Perhaps it is due to too many teenage hours spent reading the works of Jane Austen, but if I could choose any historical period in which to live it would be Georgian England. Doesn’t matter under which specific king’s reign—any of the Georges will do. The decoration of the time, ranging from chilly splendor to modest simplicity is just my cup of tea. But who knew it was such a dramatic moment in time too, decoratively speaking?
You can get some idea of this by watching PBS’s Masterpiece Classic series, whose new adaptations of Austen’s novels are set in some of England’s prettiest Georgian houses. But for a deeper understanding of how those houses looked, worked, and, more important, were decorated, settle down with historian Amanda Vickery’s recent book Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale University Press, 2009). Driven by colorful diaries of the time, as well as illuminating letters and other contemporary material such as household accounts, Vickery’s scholarly but amusing narrative brings the high and lows of Georgian housekeeping to brilliant life. Husbands and wives jostle over who is in charge of choosing wallpaper or planning an ornamental lake. A duchess separated from her philandering spouse insists her rented townhouse be furnished splendidly in order to save face, now that she has been discarded for a flashy mistress. Given the period’s passion for building and decorating, it comes as no surprise to learn that everyone, from country vicars to city hostesses, had issues with workmen. “Here my painters are all going away and leave the work half done, half undone,” the Countess of Kildare complained to her husband. “I am plagued to death with them and poisoned into the bargain.”
Especially surprising is Vickery’s examination of the interest in decoration taken by men of the time, notably bachelors desiring to impress young women on the marriage market by creating a pretty house with all the modern conveniences. A barrister, for instance, refurbishes a room with “a new white flower’d Dimity,” while another bride-hunting gentleman finds himself teased by lady friends at the seductive grandeur of his new bed. “Even virile soldiers had a weakness for Chinoiserie,” Vickery notes, pointing out a royal duke’s order for a flamboyant Chinese-style boat.
Behind Closed Doors is a scholar’s detailed backward glance, but many of its stories are strictly up-to-date. Then, as now, homeowners chased status-symbol objets d’art, puzzled over fabric samples, updated interiors with fresh paint, and took pleasure in creating rooms bright with pattern and outfitted with comfortable chairs. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
This 1826 etching of an English dining room illustrates how homeowners laid canvas cloth under their tables to protect carpets from crumbs.
Robert Adam’s trendsetting dressing room for Sarah Child at her country house, Osterley Park, was considered one of the most elegant interiors of the 18th century.
Painted by Charlotte Augusta Sneyd, this cozily cluttered drawing room would have been familiar to almost any middle-class family across England in the 1830s.
