Safe as Houses At Home with the Georgians

There's more to a house than mere bricks and mortar.

Home is supposed to be the ultimate place of peace, warmth and safety.

Both nest and fortress.

Today, we go to great lengths to guarantee our security

and guard our private property,

but when it comes to protecting personal privacy,

the Georgians wrote the book.

This is a typical Georgian terrace - you've probably seen

hundreds of them, but have you ever thought about how much they seem

to resemble a kind of domestic fortress?

Look at the railings. They're a bit like the spikes of the castle.

And down there that's the light well. That's like a domestic moat.

And over here,

the way in to the sturdy front door, this is a bit like your drawbridge

up to the opening of your castle, because every Englishman's home is his castle.

In this series, we've charted the great British passion

for having your own front door,

and the furnishing and socialising frenzy that began 300 years ago.

Having invested so much money and emotion in their houses,

it's no wonder the Georgians set about guarding them with ingenuity and ferocity.

Don't let these smooth facades and strong walls fool you.

The Georgian idyll was hedged by nightmares.

But it wasn't just the outside world that posed a threat for the Georgian householder.

The enemy could just as easily be skulking within.

A typical Georgian house was crammed, powerful and powerless

cheek by jowl, so that the risk of mutiny was perpetual.

Using letters, diaries, even court cases, I'll be revealing the lengths

to which the Georgians went to find privacy and security at home.

We've seen how the Georgians yearned for their own front door and strove to craft a tasteful interior.

But hanging on to house and home was the greatest challenge of all.

Darkness is falling.

Workers are scurrying home by train, car and bus.

Tonight the end of the commute promises dinner, feet-up and some domestic relaxation,

or an evening of excitement, out and about in the floodlit streets.

But dusk held no promise for the Georgians. It was alarming.

They shuddered at the onset of the black, unlit night.

This was the moment, it was called shutting in,

when the households started to fortify itself against the night.

So you're trying to protect everything you have within the home, to keep it safe,

but also lock out your fears of all that might be stalking and stirring in the darkness.

Throughout the cities and towns of Britain, doors would be locked

and bolted at the same time each night,

like castles preparing for siege.

This is the front door,

so the most important threshold to secure.

Look, this fabulous... It's like a fairytale lock.

So you've got door locks, bolts, you could have extra padlocks,

iron bars, bells hung up, nasty guard dogs,

horrible to behold, even servants sleeping across the threshold

to rouse the family if you were invaded in the night.

Today only children are scared of the dark,

but for the Georgians, night was black as pitch.

With only minimal candle and firelight escaping from houses,

and rudimentary street lighting,

the blackout was all-encompassing and elemental.

Darkness triggered animal fears in the Georgians,

but only the rich, with their expensive wax candles, could hold back the night.

Women carried the keys by day, making sure the household

ran like a well-oiled machine,

but it was for the man of the house to secure the perimeter at night,

checking all the locks and pacing about his frontiers like a well-trained guard dog.

Where there was no manly guardian, the women had to defend the battlements.

I saw my room window open. I'd nailed it up about two hours before.

I always nail it at night and take the nails out in the morning.

In Georgian Britain, there was no police force, and no contents insurance to fall back on.

Just the odd watchman on patrol.

So the onus was all on the householder to barricade the boundaries and see off any invaders.

There was no official curfew in Georgian England,

but any respectable family would be safely tucked up in bed by 11 o'clock at night.

That's when the watch came out on their patrols,

and dubious pedestrians were likely to be arrested.

You could find yourself locked out,

have no admission whatsoever after 11 o'clock, and the watch houses

were full of young men who'd found themselves shut out of their apartments.

Masked and violent burglars prowled about the nightmares of the propertied.

Journalists stoked anxiety with talk of a burglary plague.

More to own meant more to lose.

The Georgians were obsessed with the threat to their property,

so the moneyed invested in a profusion of locks,

but, more importantly, they rewrote the criminal law.

The 18th century saw a great flood of legislation decreeing the death penalty for even quite petty crimes.

Between 1688 and 1820, the number of hanging offences rose from 50 to over 200.

It was christened the Bloody Code.

Burglary was breaking and entering in the night-time.

There had to be an actual smashing of the boundaries of the house.

If a thief wondered along here in the 18th century,

found a window open, saw some jewels on the dining room table

and managed to fish them out with a stick or a fishing rod,

it would be theft, but it wouldn't be burglary.

So you would be much less likely to hang.

But when the fortress of the house was violently invaded,

the thresholds breached, the courts were merciless.

The propertied hoped against hope that the grisly threat of the gibbet

would deter the worse offenders.

The domestic threshold was sacrosanct as the law books decreed.

A man's house is his castle.

For safety and repose to himself and his family.

And so tender is the law in respect of the immunity of a man's house

that it will never suffer it to be violated with impunity.

But there's no fortress that can repel all invaders.

I've come to Spitalfields in London, where 18th century terraces still abound,

to find the weak points in every man's castle.

The Georgians were conscious that a house could be penetrated in a whole variety of ways.

Obviously, burglars didn't knock at the front door,

but they could come up through back alleyways, back passages,

smashing the back door, in through trap doors, smashing windows.

And you were even vulnerable from above - from the roof.

So, when Londoners thought about the city, they saw it in three dimensions.

Connected by roads and alleyways, but also by another network

over the roofscape, called the leads.

Domestic fortification didn't end with padlocks and iron bars.

I've come to the stores of the Museum of London

to discover a more gruesome means of defending your pretty possessions and elegant establishment.

So what are these nasty instruments?

So here we have two late 18th century man traps,

which would have been used in suburban homes in London.

We believe this one was found in Kensington, so it would have been from a large house.

Kensington in the late 18th century is a suburban area, isn't it?

Villas but also market gardens.

-Yes.

-But these wouldn't have been across the doorway, would they, inside in a small urban terrace?

No. These would have been used in the grounds of the house

against poachers, and to prevent burglars getting into the grounds.

-But how do they work?

-Basically, they'd have been spring-loaded,

so you'd have set the jaws and then held them in place

with this mechanism here,

and then the unfortunate burglar or poacher would then step on

the foot plate and trigger the mechanism,

which would then snap the jaws on your leg.

It's got nasty teeth - it's got jaws.

It would be absolutely vicious.

I mean a child could lose a leg, couldn't they?

It would almost certainly break your leg,

and this one, with its serrated teeth,

would probably cut through the bone. So you would be completely immobilised.

What's that for?

That would have been to anchor the man trap in place.

Even if you tried to get away, tried to lift it up and carry it,

you wouldn't be able to because you'd be chained up. So you'd get caught.

-Trapped like a dog.

-Yeah, exactly.

-Together, though, these sorts of things

really throw quite a shocking light on the idea that an Englishman's home is his castle,

and the lengths to which a property owner will go to defend his boundaries.

I think they're vicious. Vicious.

Many of the neuroses the Georgians had about their homes were all too easy for us to understand.

But they suffered stranger terrors too, beset by hostile forces

that are harder for us to credit - evil spirits.

For all the rationality of Georgian science,

an older world of magic and superstition still lived on behind closed doors.

Invading poltergeists, ghosts and witches were every bit as real as the common-or-garden garden burglar.

I've come to Chert in Surrey to discover how one Georgian family

tried to defend the home from the dark forces of the occult.

So you had all these objects hidden.

What, was this the stairway?

Yeah, this was the staircase, and there was a plaster ceiling here.

And there was a void underneath the stairs, and the objects were all put in there at some point.

I know there's been things like dead chickens, and live chickens, walled up in houses

to kind of propitiate evil spirits, but why would you put a child's shoe?

Well, you would say because it is so much a part of the person,

and it only really fits that person,

it is in sympathy with that person in a way.

It's almost like the object has a spirit of its own.

Some people see it as a kind of lightning conductor.

So as this evil force comes to attack the house,

-it gets drawn down to attack these things instead of the people.

-I see.

-It's thrown off the scent!

-Exactly.

Oh, I see. So it wouldn't come after your children, it would come after the shoes. How sneaky!

-Anywhere where the air can come in, something evil can come in too, can't it?

-Yep.

The fireplace is usually the place where you find most things, because it's always open to the sky.

It's not a door you can lock or anything.

Of course, so it's always an open aperture, so you're always at risk there.

Some buildings, where you have a big void along the side of a chimney, there will be a little point

in the roof where you can drop things down into the void.

And sometimes you get this huge collection of artefacts,

sometimes covering generations.

I love the fact that there's a family of shoes, really, protecting this house.

The guardians, really, of the safety of the house.

Georgian householders used every weapon in their armoury to defend their ramparts from external threat.

But, as any general knows, a castle can also fall from within,

undermined from beneath.

Households weren't as we know them.

In today's houses, very small families,

and huge numbers of singletons,

rejoice in unprecedented personal space.

In the 18th century, urban houses were packed tight.

Half the house might be given over to lodgers.

Even the idea of family meant something quite different.

This is Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street,

and in one of these houses in 1765, we know from the Old Bailey

that there was a family of nine living in here.

Not a husband and wife and seven children, as you might expect.

The household was much more complicated than that.

The head of the house was Mr Fenner, a tailor.

He locked up outdoors, but it fell to Mrs Fenner to control the movement indoors.

Every night, between 10 and 11 o'clock,

the lady of the house would take the keys and lock all the inhabitants

into their respective rooms to prevent any prowling about.

More like a prison than a modern home.

Nearly half of all households in London kept at least one lodger.

The Fenners kept three - a widow, Mrs Bolt and her daughter,

and a Mr Pickard, who was expected to be home before 11, or risk a lock-out.

Mr Fenner. Mr Fenner!

Then you had the underlings. Mr Fenner's apprentice,

James Tonkin, would have slept in the workshop on a fold-down mattress.

There were three other servants bedding down.

Esther Harold and Mrs Mary Crabbe, and Robert Dutton.

How do we know all this?

One night, there was a fire in Salisbury Court.

Foul play was called, and the case ended up in the Old Bailey as arson.

The chief suspects? The apprentice and the Fenners' strange cat,

rumoured to have supernatural powers.

Your family referred to everyone who lived in your house under your supervision.

So your family included all your servants and apprentices, as well as your live-in kin.

All under one roof, but who could you trust?

Two new laws were passed to help with these new domestic pressures.

Two brand new crimes were invented - theft by servants and theft from lodgings.

Keeping order in Georgian homes required unremitting effort.

Order could not be taken for granted,

because once you lost the upper hand, you might never get it back.

18th century houses were places of hierarchy,

because no-one expected to find equality at home.

The very idea was absurd.

At the top of the tree you have the man, the householder,

and then one step down, his wife, the mistress.

Then the children, lesser members of the household,

younger brothers and sisters, apprentices, servants.

All laid out in a ladder of power.

You had to accept your place in the pecking order

or brave the consequences, and in fact,

the law enshrined the householder, the man, as a kind of domestic monarch.

Lord paramount at home, governing over his little kingdom.

The overcrowded Georgian lodging house was a microcosm of a hierarchical society.

As you go up through the layers of an 18th century townhouse,

you actually go down in the social structure,

so it's always the poorest who end up at the top, up here.

Certain rooms in the house become synonymous with small incomes and economic struggle.

So that would be the cellars, the second floor, the back rooms,

and up here, the garrets.

The cellars were always damp, but the garrets were always cold and draughty.

This is fitted out really rather like a tart's bedroom from a Hogarth print,

but in fact there lots of poets and journalists end up starving in the garret,

in what were known as their sky parlours.

Sacred to the muses.

But you can imagine a whole family stuffed in here.

It really was kind of one room living.

We know that you had to sleep, eat and work in the same room.

This print has a description of the miseries of a garreteer poet,

and it depicts the one room lodgings of a Mr Rymer and his wife

and his two daughters, and it has a flock bed in the corner,

and a green Jordan, or potty, underneath the bed.

As it says here, "In which had collected the nocturnal urine of the whole family." Squalid!

The table in the foreground has all the treasures of the family on it, some bread,

pamphlets, a book and a pair of stays, those are corsets.

The daughters of the house are in the corner

darning the father's stockings

and then here over the fireplace

there's an unappetising cauldron of stew bubbling away with a rotten old leg of mutton in it.

So I think it gives a very powerful impression of all the various activities

that have to go on in a single room lodging which is bedroom,

living room, workroom and parlour, all in one.

The rich spread themselves over much more space, of course,

but the privilege brought a whole new set of problems.

Georgian architects set their minds to designing interiors

that would preserve the privacies and finer feelings of the employer class,

introducing novelties like corridors,

back stairs and separate servant wings.

Now the very walls would teach inferiors to know their place.

Here at Erddig, a classical Georgian mansion in North Wales,

a staff of about 25 servants catered to the needs and whims of the York family.

Like a true Christian patriarch,

Phillip York led his household in prayer here in the 1770s.

He was at the front, at the lectern, reading the lesson,

leading the prayers and then he could gesture to his servants.

Here, the indoor servants, the women.

Here in the belly of the chapel on benches, the male servants

and up at the top, literally lording it over their household,

the family, and they even had separate entrances.

The family filed in from a little door to one side,

whilst the servants had to all come through commonly through the big entrance there.

This chapel is remarkable, because, really, it's a microcosm of society.

Everything about the way it's laid out is designed to represent

and reinforce hierarchy.

And what's mapped out in miniature in the chapel is reinforced throughout the rest of the house.

Here we are at the formal stairs at the front of the house.

Family and visitors would process graciously in full view.

Their feet comforted by carpets and polished wood.

But the floors at the other end of the house tell a different story,

with nothing but worn stone under foot.

The dirty linen and the smelly chamber pots

came down the back stairs, carried away down the back passages,

out of sight and out of mind.

Grand houses like this one, Erddig,

have an architectural separation between the work areas of the house,

like this and the family areas, the formal areas, where politeness reigns.

This was actually a separate building, distinct from the main block.

For safety, so less risk of fire, it would all be contained here.

But also for employer privacy, to affect a kind of segregation, even an apartheid.

An ordered hierarchy of deferential servants, who cheerfully did your bidding was a rich man's ideal,

but there was always a risk of mutiny, or at the very least, subtle acts of subversion.

After all, they changed your soiled bed linen, they knew whether you'd had sex the night before,

whether you were menstruating.

They probably knew if you were having an affair,

because servants were the first people called on in divorce cases.

Servants knew all the grubby secrets.

Employers were obsessed with the possibility of eye service.

It's like lip service, a cynical performance that masks a rebellious heart.

After all, the same maids that bobbed and curtseyed in the day

could be rifling your jewels at night.

The government of servants required energy and vigilance.

Control was vital.

To make sure the servants didn't slack off or get up to any mischief,

a list of do's and don'ts was key.

Employers loved giving proclamations,

rules for servants about how they should behave,

what work they want done every day and this is something I found in an archive in York.

This is Mrs Forth's rules for the under-servant's work.

The maids have to rise early in order to milk and scour

the vessels belonging to the dairy before the family gets up.

Then they have to clean all the kitchens, the back kitchens,

the pantry and the dairy.

"Not to throw away the washings, but to feed the pigs with them."

They even have to take care of stick ashes, which comes out of the oven,

"and make lee of it to wash kitchen towels in."

I think that's an absolutely revolting job, fetching out the ash

out of the oven and turning it into what we would call lime,

which is a sort of detergent.

On and on, through the day, relentless activity but what I think

is hardest of all to bear is that not only is their work monitored,

but their behaviour's monitored, too.

"Both girls to be careful of fire in their bedroom

"and always to take a broad, flat candlestick when they go to bed

"and to snuff this candle before they go upstairs

"and never to work or sew in their bedrooms by candlelight or they will lose their places."

So I think this list of rules gives you a strong sense that although the servants clean every

aspect of this Yorkshire house, no part of it is truly their home.

The master in the drawing room and the servant in the scullery.

They lived a floor apart but in different worlds

and that's the way the Georgians liked it.

Hierarchy was ordained by God.

Ideal employers were supposed to buttress hierarchy.

They maintain their dignity at all times,

did not let their servants take liberties

and were not over familiar with their inferiors.

But in practice, the relationship between master and servant was rarely that clear cut.

In the Lincoln Cathedral archive, I came across the diaries of Benjamin Smith,

a man whose sexual liaison with his maid threatened to destroy him and tear his household apart.

These are the diaries of Benjamin Smith, who's a Lincolnshire solicitor

and these were one of my most fantastic finds in my research.

I love it when a man reveals so much of his secret life in a diary

because many men's diaries are nothing more than glorified lists, but not this one.

Benjamin Smith had been a widower for 13 years.

He was quite an upstanding member of the community, he was a church warden but he was very lonely.

Had a rather cold bed and for a long part of that period

he'd been having an affair with his servant, Mary Newbatt.

He always refers to her in the diary by her surname as Newbatt

and he makes very glancing but scorching reference to their sexual encounters.

"Newbatt came in the evening and sat with me."

I think that's code for, you know, a bit of the other.

"May I from this day earnestly resolve..."

'..earnestly resolve to be different and better and correct in my conduct to her.'

So he has this sexual encounter with her, but it's crowned with a froth of guilt.

'Oh, God, that I was married.'

Oh, God, of thy infinite goodness, pardon my sins.

Grant me the testimony of a good conscience in all things

and the hopes if they favour.

And may I again be married.

So you really get a sense that a wife is a remedy for sin,

but he knows that he's brought the credit and the honour and the virtue

of his household into jeopardy, by virtue of his liaison.

So he's guilty when he has sex with her, but he's longing and morose when he doesn't.

In eve, Newbatt went to bed without coming to me, though she knew I wanted her.

Oh, God, that I might be well married.

Oh, God, that I was but married to some good woman.

In the end, he can bear it no longer.

In December 1819...

"I have for some years past wished to be married again,

"but ill health and other considerations have prevented me seeking in earnest to be so.

"But having made proposals to Miss Graves, I now consider myself engaged to her."

Mary Newbatt left before the wedding.

Benjamin Smith was tortured by his secret shame.

Eavesdroppers and snooping busy-bodies were everywhere.

Keeping up the facade of respectability and gentility was exhausting.

The propertied had plenty of secrets they preferred not to expose to the judgement of the community.

Even the very rich struggled to keep their business private

because they were hardly ever alone indoors.

French craftsmen came up with the chic solution that wealthier Brits,

especially women, were quick to adopt.

I can't help touching it, Carolyn, but what is it?

It's a secretaire with a jewel case built into it,

so it's a multi-purpose piece of furniture.

A secretaire? A desk. A writing table.

It's full of secret compartments for letters which was absolutely

classically the case for a piece of high-end furniture like this at this period,

which is the 1770s in France, where women would often have

secret compartments built into their furniture.

To hide what, their juiciest love letters?

Very much so but you had quite sizeable spaces because your love affairs would often go on over time.

These were not one-night-stands!

30 years of love letters.

Oh, yes, they're very serious affairs.

We might pretend we're the husband of the woman who owned this piece by looking for something secretive.

So the first thing that you see when you open it,

which you would expect to see in any jewel coffer, is these jewel trays.

These come out but if you very clever at reading furniture,

what you might do if you were the husband of this woman, is you might look at the depth here

and think this is not accounted for in the space that I'm reading here in this piece of furniture.

What you might do is that you might do that

and what we might see is that this entire little space opens up so you can see the letters there, can't you?

Wrapped in a violet ribbon perhaps.

And we'll do the second tier.

It really is the dance of the seven veils now.

Yes, it's a very seductive piece.

There's a very small space again not accounted for here

between the table top and the bottom that we're seeing here.

-If we take these out...

-Ooh, cheeky!

This here is a small set of trays.

So this is where you might store your dirty diaries then.

Absolutely. They're not being protected from highwaymen.

They're being protected from people within the household.

The person who comes and does the dictation of letters.

There are all kinds of people coming in and out of the house,

settling bills, dealing with paperwork, so, many, many people coming in and out.

These are like lockable rooms within rooms.

So it's like an interior within an interior.

I wanted to show you the way that the side compartments open.

Put your fingers under there, you'll find a little button.

I'll do the same on my side. So, yes, it flies open.

What's interesting is that this is actually designed for the servants.

So loading it up for the day.

Exactly. The servants can replenish their writing equipment without invading the privacy of the owner.

It's not just a secretaire desk, it's kind of a cultural microcosm.

It tells you a lot about masculinity, femininity, manners, ideas.

If women could keep their secrets, then so could men

and the technologies designed to guard private matters from prying eyes

were as elegant as they were ingenious.

This wonderful object is a lock,

so although it's an absolutely exquisite piece of luxury craftsmanship,

it has a highly practical purpose.

It's a detector lock, that's its title,

but what's special about this lock is that it's not at all

a passive piece of machinery.

It's monitoring the comings and goings in the house and it has the gift of memory.

Its purpose, I think, is reinforced by the inscription engraved on the front of the lock.

"If I have the gift of tongue, I would declare and do no wrong.

"Who are ye who come by stealth to impair my master's wealth?"

So the lock itself is a warning.

It's the guardian of the threshold.

You have to cock...

his hat...

and then his toe, his leg, kicks away

reveals the key hole and only then can you start turning the lock.

Every time you turn it and open the door,

this pointer here moves around and registers that someone's been in.

It's clearly a rich man's lock so it might have gone on a study door

or a strongroom door to protect his private papers and his money.

So this detector lock is not a modern burglar alarm

but it is an exquisite example of the technology of surveillance.

But how could you protect your possessions

if you were an ordinary working woman with no fancy desks or safe deposit boxes?

The great personal place of privacy for all Georgian women is their pocket.

They're not pockets as we would imagine,

sort-of sewn into our clothes, they were tied on in pairs

that you roped around your waist underneath your skirts.

They were a version, really, of the modern handbag

into which a women would stuff everything she had of value that she wanted on her at all times.

You can see on this fashion doll where they would have gone.

There are her lovely stockings held up with garters.

That's the lowest layer.

No knickers. They don't wear pants in the 18th century.

They're a Victorian innovation.

Then linen shift,

another petticoat, quilted petticoat

and then at the top, very close to her loins is her pocket,

which matches her dress.

And so they'd be a slit through the dress into the pocket

so you could get your hands in to extract the things you needed.

We know from pick-pocketing cases that it was not hard

to get your hand in, really, and wrench away one of these pockets.

Hence the old nursery rhyme, "Lucy Locket, lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it."

The Georgians believed that some place of privacy

was vital to your autonomy, to knowing who you were.

But some women were unlucky enough to have all their privacy denied

and to live in houses that never felt their own.

The most upsetting letters I ever found were penned by a gentlewoman,

Ann Dormer, who endured a domestic life stripped of power

at the hands of her husband, Robert.

I was really interested when I came across these letters

by Ann Dormer who was married to quite a substantial gentleman,

Robert Dormer of Rousham.

She'd been married 20 years.

Ann Dormer's a very privileged woman.

She's in the top 1 or 2% of the population, she's a gentlewoman,

she lives in a beautiful Jacobean manor, she even has 30 servants!

But her husband is no longer her husband.

He's become her jailer.

It's a really disturbing marriage

because Robert Dormer has always been a passionately jealous man.

He was in a fever to get Ann Dormer in courtship and then, once married,

he pursues her everywhere and one of the examples she gives

of his behaviour, it's really creepy...

"He has this way of kissing a dirty glove of mine and saying he loves me extremely

"and then he will hang at my neck."

'I must not exasperate him

'for I and my poor children are in his power

'but I told him that I had never found his kindness

'other than as a cordial given to one upon the rack

'to preserve them to endure the torments.'

One of the striking things about Ann Dormer's experience of this

matrimonial tyranny, is how her servitude is mapped out in space.

It affects everything about how she lives at home,

where she can feel safe and comfortable and at ease.

So, room after room offers her no comfort.

Ann Dormer tried to get some respite from her terrible marriage

by walking in garden but she could still be observed from the house.

Her marriage was a burden under which she groaned.

She described it as a net and a cage.

Rousham was never her house.

His jealousy is a sort of madness, I think.

For now I am grown so grey, so lean and so haggard

that I might justly hope that I might now be trusted in the garden

without fear of anybody running away with me, but no...

My lord has as constant a watch over my steps as ever

and can tell exactly how many will carry me from my chamber

to the garden and if I happen to stop one minute,

I am sure to be asked the reason.

I am like one haunted with an evil spirit...

..who has committed some crime.

"I am the most miserable creature in the world.

"For there is not a greater slave in Turkey than I am here."

So if Rousham were a country, it would be a dictatorship.

Ann Dormer was released only by Robert's death from what she saw as bondage.

For Georgian women, carving out a place of your own was fraught with difficulties.

This is my study.

It's where I do all my work at home.

It's also the kind of engine room of all my research, my writing,

my teaching, all my gear, all my material, is around me, I can't do it without it.

But I'm very aware of what a privilege it is actually to be a woman with a room of my own.

In the 18th century, it's actually very unusual that a woman has a right to privacy at home.

It's usually the men, the senior figures in the household,

who have that right to withdraw and have time to themselves.

However, there was one important exception.

One special room where regular seclusion was not only allowed,

but authorised by God - the closet.

Closets started to appear in grander houses in the 17th century.

This is Chastleton House, in Gloucestershire,

and it has one of the earliest surviving closets in England.

I've been given a few clues behind the arras, they said.

Look at that. The whole thing comes away.

Fantastic.

It really does have quite a magical atmosphere of retreat and privacy.

Closets were little rooms off the main apartment, off the main bedroom.

Look at the extraordinary wallcovering. It's psychedelic.

It's like something from the seventies.

This is all wool, plain stitched in.

Really you came into your closet to be alone with God,

that's what the King James Bible told you to do.

"Enter into thy closet."

You're supposed to come in twice a day to pray

and I suppose it's a chance to withdraw and be by yourself.

Closets do get put to secular purposes as well.

By the end of the 17th century people are having tea, coffee, chocolate,

keeping their collections here, possibly pornographic.

Adulterous liaisons often go on in the closet.

But closets came into their own in Georgian houses

as one answer to their crowded nature, racket and commotion.

It was only the rich and the middling ranks who had their own closets

where they could retire for a nice bit of peace and quiet.

But what about the servants?

No architect bothered with their privacy or their seclusion.

All that they had was a box.

If you were a young mobile worker or a servant,

you'd be very lucky indeed to have a room of your own.

You might not even have a bed of your own

but almost all servants expected to have a box of their own, a locking box.

In it you'd keep your best clothes, your money, your private treasures.

I find these very poignant.

I've come across references of poor servant girls wallpapering their boxes, decorating them,

because, really, the locking box stands in for identity and individuality.

For the working poor,

this is the last reliable place of privacy.

A locking box is the very sign and symbol of service.

No young servant would go anywhere without one

and that point is really well made in Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress.

Here is our young heroine, Moll, come to town from the country.

There she has about her the few things she has in the world.

She has a box, a trunk with her initials on, MH,

and a dead duck in a bag that she's brought from the country.

She's launched on London with those, but then some months later,

when terrible things have befallen her,

she's dying before the fire with her laundry drying above her

and her box is open, being rifled by a maid.

She has no defence whatsoever against intrusion.

The sheer vulnerability of life, especially for the poor,

was a striking feature of the Georgian era.

To lose your home was to lose your status and independence and, ultimately, to lose yourself.

Destitution and beggary were common in an era before pensions and welfare.

Even middling households could be holed below the water line by bankruptcy and illness.

Some charities tried to hold destitute but worthy families

together in almshouses, like these in the Geffrye Museum in London.

Almshouses enabled frail couples

who could no longer keep a home of their own to have a roof over their heads.

They were the sheltered housing of their day.

This is one of the individual rooms.

It's a sort of 18th century bedsit.

You have to live and work in here with a little room off.

Although it's rather simple, I actually think there's something

quite pleasant about the atmosphere cos it's very clean and neat.

You could bring in some of your own things to warm it up a bit,

so a colourful woollen bedspread, the odd piece of pewter from home,

some of your ceramics, to remember who you are.

Many commentators felt in the 18th century

that the deserving poor ought to have the comforts of what they call a private fireside.

You do get a real sense of that in this room.

Frugality yes, but also, I think, decency and a certain amount of dignity.

This is a communal institution and so the inmates had to abide by,

a set of rules. This is a copy of them.

The original rules of the almshouses and there are 29 of them,

so your behaviour is monitored at the risk of expulsion.

So you're not to be drunk at any time, not to give any railing, bitter or uncharitable speeches.

They're about avoiding fights and you're not supposed to sell things from your room.

We shouldn't forget all the things you give up when you give up a home of your own in the 18th century.

Here the inmates don't have their own front door and that's critical

because having your own front door can qualify you for the vote in many boroughs.

But having your own household, it signifies life at high tide,

that you are a powerful person, a citizen, you get credit in shops.

But the moment you abandon that, it means that your life is declining.

You're giving up your power and your status.

The British were notorious for their stubborn attachment

to an independent home, however gaunt and squalid.

But a new solution was looming,

an institution that epitomised the very opposite of home - the workhouse.

I'm in Southwell in Nottinghamshire

approaching what looks like another neo-classical mansion,

but, in fact, this is a prototype of a new model workhouse.

Behind this symmetrical facade is a pitiless and soulless institution.

You have to imagine a great flow of humanity through here.

People must have been absolutely destitute to throw themselves on the tender mercies of the workhouse.

It was in these buildings that everyone would be processed,

then they would be categorised.

Are they able-bodied working poor or are they old and infirm?

They'd be stripped of their clothes, de-loused, de-personed, really,

and given a regulation uniform.

And then what I think is the final act of mercilessness,

is they were separated, men and women and then the women from the children.

So women in here, but through the adjoining yard, its counterpart,

the men's yard.

I might be a sentimentalist but I can't help but imagine the matrimonial agony, really,

husbands and wives separated from each other.

These are all systems, really, of deterrents.

It's about selection, classification,

segregation and supervision,

which all make your life an institutional one.

I think you'd have to be absolutely destitute

to submit to the discipline of the new model workhouse

but that, after all, was the point.

So this is the workhouse schoolroom.

Quite an austere little chamber,

but crucial because the vast majority of the poor were always young.

Here, some moral education...

"Happy the child whose tender years receive instruction well.

"Who hates the sinner's path and fears

"The road that leads to hell."

And then built into the structure of the room you have another feature of segregation.

Here, there's frosted glass to make sure any children

aren't distracted by the sight of their parents.

The architecture of the place shows what the institution is trying to do.

It's smashing those central emotional bonds of family, destroying them.

It's an extreme deterrent.

So there's no trace of the core comfort of home in an institution like this.

Once you're in the workhouse, you were an inmate, that's what you were labelled.

This is the ladies' dormitory.

Communal living was objectionable to the Georgians.

The workhouse really was a place of last resort.

Stripped of any of the prettiness and individuality of home.

What you had lost was rubbed in your face.

Your own front door, your dignity, your nest for family life.

But it wasn't just the poor who were tortured by a lack of home,

the privileged could feel homeless, too.

For a home where you have no autonomy whatsoever is a prison.

In an earlier programme we have seen the spinster, Gertrude Saville,

relieved her frustrations in her diary,

a document of suffering I still find difficult to read.

Sunday. Church. Unhappy.

Extreme. Miserable. Unhappy.

"Very miserable. Unhappy.

"Unhappy.

"Miserable."

You might think what has a noblemen's daughter got to complain about?

But she lived her life on sufferance

without any rights in her brother's house.

Constantly humiliated, even laughed at by the servants,

she was housed, clothed and fed but she was never at home.

Home.

What do I call home?

I have no home.

Entirely confine myself to my room.

Workchair very hard, that and my cat.

All my pleasure.

Miserable.

In a twist worthy of a fairytale, Gertrude Saville was left

a sizeable property near Newcastle by a cousin in 1730.

At a stroke, she was delivered from both domestic subordination and financial dependency.

At last, at 40, she became mistress of her own household.

Saville had achieved the Georgian ambition, a home of her own.

Georgian elegance is seductive but remember, it is just a front.

People toil to create the impression of gracious living and a well-ordered hierarchy.

Burglars and witches lurked in dark corners.

There were losers as well as winners behind closed doors

and yet the hankering for a home of one's own was universal.

We still believe that a stable home is the foundation

for health, wealth and happiness and that behind our own front door,

we can be most truly ourselves and show off and exhibit our personalities to the world.

We have the Georgians to thank for that.

They shone a spotlight on the home

and put it at the centre of British life, where it remains to this day.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd