation in the restored barn! ) where a first edition copy of Sense and Sensibility- appropriately enough in this its anniversary year- was on show.
If you can try and watch the programme on the BBC Iplayer- it is available for another six days and the Jane Austen House part of the programme is approximately 25 minutes into the programme. Paul Laidlaw was obviously quite taken with the museum and asked some interesting questions. Its well worth a look .
Like this:
This week the BBC has been repeating the 2002 documentary, The Real Jane Austen on BBC4, presumably as part of the celebrations for the 200th anniversary of both the Regency and the publication of Sense and Sensibility.
This is a very engaging programme, an hour long, presented by the actress, Anna Chancellor. Ms. Chancellor is not only famed for her wonderfully catty performance as Miss Bingley in the BBCs 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice, but also for the fact that Jane Austen was her eight times great-aunt.
The documentary was filmed on location, at Chawton Cottage, now the Jane Austen’s House Museum, and Jane’s beloved peaceful home for the last eight years of her life.
It was also filmed at The Rectory at Teigh, which was used as the location for Mr Collins’ rectory in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice.
The Rectory, which I have visited and written about here and here, was used as the location for the Steventon Rectory, where Jane Austen was born and grew up. The original building has long since been demolished, and I think, if you consider the original, shown below, that the rectory at Teigh is a fair replacement.
The hall at Teigh, shown below with its beautiful plasterwork, was also used as the drawing-room at Manydown, the scene of Jane Austen’s engagement and swift dis-enagagment to Harris Bigg Wither.
It uses an interesting device: all the main character are portrayed by actors,and not only do they re-enact various scenes from Jane’s life but give face to face interviews to the camera. The cast is very well chosen: John Standing is a sympathetic and kind Reverend Austen. Phyllis Logan, a sensible and straightforward Mrs Austen. My favourite was Jack Davenport as the ever so slightly arrogant Henry Austen, so sure his mother and sisters needed very little financial support upon which to live after the death of Mr Austen. Yes, well…
I do wish this were available to buy on DVD: it would make perfect viewing for GCSE students wanting a short, snappy but accurate overview of Jane Austen’s life and times.
I remember viewing it in 2002 and liking it: my opinion has not changed after seeing it again on Tuesday evening. It is not available to view on the BBC iPlayer, but it will be broadcast again on Sunday 11th September at 7.10p.m. and very early on Monday morning, the 12th September, at 1.50a.m. Go here for all the details.
…borrowing freely from the Muriel Spark novel ( one of my favourites too, by the way) is the official title given by the BBC to Amanda Vickery’s forthcoming documentary on Jane Austen, which will be aired sometime in December.
The BBC’s press office has released this plug for it, which gives an indication of the tone and content:
To mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense And Sensibility, Professor Amanda Vickery, one of the leading chroniclers of Georgian England, explores the ebb and flow of Austen’s popularity and the hold her fiction has on people today.
In this 60-minute programme, Vickery considers what it is about Austen’s plots and characters that continue to delight, amuse, console and provoke. Her fans insist her current popularity is due to the timelessness of the fictional world Austen created, but for Vickery the question is: why have her novels gone in and out of fashion? What interests Amanda is how different periods and generations have looked for their own reflection in the characters and plots of the novels. She wants to work out what that says about them, as well as about Austen.
Interviewing a variety of literary scholars, film directors and costumed devotees who attend the Austen conventions, Vickery also views the Sotherby’s sale of an incredibly rare, handwritten manuscript of an unfinished Austen novel.
The Prime Of Miss Jane Austen is part of Books On The BBC 2011.
As you know, Amanda is currently dashing all around the country filming this production, and will be attending the Jane Austen festival in Bath in September to observe and film some of the proceedings. Not in costume though,as she has made VERY clear on Twitter 
I do think the production sounds intriguing, and I am very much looking forward to watching it. It is high time that we Thinking Austen Women( and Gentlemen) had something interesting to watch on television
As soon as I get anymore news I will, of course, let you know. And yes, The Jolly Girls Outing for this year is now officially over, and a marvellous time was had by all, thank you all for your good wishes. Also the exhausting process of getting one’s dear daughter into University has been achieved. *Heaves great sigh of relief* Normal service will, therefore, now resume
Like this:
(©LucyWorsley)
For those of us who were charmed by her TV performance in If Walls Could Talk which was broadcast on BBC4 earlier in the year, there is good news: Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Royal Historical Palaces, has been filming a series of three programmes about The Prince Regent and his era again for BBC4, to be broadcast later in the year.
This is how she describes it on her blog:
Let me fill you in on this Regency project – it’s in three parts, for brilliant BBC4 once again (yes, the brainy channel). The Prince Regent officially became ‘acting king’ in 1811, two hundred years ago, and the series is probably going to be called Elegance and Decadence (two lovely words which seem to sum up his nine-years reign as Regent before he properly became King George IV in 1820). When all is edited I think we’ll have an hour on the corpulent Prince of Whales himself, beginning of course at our beautiful Kew Palace where he grew up, great events and great artists (Lawrence and Turner) and the Battle of Waterloo. Episode Two is planned to be about architecture, Brighton Pavilion, Windsor Castle, the property market and the middle classes, and there’s a bit of my all-time favourite Regency person Jane Austen. We finish with an hour of sedition, violent protest, the Peterloo Massacre, industrialisation, royal divorce and dissent. Fun, huh?
Fun, indeed.
Over the past few months, while filming the series, she has been dandying about with Ian Kelly, author of a really good biography of Beau Brummel, The Ultimate Dandy, delving into the correspondence of Lady Caroline Lamb, flying in hot air balloons over Bath (how horrifying!) and dancing with tons( excuse the pun) of Regency dancers.
(©LucyWorsley)
I’m so looking forward to this series, because, as you all know, Jane Austen is my all time favourite Regency person too. I will, of course, keep you informed of broadcasting times and other developments
.
Professor Amanda Vickery’s splendid BBC Radio 4 series, Voices from the Old Bailey is back, and is on excellent form.
The first programme in the new, second series of four programmes was first broadcast last Wednesday at 9 a.m., but can be accessed here to “listen again” via the BBC Website. This week’s episode concentrates on riots during the 18th century, and the section on the Gordon Riots, an uprising of terrible anti- Catholic violence put down with equal harshness by the army, and which occurred in London and the surrounding district in 1780, is absolutely riveting.
But does this have anything to do with Jane Austen, I hear you cry ? Most definitely, yes. In Northanger Abbey it is surely the folk memories of the Gordon Riots that cause Eleanor Tilney to be very easily alarmed upon misunderstanding an innocent remark made by Catherine Morland in Chapter 14:
Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence. The general pause which succeeded his short disquisition on the state of the nation was put an end to by Catherine, who, in rather a solemn tone of voice, uttered these words, “I have heard that something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London.”
Miss Tilney, to whom this was chiefly addressed, was startled, and hastily replied, “Indeed! And of what nature?”
“That I do not know, nor who is the author. I have only heard that it is to be more horrible than anything we have met with yet.”
“Good heaven! Where could you hear of such a thing?”
“A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday. It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and everything of the kind.”
Of course, Catherine is talking of nothing more serious than of the publication of one of her horrid books, but Eleanor Tilney, the better informed of the two and with an emotional interest in any potential public unrest that might have to be put down by her elder brother, who is serving in the Twelfth Light Dragoons, leaps to some serious conclusions. Henry Tilney has to set matters aright in a very Mr Bennet-ish fashion( and not in a manner of which I approve, to be brutally honest with you, despise me if you dare):
“My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy–six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern — do you understand? And you, Miss Morland — my stupid sister has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London — and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of the woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in general.”
This weeks programme features one of my favourite historians, Professor Peter King, whose books, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740-1820 and Crime and Law in England, 1750-1840 are two of my most favourite books on the subject. Go read them now if you possibly can. Completing the discussion panel are Dr. Katrina Navickas and Professor Tim Hitchcock, co-founder of the fabulous on-line archive, Old Bailey Online.
Amanda is currently filming for her BBC TV Special on Sense and Sensibility, which will air sometime in December. She recently sent me this picture of her being filmed examining The Watsons manuscript at Sotheby’s,which of course was recently sold for nearly £1 million. I thought you would like to see it, so here it is:
We have investigated the links between Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen before on this site, and so when I heard today’s Woman’s Hour programme, which contained a discussion of the two, I though you might like the opportunity to share it.
The programme was a discussion of the merits of the two authors, and included a comparison of their respective fame during their own lifetimes
In the early 19th century Jane Austen was certainly less famous,and less well-connected to the Romantic literary world than The Great Maria, but now that position has changed totally , with Maria Edgeworth being relatively unknown.
A new edition of Maris Edgeworth’s book Patronage, edited by Professor John Mullan was published on the 4th July and the discussion marked that event. John Mullan is a Professor of English at University College London,and we have heard him take part in Amanda Vickery’s Voices from the Old Bailey programmes last year. He hosts the Guardian Book Club, and contributes regularly to the Newsnight Review, LRB and the New Statesman. Patronage is a novel that is of interest to Janeites as it is considered that it may have influenced Jane Austen when she was writing Persuasion.
If you go here you can listen again to the programme -the piece on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth began approximately 30 minutes into the broadcast. Scroll almost to the bottom of the page to see the details. You can download a podcast of the programme, or simply “listen again” to it if you go here; it will be available from tomorrow for seven days, I think, and will of course be dated the 7th July.
Do enjoy it, as I think you will find it interesting.
In our last post we talked about the exteriors of the Old Rectory at Teigh in Rutland, used as the Hunsford Parsonage in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Today, let’s take a look at the interiors.
The Hall is a room we see mainly when Charlotte and Mr Collins are leaving ,with Maria to yet another scintillating evening at Rosings in the company of Lady Catherine.
Poor Elizabeth is glad to see them go so she can throughly make herself miserable by re-reading all Jane’s letters to her, for she is now, coourtesy of Colonel Fitzwilliam, in possession of the knowledge that Darcy did intervene to prevent Bingley from forming too strong an attachment to her sister. Badly done Darcy.
This is the most beautiful room, currently used by its owner as a guest dining room
In the adaptation it was painted grey but Mrs Owen has since painted it a more cheerful yellow.
The plaster work is stunning,and sets this room apart architecturally from the rest of the house.
The ceiling is amazingly detailed
The Staircase Hall again has some beautiful plasterwork decoration
with plaster pilasters, which boast wonderful Corinthian capitals,which flank the arched window.
If we go up another flight of stairs we come to the room that was used as Elizabeth Bennet’s Bedroom.
And which looks out onto the church to the side of the house
The bed is in a slightly different position,as you can see….
But one original feature still remains…..the corner closet
which had been so thoughtfully kitted out by Lady Catherine with…
…shelves…
What an orginal thinker she was….
Sadly, the shelves are not normally kept in the closet for it is used as a wardrobe..but you can see where they would have been…
And finally , down one flight of stairs, to the sitting room on the first floor, which was backwards, and used by Mrs Collins to insulate her from the irritations of her husband’s company…..
where she could receive welcome guests, such as Colonel Fitzwilliam…
and where Lizzy would receive, rather awkwardly, less than welcome ones…
who made insulting proposals of marriage while the clock on the mantle was stuck at 18:17….;)
This room is a delightful sitting room, used by guests to the Rectory.
It is still decorated in the same wallpaper, which makes the room so instantly recognisable to admirers of this adaptation.
It is very easy to reenact that dreadful proposal scenes in one’s head as you sit in the room…
..so vividly did that scenes impress itself on one’s memory.
And that ends our tour of the interiors…but fans of that adaptation will be pleased to note that you can actually stay at the Old Rectory for Victoria runs it as a thriving Bed and Breakfast business. If you go here you can access her website and make your booking. It is only 20 miles from Belton House, which was used as Rosings, and 16 miles from Stamford, the setting for Meryton in the other Pride and Prejudice, of 2005 with Matthew McFaddeyn and Keria Knightley. A perfect base for doing some adaptation based sight seeing;)
Last week I was lucky enough to be granted permission to photograph The Old Rectory in the village of Teigh in Rutland,which served as Mr Collins’ Rectory in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Today we shall look at the exteriors, and in the next post, the interiors.
We first see the Rectory in the adaptation when Elizabeth, Sir William Lucas and Maria Lucas visit the Collins’ in their home.
The gravelled drive sees the first meeting of Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte since her ruthlessly sensible marriage to Mr Collins.
And, it is, of course, the back ground to Fitzwilliam Darcy’s hasty retreat after his disastrous marriage proposal to Elizabeth, which was so roundly rejected.
It is interesting to note that while the church used as Mr Collins church was, in reality, on the Belton estate, the Belton parish church of St Peter and St Paul…
…the parish church and the Old Rectory at Teigh are nearly 20 miles away. Luckily, the church has a tower that is very similar to the church at Belton and as you can see, it is very difficult to spot the difference, especially during the small amounts of screen time either church was given.
This was, of course, one of the main reasons the production team chose the Old Rectory to serve as Hunsford Rectory. The owner, Victoria Owen confided to me that the reasons they chose her home was because of the church, the house was of the right period, and because it does have a parlour that faces “backwards” like Charlotte’s favoured room at Hunsford.
Elizabeth was thankful to find that they did not see more of her cousin by the alteration, for the chief of the time between breakfast and dinner was now passed by him either at work in the garden, or in reading and writing, and looking out of window in his own book-room, which fronted the road. The room in which the ladies sat was backwards. Elizabeth at first had rather wondered that Charlotte should not prefer the dining-parlour for common use; it was a better sized room, and had a pleasanter aspect; but she soon saw that her friend had an excellent reason for what she did, for Mr. Collins would undoubtedly have been much less in his own apartment had they sat in one equally lively; and she gave Charlotte credit for the arrangement.
Chapter 30.
More on that in the next post.
Teigh is a tiny, beautifully peaceful village in Rutland, England ’s smallest county, set in some fabulously serene countryside. This is the view from the church over the surrounding fields…
The parish church at Teigh, Holy Trinity, is ancient, but the interior, very suitably, dates from 1782. I have not taken any photographs of the interior, for it didn’t appear in the adaptation, but if you go here you can see just how stunning this rare survivor of a church interior of the Georgian era truly is.
The church is very close to the Rectory as you can see from this photograph.
Perfect for filming.When I visited sheep were safely grazing in the churchyard, amid the ancient headstones…
and this delightfully friendly lamb made my acquaintance. Idyllic.
Next, the interesting interiors.
is the title of this BBC Radio 4 programme,available to Listen Again here, which was kindly bought to my attention by one of my correspondents after reading my Edward Ferrars and Hair Jewellery post.
Its an intesting programme ( only 30 minutes long) about the history of hair used as a symbol of remebrance, and I’m sure you will enjoy it,even if it does cover periods other than the time we are primarily intersted in here.
The BBC FOUR TV series, If Walls Could Talk concluded last night with a fascinating episode on the development of the kitchen throughout history.
I’ve not mentioned this programme to you before, because it is not primarily concerned with the era in which Jane Austen lived, being a general over-view of the development of key rooms in the house: the Living Room, the Bedroom, the Bathroom and in last night’s episode, the Kitchen.
The Kitchen, of course, developed apace during the 18th century and so I think you might like to see the interpretation of its history as it applies to our era, from last night’s show.
The series is presented by the rather endearing Dr Lucy Worsley who is the Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces. She has come in for quite a lot of criticism for her presenting style, in particular for her habit of donning historic dress in every episode. Having now seen all the episodes I feel that when she did this in the company of other historical reenactors it made sense. She would look out of place in the swanky Victorian kitchen at Shugborough Hall, black leading the grate in modern dress when all about her were in pink maids uniforms and flounced aprons. But then I didn’t understand the need to dress up in a Georgian sack dress, when she was in the company of other experts, such as Professor Amanda Vickery, who were sporting modern dress. Ah, well….to Georgian Kitchens.
The great technological developments in our era, cast iron ovens raised from the ground fueled by the more efficient coal were considered. Dr Worsley experienced the hot and hard work of being a turnspit (dressed as a boy) in the Tudor kitchen at Hampton Court, and then the programme jumped to our era to consider one of the most intriguing labour-saving devices of the 18th century, the turnspit dog.
In West Street Lacock ( or Meryton or Highbury, given your choice of favourite adaptation!) in Wiltshire there still exists a public house , the George Inn,
which has retained a working turnspit which was once powered by the special turnspit dog, a breed of dog now extinct, shown below:
During the 18th century and until the early years of the 19th century this special breed of dogs were used, particularly in Bath, to turn the spit to roast meat, while running on a wheel attached to a wall, a subject that I’ve written about previously here. I wonder if any of the houses in which Jane Austen lived while in Bath had a similar contraption in their kitchens? I’ll bet they did….there is still one at Number 1 Royal Crescent.
Ivan Day, our friend of Historic Foods, was in charge of the operation. The dog they used to replace the turnspit was a modern border terrier, Coco.
She was placed in the wheel, shown above on the side of the chimney in the pub, and fed sausages hidden on the ledges in the wheel. Needless to day,Ivan Day’s doubts, that as Coco was not bred to the job and had longer legs than the original breed of dog, did prevail and she did not perform the job at all efficiently.
Dr Worsely, had to take over the job of turning the spit by hand via the wheel.
( And do let me rush to confirm and assure you that no dogs were hurt at all by the filming process: Coco was fed rather a lot of spit roasted mutton as payment for her valiant and good natured attempts to turn the wheel by Ivan who is a very lovely man and a confirmed dog lover!).
The next part of the programme took us up to Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire,
Robert Adams’ stern confection of a house built for Lord and Lady Scarsdale in the 1760s. Here we met with the fabulous food historian Peter Brears, who explained that the layout of this grand , up-to-the-minute country house was so designed that no cooking smells would ever permeate the rest of the house from the kitchen.Heaven forfend that aristocratic nostrils should be assaulted by cooking smells, like lesser motals who lived among their cooking pots !
If you look at the floor plan of Kedleston, below, you can see that
©The National Trust
it was first envisaged that the house would have a central block with four pavilions connected to the house by gently curved corridors, rather like the design for Holkham House in Norfolk.
Sadly only two pavilion wings were built.And you can see from the plan that the pavilion to the right housed the kitchen. This is now the National Trust tea room and in the programme though nearly everything tea room related had been cleared, you can just make out one of the large vending machines which was obviously plumbed-in in some way and could not be removed.
The kitchen with its stern warning shot to the staff, above,
and its high ceilings and modern ventilation, above, was physically sufficiently far away from the dining room to prevent food odours from seeping into the other parts of the house.
The state dining room was decorated not with tapestries and carpets which would retain food odours, but with plain stuccoed walls and in the 18th century there would have been an oil cloth covering the floor. No aristocrat of this era wanted to be confronted with food smells unless the food was actually on his rather grand table.
And Robert Adam thoughtfully provided incense and pastille burners in the dining room to further cleanse the room of any lingering food smells.
Of course , it is a widely held belief that kitchens thus separated from dining rooms could only serve luke warm food at best.
Dr Worsley encouraged Mr Beares to run, while holding a tureen full of that Georgian staple, hot Pea Soup, along a route from the kitchen on the ground floor upstairs to the state dining room ( see the route above on the annotated plan) in order for him to prove that the food would not have arrived cold. Quite a sight to see….
He speed up the stairs with a determined vigour and Dr Worsley served herself some still warm soup from the silver tureen.
This episode was one of the best of this series of four programmes. I’ve warmed to Dr Worsley’s presenting style as the series progressed, and hope you watch the four installments on series link on the BBC I player, linked above in the first paragraph, if you have missed it. Or look out for the DVD, which is sure to come. There is a book to accompany the series but I cannot comment on it as I’ve not read it, but do bear in mind that it covers periods before and after that in which we are interested if you have a mind to buy it.
Like this:
I thought you might enjoy a serendipitous collaboration between the BBC and the National Trust.
The National Trust has created a city skyline walk around Bath, and this week the BBC Radio 4 Programme Ramblings, now presented by the amiable Stuart Maconie, recorded him walking along the route in the company of some local police officers. The area covered in the walk is indicated in the section from John Cary’s map of Bath and its Environs (1812) above. It covers Claverton Down, Widecombe,and passes by Ralph Allen’s Prior Park: the landscape garden there is also a National Trust property.
The walk is a circular one of about 6 miles in length,and has marvellous views across the city, and if you are in Bath you might consider doing it for yourself.
However, wherever you are in the world, if you have a look at the National Trust’s map-which you can see here -while listening to the programme, you can easily follow the route and imagine the views that Jane Austen took on her walks to Widecombe and Beechen Cliff while she lived in Bath.
It’s a jolly programme, -accessible here- and is only 23 minutes long. I’m sure,with the additional aid of the map, you will have a great idea of the terrain as they walk the path.
…on the 7th March 2011, and is now available to “pre-order” on all the well-known sites.
This was one of my favourite TV series of last year, and Amanda Vickery fully lived up to the promise of the evidence of her live lectures, revealing herself to be a vibrant, sensitive and authoritative guide to the domestic habits of the differing classes of people living in the 18th century.
The series is sumptuously filmed on location throughout England and Wales, and is invaluable as a companion to Professors Vickery’s best selling and most excellent book,Behind Closed Doors upon which the series was based.
At present there is no sign of this being bought by foreign TV stations so if you have a multi region DVD( a must!) then I recommend you order this DVD now.
My reviews of the three programmes are accessible, here, here and here. My interview with one of the directors of the series,Neil Crombie, is accessible here and my interview with Professor Vickery about the series is accessible here.
BBC World News has produced a beautiful and moving film of the exhibit, which I wrote about here . The film included footage of the remains of teh hospital in Brunswick Square and details the history of the Foundling Hospital.
Interviews with Professor John Styles and Lars Tharpp are inlcuded and there is the very moving and sad story of a recent inmate.
Go here to acess it ( hopefully all over the world).And above are some photographs of the exhibition that I’ve not published here before.
This series has been throughly thought-provoking, and the final installment was no exception.
It realigned the balance of the series towards the other side of the seductive Georgian coin, and threw more light on the lives of the poor, the dispossessed and servants in this era.
It is all too easy to imagine that most Georgians lived in fine Palladian homes or wonderfully proportioned town houses or rectories,as we have seen in previous episodes, when, in fact, the urban poor lived hugger-mugger in the garrets and cellars of these houses, some fine, some distinctly not, and the rural poor lived in hovels, almshouses or, if they were desperately unlucky, in the dreaded workhouse with its dehumanizing system of operation. This programme was a discussion of mainly two parts: what were the property-owning Georgian ideas of privacy, what rights did these privileged property owners have, and to what lengths would they legally go to defend their homes? Second, what sort of privacy was allowed to the poorer members of society? How did they protect their property, such as they had? It demonstrated how the elegant architecture of the era reflected this strongly hierarchical society and its richer member’s new desire for privacy. And how servants and the poor had few resources open to them to maintain their dignity and property rights.
The lack of an effective police force and dependency on the watchman meant that many urban(and rural) homeowners defended their homes every Englishman’s Home was his Castle- to the nth degree. They used every legally defensive measure available to them,shutters and iron bars to secure their homes…
and the now thankfully outlawed mantraps, as used in the grounds of surburan villas in Kensington…
now in the collection of the Museum of London where they will do no more vicious harm.
And despite this being the Age of the Enlightenment and the rational age of reason, many homeowners were still afraid of the supernatural and the unknown enough to use charms and votive objects for added layers of protection( we think immediately of Mrs Norris and her use of” charms” in Mansfield Park!).In this Surrey household slippers and shoes were used as a supernatural lightening conductor to ward off evil…
The programme made a wonderful visit to one of my favourite “museums” (I search in vain for the right word to describe this place..an instalment…an experience?) Denis Severs House in Spitalfields,London.
A filmmaker’s dream,every still looked like a Chardin still life….
Even the dripping washing hanging in the Hogarthian garret was picturesque….
I shall restrict myself to only to three images…..but the point was made that the hierarchical Georgian society was reflected in these elegant buildings -the most remote and poorest accommodations available to only the poor and to servants….
The trusty iPad was again in use, here showing the degradation of life in garrets,where a whole family would eat, live and sleep all using the same communal “Jordan” or chamber pot. Squalid indeed.
A visit to Erddig House in Wales famous for its benign treatment of servants, was used to demonstrate the differences between servant accommodation and accommodation for their employers.The use of corridors,bells, separate servants wings , innovations of the 18th century, all combined to make servants lives more remote from their masters and increased their employer’s privacy…
(did you spot the spectacular sugar loaf in the kitchen at Erddig?)
Servant’s lives were prescribed not only by the architecture within which they lived, but by the rules imposed by their employers….
The ideal employer respected his servants privacy to certain degrees-they were still expected to obey the rules of the household within their own shared accommodation, but affairs with servants were seen as immoral and disquieting. The story of Benjamin Smith a Lincolnshire lawyer and his affair with his maid was pitiful in every respect.
We were shown a wonderful French secretaire dating from the 1770s which encapsulated the Georgian society of the time:beautiful but hiding its many secrets in hidden drawers- ”for dirty diamonds and love letters”- all kept away from the prying eyes of servants ,whose ability to gather knowledge of their employers doings was feared, especially in Crim. Com and Divorce proceedings…shades of Mrs Rushworth senior’s maid,who had exposure in her power…..
The pocket collection of the Victoria and Albert museum was accessed, the theft of a pocket begin analogous to rape ,so intimate was this pice of clothing used to hold a woman’s most necessary and private articles…
The gilt was most definitely stripped from the gingerbread of Georgian elite women whose privacy was not respected by their husbands, the jealous husband of Ann Dormer of Rousham in Oxfordshire (famous for its magical landscape gardens designed by William Kent) made her life one of unbearable misery and torture. She was under surveillance every minute of her life…..
…her lack of privacy was a constant mental torment to her, her sad state likened to living under a not-at-all benign dictatorship.
We were taken to Professor Vickery’s home , to see in Virginia Woolf’s words, her ‘room of her own‘ -her study- which she felt was essential for her to complete her work. And she sympathised with women such as Ann Dormer who never attained the peace and contentment their own small private space would have afforded.
The late 17th century concept of the closet, a small personal, private space where ones religious devotions coud be attended to in peace was taken up by the Georgians and expanded…
…into a small room where socializing could take place,where tea, gossip, chocolate and pornography could be dispensed,and where affairs could be conducted.
The hallucinogenic bargello work on the walls of the closet of Chastleton House in Gloucestershire was used to illustrate one of these tiny, intimate spaces ,where privacy could be assured. The point was made that it was usually the male head of a household who had the prerogative to withdraw from family life, surely resonant of Mr Bennet (and possibly Darcy when Mrs Bennet came to call at Pemberley)
For the poor or for servants, their only privacy was most likely to be found not in a room of their own but in a lockable wooden box where their precious effects coud be safe from prying eyes of employer and /or fellow servants for it was unlikely that many servants had a “room of their own”.
Hogarth’s series of prints,The Harlot’s Progress, a series with which Jane Austen was familiar was used to illustrate how Moll, the fresh-faced girl up from the country with her box, marked with her initials
eventually came to grief after a career as a prostitute, having her box ransacked by her own maid, while she was dying from some sexually transmitted disease. A metaphor for how low she had sunk in life and death.
The concept of owning property was for the Georgians the key to so many things:respectability, the right to vote, to be a magistrate….but for the less well off in that society what happened when your rights of property had gone, and you no longer had the comfort and respect that derived from owning your own front door? If you were lucky you were cared for in a communal charity like the many almshouses that were set up around the country. Below we can see the almshouses that were a charitable institution established by the Ironmonger’s Company, and form what is now the Geffreye Museum.
And while the living was communal with all its attendant rules and regulations, married couples could still exist in their own Gerogian version of a bedsit, living with dignity, despite having no property to call their own.They were the lucky ones.
The destitute had to fall back on very cold charity: parish relief and the workhouse. The workhouse at Southwell in Nottinghamshire which I have always found to be an almost unbearable place of sorrow, was examined.
Here families were brutally separated and forced to live in a communal way,something that Georgian society found so very distasteful.Husbands were permanently separated from wives and children separated from their parents. The school room of the workhouse,below,with its moralising verses to be learnt by rote…
..had frosted glass in the window panes to prevent the children catching an unauthorised glimpse of their parents,should they be fellow inmates.
This would eventually have been the fate awaiting Miss and Mrs Bates in Emma. Mr Knightley was actuely aware that they were doomed to fall even futher from the genteel life they once knew in the Highbury vicarage, (a life which terminated socially and financially on the death of the Reverend Mr Bates)should their Highbury friends not support them financially. Just as Jane Austen knew of such desperate tales. Poor Miss Benn who lived in abject poverty in poor, rented accommodation Chawton was befriended by her during the years she lived in her Chawton home, a cosy, private, comfortable cottage by comparison, in the company of her mother sister and best friend. No wonder she counted herself lucky to live there on her brother Edward’s graceful charity. And no wonder when the threat of losing that home loomed in her final years, the resulting stress was most likely to have contributed to the cause of her untimely death.
But we ended on a high note……from the unhappy desperate diaries of Gertrude Saville in Episode One,
the unloved unwanted spinster sister living in sufferance in her brother home on his charity…to the end of her tale, when she suddenly and unexpectedly became mistress of all she surveyed and had not only a room but a home of her own…
This episode ,indeed the whole series, explains and amplifies concepts that were dear to Jane Austen, notably the search for one’s home, a place of one’s own. She saw the lot of women in her era with regard to this very clearly: the powerlessness or not of women in the search for a home of their own is central to many of her stories. For example, Fanny Price’s conflicting emotions between her Portsmouth her Mansfield homes; Jane Fairfax’s terror and bravery when faced with surrendering forever her status as a gentlewoman to become a governess, a servant living on sufferance in someone’s home ;and the deserving Miss Taylor who on marriage finally achieved accesss (and a key) to her own front door. Food for thought.
Professor Vickery has been a knowledgeable, amusing, sensitive and delightful companion though this journey into the Long 18th Century, discussing concepts of home,property and taste, all concepts with which we are now familiar but then were distinctly novel for the newly emerging middling classes.
I have throughly enjoyed watching each instalment of this series and am saddened that there were only three. I do hope it becomes available on DVD soon ,and I do hope that you, my readers from outside the UK will get a chance to view it in way or another ,as soon as possible.
Amanda Vickery very kindly agreed to let me interview her about her BBC TV series At Home with the Georgians,which is enjoying such great success on BBC2 presently. I thought you might like to read her fascinating replies to my mundane questions before the last episode of the series airs on BBC2 on Thursday evening…so here it is.
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The series is based on your book, “Behind Closed Doors” which I loved. Obviously you could not include all your real life characters in the 3 hour series so, when you were writing the series, what were your criteria for including a person’s story from the book?
The first challenge was to boil Behind Closed Doors (at a doorstopper 140,000 words) down to three one hour programmes. We carved it up into three big themes: Making Homes, Filling Homes & Protecting Homes. My key aim was to give each programme a strong over-arching theme. I had lots of meetings with Liz Hartford the series producer and Ross Wilson the executive producer from Matchlight films chewing over what would be the clearest thought-line – legible enough for non experts to enjoy without head scratching, but not so simplified as to do violence to the subtleties of history. However much I loved my characters if they didn’t serve the argument they didn’t make the cut. I especially regretted the loss of the rebellious Duchess of Grafton who strove to retain her standing in London as a separated wife. Alas. Another issue which governed our choices was whether there was enough visual material to support a TV case study. It is highly unusual for house, manuscripts and portraits to survive for individuals below the level of the greater gentry. Neil Crombie, the director of programme one ‘A Man’s Place’, was dismayed at first by the lack of beautiful well-preserved interiors in which to film. (John Courtney’s Beverly town house is no more; Wivenhoe is now a conference centre; Gertrude Savile’s Rufford Hall is a ruin etc etc.) But Neil and the wonderful researcher Eleanor Scoones were ingenious at finding ways around the absence.
They searched out the paintings hidden away in private collections of a mature Gibbs and Ryder – which I had never seen and encountered for the first time on camera. We went back to the manuscripts, the archives and I swanned about the surviving Georgian streets of Beverley and Exeter, Spitalfields and the Inns of Court. The dramatic reconstructions gave us visual diversity and a bit of relief from me talking to camera!
What was your favourite of all the stories you featured in the series and why?
For excruciating humour it has to be Dudley Ryder. We had over an hour of film of me pouring over the diary and responding to his ambivalences. I think barely 3 minutes were left in. As a feminist as well as a historian, and as a lover of realist novels, I have always felt it was important to understand the full humanity of men as well as women. Very few of the gents I have researched were the cardboard patriarchs of older theories. In fact, as bachelors they seem so self-conscious, gauche and half-baked it’s a wonder they ever headed up households.
Ryder went on to become solicitor general, but you would never have foreseen this from reading the diary he wrote in code aged 24. But I adore John Courtney too. In my mind’s eye he was something of a Mr Collins – deaf to female signals, desperate to be debonair and facing eight rejections with undiminished astonishment: “I was thunderstruck”.
What audience were you trying to reach with this series? Were you trying to reach people who are history nuts and have read your book or a completely new audience- for example, people who are fans of adaptations of Austen/Bronte/Gaskell novels not necessarily readers of the novel or indeed of serious history books?
I was asked to do the series by Janice Hadlow head of BBC2, who is writing her own 18th century history and who liked Behind Closed Doors as well as my first book The Gentleman’s Daughter. She enjoys characters, stories, details and arguments and thought viewers might too. The head of history at the BBC Martin Davidson hoped that I could make a series which would unlock a new audience for history programmes. All the surveys reveal that the current audience for history is predominantly male and middle-aged. Why should this be when women are the key audience for costume drama? Somehow a bifurcation of history has emerged on TV: putting it crudely, bonnets for the women and bombers for the men. I would love to reach an audience that wants to see a different sort of history (neither war nor Kings and Queens). I’m interested in producing documentaries which reflect what the history profession itself actually researches and teaches now. In BBC TV land, there is a vogue for “authoritative history” – i.e. history programmes written and presented by experts, rather than fronted by celebrities drafted in to go on a historical ‘journey’ of discovery or read a script written by the producer derived from textbooks. I was delighted to catch this wave.
Producers at radio 4 and BBC4 assume that the audience is keen on history. At BBC2 you can’t take that for granted. You simply cannot make programmes aimed just at 20,000 experts who have done all the background reading. The goal is entertainment and to draw a wide and varied audience into another world with colour and character, wit and pathos – all undergirded with a single driving argument. The BBC are thrilled with the result, as their investment in trailers testifies. What the audience makes of it is another matter of course. We have our fingers crossed that history refusniks as well as history buffs will switch on to discover that there’s more to history than tanks and tiaras. I am committed to a holistic history that embraces everywoman as well as everyman. I still sympathize with Catherine Morland. “Real solemn history I cannot be interested in… the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all.”
How pleased were you with the end result?
I am delighted with three programmes – each reflects a collaboration with a different director, each with their own style and tone – ‘A Man’s Place’ with the theatrical and brilliant Neil Crombie (who shared my sense of humour), ‘A Woman’s Touch’ with the searching documentary maker Iain Scollay (who tried to catch me at my most honest and unguarded) and ‘Safe as Houses?’ with the stylish Phil Cairney (whose direction combined the formality of Neil’s and the observation of Iain’s). I also learnt a lot from the director of photography Dirk Nel, who had worked with several different history presenters. He instilled great confidence in me – which is half the battle – while training me to hit my mark. I will never forget him chanting “FIND the light, Amanda, FIND the light” before I set off on one of my rambles down a murky corridor. Almost everything was ad libbed to camera, so I am relieved that I came out with some coherent sentences. The aim of Dirk and all the directors was to capture my personality on camera. My friends say I am recognizably myself so in one key respect they have succeeded.
How much influence did you have in the choice of actors, locations and music?
The locations were driven by my research and availability, the actors were chosen by a casting director, Eleanor Scoones the researcher, Liz Hartford, the series director and Neil Crombie (who directed the reconstructions). All of them had read my book very closely – in the end I trusted to them. In an ideal world I would have directed the dramatic reconstructions myself! But even a control-freak diva has her moments of sanity and insight. The music was largely chosen by the directors, but I made my suggestions and had right of veto. Writing is a solitary process over which you exert total control, whereas TV is a collaboration with an army. You have to respect the talents and advice of your collaborators and accept that you are producing something which reflects them as well as you. Given my intellectual life (teaching apart) is quite hermetic, I loved working with a quick-witted and highly skilled production team. I am a gregarious person and relished the camaraderie. I also loved learning a new trade from them.
You allocated a whole chapter to Jane Austen in “Behind Closed Doors”. Do you consider her to have been an accurate recorder of late 18th early /19th century life? Did you find any of her plots/characters reflected in any of your real diarists’ lives?
I tried not to treat Austen’s work simply as descriptive evidence from which I could cherry pick juicy quotes to back up my arguments. Literary scholars are always accusing historians of simplistic cut and paste. But it is clear that Austen assumed that her readers were sensitive to the implications of taste and interior decoration. She relied on them to take domestic details (like Darcy’s gift of a piano to his sister, or General Tilney’s over-bearing choices of breakfast cups) as reliable signs of character. Even silly little tables had meaning.
Austen also relied on the social, economic and emotional importance her readers would attach to the drama of setting up home. When it comes to history, I hope my readers will make the same leap, and agree that domesticity is a universal subject, not a frivolous topic to be dismissed and patronized.
As for characters on TV, I rather enjoyed inserting Jane Austen herself into the narrative. She appears first as an anonymous spinster, living in what historians call a ‘spinster cluster’ in a small grace and favour cottage hard by the main road. Austen lovers will instantly recognize Chawton, but plenty of editors at the BBC were surprised when we revealed the impoverished sister to be none other than Austen herself. I wanted to show that however mocked by satire, the spinster’s life is no less heroic and productive than that of the smug marrieds.
Do you have another TV or radio project in the pipeline? If yes, can you tell us anything about it?
I am working on another Voices of the Old Bailey series with Elizabeth Burke of Loftus to be broadcast next summer on BBC radio 4, and we have been commissioned to produce a six part history of men and masculinity from the Medieval knight to the modern salary man. I am also working with BBC2 to develop longer span series which still aim to bring the Catherine Morlands of this world to an enjoyment of history. Floreat Clio!
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Floreat Clio indeed, and may I add Floreat Amanda because I really do think our understanding of the lives Jane Austen chronicled would be considerably impoverished were it not for her scholarly endeavours. I should like to thank her for her patience and kindness in supplying me with such fabulous replies to my questions,even though at one point our computers stubbornly refused to talk to each other!
The final episode of At Home With The Georgians Airs on BBC2 Thursday 16th December at 9 p.m. I will be watching as usual and posting my review on Friday. Do watch it if you can. If you would like to embark on a reading project based around the programmes, Professor Vickery has kindly produced a short reading list, go here to see it (Do note many of the books will already be familiar to readers of this site!)
I do hope a DVD will soon be available, in the meantime enjoy: the series will remain available to “view again” for another week.
A confession. I do have to say from the outset that I truly adored this week’s episode. The series really came alive for me, Professor Vickery totally at home with some of her most interesting material, which she clearly relishes and she is obviously and authoritatively in complete command of all the intricate detail.
The episode dealt with the new concept of taste, an idea imported from France, and how women’s interpretation of that sometimes dangerous conceit influenced the interiors of homes rich and poor.
We began at Parham House in Sussex contrasting the Elizabethan, masculine Great Hall
with the 18th century feminised Drawing Room complete with harp. Mary Crawford would no doubt have approved.
The woman whose diaries provided Professor Vickery with much of her inspiration for this programme was Sophia, Lady Shelburne of Bowood House in Wiltshire and chatelaine of the most splendid town house, Shelburne House in Berkeley Square (now the Lansdowne Club)
In Professor Vickery’s words, Sophia was “a swot”, an intelligent, educated woman who became enamoured of the new fashion for neo-classicism
In search of inspiration in order to keep up with this new fashion, her diary entries show she visited the Duke of Northumberland’s home, Syon House originally an Elizabethan building, but one that was completely overhauled by the newly fashionable architect, Robert Adam…
to become a temple to the new taste….
incorporating detials from the evacuations at Pompei and Herculaneum in an impressive and sometimes exquisitely feminine manner.
When it came to designing their own town house/palace, the Shelburne’s commissioned Adam to design their dream home,a place suitably impressive for the politically ambitious Whig, Lord Shelburne,where he could entertain and impress supporters and government members alike.
We had a small trip to the architect, Sir John Soanes House Museum, full of its wonderful neoclassical collections(though it was not flagged up as Sir John’s house and it might have helped viewers unfamiliar with it,had it been…)
The consumerism of the 18th century one of Professor Vickery’s favourite topics-was examined. Matthew Boulton (my hero!)
and his genius for producing desirable goods for both the aristocracy and the middling classes was celebrated and we visited his home at Soho House in Birmingham.
He was shown to be a smooth operator when it came to selling and recognised that tapping into the female psyche guaranteed profits and full order books.
Chippendale and his revolutionary Gentleman’s and Cabinetmakers Directory, the forerunner of catalogue selling was examined….
And his innovative designs for male and female pieces of furniture,thereby guaranteeing double sales, was admired.
The ingenious nature of Georgian metamorphic furniture, as in this cabinet bed at Temple Newsam near Leeds was discussed
And the trusty Ipad was used to great effect when looking at 18th century adverts for
furniture polish (again there is nothing new in this world)
And it was also used to illustrate the dangers that awaited someone overwhelmed by the new taste ,who didn’t know when to stop: incorporating neo-classicism,Gothic, Ionic Orders and Chinoiserie in their suburban villas was a sure way to ridicule.
One of my favourite chapters in Behind Closed Doors dealt with the Georgians use of wallpaper and how accurate a barometer it was for interior design and taste. We visited Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath (the home of Lord Mansfield)
to see the wonderful collection of delicate fragments of 18th century wallpaper
including this scrap in the newly fashionable colour, yellow
and readers of Behind Closed Doors will recognise this fragment….
We saw Diana Spurlings women “doing it for themselves” on the Ipad
and visited Coles Wallpaper Manufactory where hand blocked and flocked papers are still made in the traditional manner, (a place I used to walk past on my way to catch the train to the office when I lived in London and used to peep through their open doors in the summer to see the magical process at work)
The new consumerism changed people’s social habits taking tea, for example, where you could show off your new china and furnishings, became all the rage,a subject Professor Vickery deals with in detail in The Gentleman’s Daughter. Jane Austen knew this feeling well, especially when she was ordering her own and her brother’s Wedgwod china….
Lady Stanley, a sad case whose husband denied her decorating and visiting rights showed the other side of this Georgian coin…..poor lady,played very sensitively in this programme.
Women’s own efforts to decorate their homes was covered,and Professor Vickery visited the marvellous Quilts exhibit at the Victoria and Albert museum which I also visited earlier this year and wrote about here
The amazing work of a ten year old, above, was lauded…..
We visited one of my favourite eccentric houses ,the home of the spinster Parminter cousins,A La Ronde and saw its totally feminine design and decoration, a miraculous survivor into the 21st century
And made a moving visit to the billet books of the Foundling hospital, which I’ve written at length about here,where in this case, a woman’s patchwork was her link to her child( and this story and a happy ending for once)
Finally, we revisited Lady Shelburne’s magically feminine Robert Adam designed drawing room which is now installed in the Richard Rogers post modern Lloyds Building in the City of London. A lasting monument to the taste of the Georgians.
There has been some adverse comment on Professors Vickery’s style in the press and on the internet over the past week,especially regarding her raw reaction to seeing a portrait of her hero, Dr George Gibbs . This was, in fact, a very funny part of last week’s programme, for having built him up to be her ultimate “hero” in her mind, when he was revealed to be a rather ordinary looking chap, jowly jawed and all, Professor Vickery was rather loud in her disappointment, failing to notice what the cameraman did, that Dr Gibbs’ descendant, who was showing the portrait , bore an amazing resemblance to his great grandfather how many times removed. *snort* In this week’s programme we get the impression that Professor Vickery became very attached to two of her lady diarists, and in particular to Lady Shelburne. For myself, I love to witness this aspect of Professor Vickery’s presenting technique, for I think it is this honest sympathy for her sources which enables Professor Vickery to fully understand them and to bring them to life for us. She is also not “too cool for school” an attitude I embrace myself and this is I think, a refreshing change from some of our more staid presenters.
Go here to watch episode two on series link at the BBC. Next week is the last in the series. I shall be bereft.
Some of you may remember the BBC Radio 4 programme, Jane Austen’s iPod which was broadcast earlier in the year. A series has now been commissioned using the same idea- taking a well known historical personality and playing music they knew or had written about them while talking about their lives with experts in the field.
Last week’s episode was concerned with Dickens (Shh!!- don’t mention him too loudly! I think we got away with it!). But today’s epiosde was of more interest to us as it featured Emma Hamilton’s iPod. Emma Hamilton was of course the mistress of Horatio Nelson,under whom Francis Austen
served ,though to his chagrin, he missed being on duty at the Battle of Trafalagar where Nelson was killed in action.
Quintin Colville , Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum and Emma Hamilton’s biographer Kate Williams talk to the musician David Owen Norris about her fantastical life, and Rachel Cowgill talks about Emma’s musical ability and her taste in music, looking at her music books which are now in the Maritime Museum’s collection. Fascinating stuff including details of her job as a “Goddess” in the Temple of Health where the infamous Celestial Bed, supposed cure for infertility was in constant demand, her marriage to Sir William Hamilton, her famous classical “Attitudes” and scandalous life including her manage a trois with Sir William and Nelson,and her meeting with Hayden. Fascinating. I’d like to have heard a little more about Nelson’s poor, real and neglected wife, Fanny, but I suppose she would have been out of place in this programme about mistresses.
The Programme was recorded at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwhich, near to the Greenwich Naval Hospital which was of course where Nelson ‘s body laid in state before he was taken down the river Thames to be buried according to the rites of a State Funeral at St Pauls Cathedral. I rather like the sound of the new gallery to be devoted to Nelson, Emma and the 18th century at the Maritime museum…I’ll keep an eye out for any more news of that, and will report back.
In the meantime, here is a link to today’s programme which is available to Listen Again for the next seven days.
Today BBC Radio 4′s redoubtable Woman’s Hour programme gave us a tour around Brighton to disocver details of its past (some of it relating to the Georgian and Regency eras) and some of its notable women. Louise Hume, a lecturer, devised the walking tour of Brighton for Herstoria magazine.
We visit the grave of Martha Gunn, the famous dipper, depicted below by Robert Deighton
We then visit the Theatre Royal. This is how it looked in 1805:
And the Royal Pavilion, the seaside palace of the Prince Regent, where we visit the exuberantly beautiful music room seen below:
The Pavilion was the home of Caroline of Brunswick, shown below, for a while, while her husband the Prince dallied with his mistress, Lady Jersey.
And we visit Marine Parade, home of Harriette Wilson, the mistress of Lord Carven, where we hear of her exploits,
as recorded in her memoirs:
Go here to access the programme which is available to listen again for another 7 days from today.
You can access the revlevant section of th programme approximately 20 minutes in. As Lydia Bennet wailed in the BBCs 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice,“I Want to Go to Brighton!“(In fact ,I am going there next year!) Enjoy!
Professor Vickery , above on the right, has just sent me notice of this- her overview of her series in her own words
It makes very interesting reading, and frankly I cant wait for tomorrow’s first instalment. Enjoy!
