Lucy Worsley picks five books that explore hidden domestic lives

From the evolution of plumbing to the freedoms of well-to-do women, the historian chooses books that shine a light on the nitty-gritty of life in the past

“Who emptied the chamber pots?” ask our visitors at Hampton Court Palace. “Where did the servants sleep?” Answering these kinds of questions, about the nitty-gritty of life in the past, is bread and butter to people like me who work as curators in Britain’s historical buildings open to the public. We all now have our shelf of go-to books to help us, yet there was a time when this wasn’t considered “proper” history. Here are five volumes that help you understand the domestic lives of people in the past – and why they came to matter.

Mark Girouard was one of the first architectural historians who started to think that there was more to the history than connoisseurship and assigning buildings to particular architects. His exploration of the development of things such as the dessert course, or the mechanics of plumbing, in his groundbreaking Life in the English Country House (1978) underpins a lot of the information you’ll come across if you visit a historical house. Of course, since it was first published, historians’ interests have broadened out from the stately pile to a whole range of dwellings, from workers’ houses to the streetscapes you might find in living history museums.

But do you have a lingering feeling that constitutional or diplomatic history is more serious, more worthy? Well the personal is the political, a point made, at the same time as Girouard was writing, in the wildly popular and highly influential novel by Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (1977). I cannot erase from my mind French’s astonishingly realistic re-creation of the heroine Mira’s terrible, turgid housework routine.

Many a feminist-in-waiting had their eyes opened by both the trials of Mira’s life and what she eventually did with it. She decided she’d had enough of housework and went off to study literature at university instead. I can imagine the decisions of 1970s women like her forming the case studies in a future version of Amanda Vickery’s landmark study of women’s lives in the 18th century, The Gentleman’s Daughter (1998). It delicately and movingly unpicks the ways in which the daughters of gentlemen had a bit more power – despite the restrictive Georgian clothing – than you might think to make decisions of their own.

The Gentleman’s Daughter was based on the archival discoveries of a historian with an interest in material things. Meanwhile books in its wake, such as Eleri Lynn’s Tudor Fashion (2017), turn round the telescope to work outwards from the surviving objects of the past. The book gathers and analyses some amazing survivals of 16th-century textiles, and then goes on to use replicas to illustrate exactly how each garment should be worn and accessorised, and what it signified. It’s a book that’s in daily use here at Tudor Towers.

Finally, fancy reading a published primary source full of detail about eating pease pudding, doing the laundry, having piles and a literate pig? After you have devoured the obvious starting point of the journals of Samuel Pepys, graduate to the less well known record of James Woodforde’s country rectory life in Norfolk. In his The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802, first published in the 1920s and reissued many times throughout the 20th century, literally almost nothing happens. But in Woodforde’s hands daily life is magically made fascinating.

• Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley is available in paperback (Hodder & Stoughton).
  

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