‘Life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments,’ wrote Dr Johnson (of whom you may think you have heard too much in the last few weeks, but he is often so pertinent).
‘Life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments,’ wrote Dr Johnson (of whom you may think you have heard too much in the last few weeks, but he is often so pertinent). He was commenting upon the barbarity of Scottish houses in which it was impossible to open a window and get some ‘fresher air’. The greater part of our time, he reminds us, ‘passes in compliance with necessities in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences…’ It’s how people live from day to day that reflects the success of governments and nations. What matters are the common things of life, so that the grandiloquent epigram will soon slip from our minds, but we’ll never forget the vivid image of a burly, breathless Johnson struggling to open a window in a smelly inn in Banff.
He would thoroughly have approved of the latest grand project from Radio Four, A History of Private Life, which will take us through the last 400 years of life at home in the company of Professor Amanda Vickery and a team of actors and singers. Intimate lives and private rituals are much harder to retrieve than the public face of institutions and the political machinations of Parliament and town hall. But, argues Vickery, ‘relationships and emotion are the heartbeat of the past’. For her academic work, she has trawled through the local record offices of counties up and down Britain and netted some wonderfully vivid accounts of domestic heaven and hell in private diaries, letters and account books that have survived often beyond the wishes of their creators that they not be read.
William Ramsden, for instance, in 1763 celebrates the birth of his son, writing ‘from the arm of my wife’s easy chair…my good woman at the same time with glee in her eye contemplating her little boy…with his leather bottle’. Her glee and the baby’s leather bottle create an unforgettable portrait that magically connects us across almost 250 years. In Colne, Lancashire, at much the same time, Elizabeth Shackleton was struggling to run a large house and garden, dependent on her team of unreliable servants. One of them she calls Nanny Nutter and virtually adopts from the age of 12, but she runs away and ends up as a neighbour’s chambermaid. Shackleton writes in her diary (Vickery discovered 39 of them) that she’s ‘an ungrateful, lying girl’. Nanny Nutter cannot answer back because she was most probably illiterate.
The series, 15 minutes each afternoon for six weeks, attempts to convert all this documentary material into a vivid sound portrait of the way we used to live, from the pots and pans that were often part of a woman’s dowry, to difficulties with servants, the marvellous morality of starched white linen and the nightmare of bedbugs. Vickery and her producer (Elizabeth Burke) have cleverly intercut the narrative with excerpts from popular songs of the period, researched by Wiebke Thormahlen and sung with great relish by Gwyneth Herbert and Thomas Guthrie, adding rich texture to the aural experience.
Home, of course, can also be described as a prison, ‘a line of semi-detached torture chambers’, in George Orwell’s memorable phrase. You might also argue that only one-third of British households are now, or were ever, conventional family groupings living in ‘a house’. This is a series that promises to ignite the long-running debate between those who view the past like a forensic scientist through a microscope and those who prefer to see it through the broad sweep of events and political theory. How different was Elizabeth Shackleton’s life from that, say, of Baroness Scotland, turned upon by her housekeeper? Was the experience of being poor and homeless in 1700 any worse than that of the poor and homeless in 2000? Can we truly recapture ‘the heartbeat of the past’ from such random and often inconsequential records?
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