Professor Amanda Vickery champions relationships as a way of understanding the past. And it’s something that formed the basis of her BBC series, A History of Private Life.
I'd far rather read love letters than Acts of Parliament
I have spent my entire career chiselling precious personal nuggets out of unpromising archives. Early on in my London University PhD, I realized that I'd far rather read love letters than Acts of Parliament. Even in a county record office in a 1960s development on an out-of-town roundabout, research can be electrifying. The past lives again when a lock of red-gold hair, undimmed by time, falls from a bundle of manuscripts. And what researcher's heart would not lift at the words ... "please burn this letter that no mortal eyes may read it"?
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?
Not that writing the history of private life is especially easy. House, home and domestic life are so fundamental as to be almost invisible. Diarists and letter-writers often only felt moved to comment at times of crisis. The history of home hides in plain sight. It took some ingenuity to recreate what people in the past thought so important that it went without saying.
I have pieced together a narrative from courtship letters, confessions and wills, diaries and autobiographies, inventories, advertisements, burglary trials, and upholsterers' ledgers to bring to life a history so taken for granted that it was rarely put into words.
We hear the voices of men and women of very different backgrounds relating the problems and pleasures, successes and catastrophes of domestic life: the London bachelor who longed to be married, but worried about bad breath and impotence; the Lincolnshire widower who carried on an affair with his housekeeper and was tortured by guilt; the Scottish architect camped in London, who summoned his sisters from Edinburgh to shore up his household; the Oxfordshire wife whose psychopathic husband censored her correspondence and drove her to hide in the closet.
Elizabeth Burke gave me my first break on radio and I have always wanted to work with her to learn more about the art, craft and mystery of creating truly atmospheric broadcasts. Researching and writing 30 scripts is a mammoth undertaking, but luckily I won an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship which bought me precious time to work intensively with Loftus Productions. Drafting a script a week reminded me of the torture of writing a weekly essay as an undergraduate - but instead of a tutorial, I had a weekly meeting with Elizabeth where we thrashed out what would work best for radio and how to balance case studies and historical narrative. Thanks to Elizabeth I learned how to translate research into intelligent entertainment and written argument into spoken scripts. We thought long and hard about the balance of the different themes and moods. I will never forget the day that Elizabeth told me my script on widowhood was just too depressing and I had to brighten it up somehow!
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.
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.
Another revelation was the power of music and song to elaborate arguments. For instance, Bach's Cello Suites express the religious discipline of private prayer and are the exact musical equivalent of the devotions I explore in the programme on the closet (the little rooms off bedrooms which were built in the 17th century). Cheeky masculinity is to the fore in the Tinkers' Songs which accompany our programme on Pots and Pans - as one likely lad offered at the back kitchen door: "Go tell the lady of this place I've come to clout her kettle!" In "The Housewife's Lament", one of our favourite songs:
There's too much botherment goes to a bonnet
Too much ironing goes to a shirt
Nothing is worth the time you spend on it
All of my life is a struggle with dirt.
These heart-breaking and witty verses are a delight and woven in throughout to give a rich texture to the narrative. The songs are the equivalent of images in a book. We use them not just to illustrate my arguments, but to drive the story on.
Amanda is the prize-winning author of The Gentleman's Daughter (Yale, 1998) and Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, 2009). She has lectured on all aspects of British social, political and cultural history from the 17th century to the present. Her greatest weakness is a love of clothes, though some would say chatting runs fashion close as her favourite hobby.
For more information about Amanda, please read her staff profile