‘Bite-size’ history is a popular format for broadcasters whether for G.C.S.E revision purposes and all those young people of today with the attention spans of gnats or for producers who don’t have Wolf Hall’s £7m production budget and are snapping their pencils as Tudor history yet again takes the lion’s share. I suspect that the candle budget for Wolf Hall (which ran into tens of thousands of pounds) was more than the entire cost of Amanda Vickery’s 2009 radio series A History of Private Life. But this should come as no surprise to regular viewers and listeners of a serious historical bent, who have to put up with their thoughtful and, dare I say, intellectual programmes being scheduled late at night, on niche channels or in bite-size format.

Thus Professor Amanda Vickery, who wrote and presented the series, had the mammoth task of reducing 400 years of the history of the home into 30 fifteen minute episodes. It’s a task that by and large she manages very well: the programmes are fresh, have a lightness of touch and a wry, dry sense of humour that really brings to life the real-life figures who recorded their domestic lives in diaries, letters and other places for us to view from our modern perspective.

BSECS members will, of course, find the episodes that focus on the eighteenth century the most interesting and five of those episodes are the main focus of this review. The series was well-designed not only chronologically but also thematically. The episodes covering the eighteenth century explored marriage (Episode 17: Bachelors, Episode 18: Spinsters and Episode 24: Courtship and Setting up Home) and domestic fashions and taste (Episode 22: Taste and Episode 25: Neat and Not to Showy). Themes are my main focus here, so hopefully readers will forgive my consideration of the episodes out of chronological order; indeed one of my small niggles was that themes did seem to jump about a little within the chronology, though not enough to jar the listener.

When examining the history of private life, the rite of passage of marriage and the associated benefits of being a married couple are important areas for exploration. In the eighteenth century, as in many centuries prior to our own, marriage was not purely a matter of love and emotion but one of power, financial gain and societal recognition, as Vickery notes in Bachelors. A quote from the Bachelors Directory of 1794, a publication for the enthusiastic single man, caught my ear. ‘Matrimony, what can better agree with him and, more exactly, relate to his necessities? One of the really charming aspects of these episodes was their use of period songs, accompanied by period instruments, and I was especially amused by a pleasure-garden song of 1764 which swore that for a man, getting married would ‘soothe his every care’. As this was the refrain, repeated several times, it made me think that not much has changed between 1764 and my own marriage in 2015! Bachelors therefore had every reason to marry, said Vickery; a marital home was far more comfortable than bachelor quarters such as those found at army barracks, university colleges and the Inns of Court. This episode was especially source-rich and considered diaries, letters, university accounts, songs and poetry. It focused especially on Sir Dudley Ryder, the son of a draper who rose to be an MP, Judge and later Solicitor-General and Attorney-General in 1737. Vickery made an excellent point that men from the middling ranks of society needed to train (often in a profession) and build up their fortunes before considering taking a wife. Ryder, for example, did not manage to marry until 1733 when he was 43. In the interim period, the pleasures of women could only be sampled with flirtation with girls from good families and rather more than flirtation at pleasure gardens like Lambeth Wells, where a ‘fondle’ would apparently cost 1 shilling. However Vickery took pains to stress that most men really did desire the companionship and intimacy of marriage, as well as the conveniences it would bring.

By contrast to the free (if not always comfortable) bachelor life however, spinsters in eighteenth-century Britain had more of a trial. Vickery estimated that one in five women never married and thus found themselves in a life of dependence and sometimes unhappiness. Vickery gave the reasons for this as mainly economic ones but also relating to patriarchal attitudes. This blithe blaming of the patriarchy was a little odd, unless we assume that by this it was meant that it was easier for men to live a bachelor life alone outside the home than women. Certainly, I see no reason why women would be any less in favour of matrimony than men, although it is true to say that an unmarried woman past a certain age was greeted with less enthusiasm by a community than an unmarried man. I would have liked more exposition on this point, but am more inclined to blame the bite-size format than the historian. Again, songs were used with excellent effect – this time a lament from ‘The Old Maid’ who is 53. Another case-study, Mary Hartley of Reading, a spinster and invalid, was used to illustrate the often isolating nature of spinsterhood, which was in contrast to the freer, more public life of a bachelor.

When a spinster and a bachelor became engaged, new aspects of marital life demanded attention. These aspects were examined in Courtship and Setting Up Home. This was definitely my favourite episode, although it focused much more on the setting up of a home than courtship as such, unless one defines courtship as deciding how you will decorate your marital environment! I loved the clever device of focusing on two couples from the 1740s, Dr Gibbs of Exeter and James Hewitt, Barrister of Coventry. In both cases, the man was trying to rent and decorate a home without the presence of his beloved, in the case of Dr Gibbs because his fiancée was away, whilst Mr Hewitt’s wife Mary was at her father’s home in Essex, recovering from childbirth. Dr Gibbs was exceptionally aware that his fiancée would require a say in the decoration of the home whilst Mr Hewitt, sadly for him, was not. I roared with laughter at Dr Gibbs’ plaintive letter – ‘I am quite weary, my dearest girl, of writing to you about houses’ – and laughed even more when Mrs Hewitt, hating her husband’s choice of yellow wallpaper, refused to return to Coventry unless she had more say. I thought it an interesting point to make that such superficial discussions were a gauge of character and again, more discussion of this conclusion would have been useful, but Vickery’s wry remark that ‘Death or divorce was preferable to Coventry’ was a perfect summation.

Another very eighteenth-century preoccupation was taste and its acquisition. Taste, as memorably explored in John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination is one of those words, like politeness, which can easily sum up the cultural character of the eighteenth century, and I was pleased to see it discussed in two episodes of the series. As Vickery explained, then as today, homes and interiors express individuality. ‘Taste for the British is about the marriage of wealth and virtue’ she said, another of the maddening soundbites which are not untrue and fit the format but merit so much more discussion and further exploration. Taste explored the elite world of The Earl and Countess of Shelburne. Again, the letters of Lady Shelburne made charming radio and there was an interesting discourse on the attempts of aristocratic couples to achieve intimacy together, not merely sexual but simply being alone as a couple. The Shelburnes, it appears, withdrew to Lady Shelburne’s dressing room where they ate a deux, read, talked, played games and looked at each other’s print collections. This interest in prints and architectural drawings was such that they even did so whilst Lady Shelburne was in labour and awaiting the arrival of the doctor.

The premise that taste was developed by the virtues of a classical education, wealth, foreign travel and good breeding was also covered in Neat and Not Too Showy which looked at more middle-class ideas of taste through home interiors. Again, Vickery’s eye for the amusing was demonstrated in the 1805 horrified reaction of a Methodist shopkeeper from Shrewsbury to nude portraits in a great house, showing not only that taste is in the eye of the beholder but also the onset of what we would today call ‘Victorian values’, which changed the ways people wished to display their taste through their homes. This episode, which followed the records of a London-based wallpaper company, Trollope & Sons, again identified interesting cultural nuances, such as the first floor being the most important part of the house in decorative terms as this was where entertaining went on. I have noted this myself in places such as Number 1 Royal Crescent in Bath and Dublin’s Number 29 Georgian House Museum where decorative coving stops abruptly as you ascend to the second floor. I also liked Vickery’s exposition of the demarcation of interiors via colours, crimsons and yellows being popular in social areas with blues and greens popular elsewhere and cheaper, small-patterned wallpaper being used in less-seen areas. Linguistic terms were also noted, such as ‘neat’ and ‘clean’ being associated with moral wholesomeness whilst ‘gaudy’ was to be avoided. There was no mention though about how, for the middling sort, taste was a rather more vexed issue. Vickery correctly noted that fashion was important and how the middling sort demonstrated their ‘moral assertiveness in its very restraint’ but I would apply this more to the evangelical and dissenting elements of society and would like to have heard mention of the social climbers of the world who imitated eagerly the aristocratic fashions, such as the dreadful Branghtons in Frances Burney’s Evelina. Again, this was difficult to bring out in such a short time.

In my view, one of the serious weaknesses of the eighteenth-century segments was that the lower orders or the working class were never mentioned. No person below the level of the professional or mercantile classes made an appearance, apart from a shopkeeper. Some of this will be due to the lack of good records available for that sector of society during the period and some may be because the lower orders were covered in other episodes, but for the period that will most interest readers of Criticks, it was somewhat imbalanced.

The truncated format has its merits: you can listen to it whilst driving to Tesco or making breakfast, helpful for those without the time to commit to a lengthy series, and accessible, with a wider appeal to a greater number of audience types. But, like canapés, one episode is rarely enough for those with a serious interest in history, leading to frustration, hunger and binge-listening on iPlayer. On the whole however, I would definitely recommend the series to those with an interest in cultural history, simply because the breadth of evidence provided makes for a charming exploration of the history of the home.

Select episodes of A History of Private Life, written and presented by Professor Amanda Vickery for BBC Radio Four, are currently available for a limited time on BBC iPlayer. The complete series is also available to buy from Amazon and other retail outlets. It was originally broadcast September-November 2009.