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Amanda Vickery - A History of Private LifeEpisodes

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  1. Alternative Homes

    30/30Historian Amanda Vickery reflects on the enduring pull of a home of one's own.

  2. Dunroamin

    29/30Historian Amanda Vickery listens to the experiences of those who moved out of the cities.

  3. Exporting the Home

    28/30Exploring the homes the British struggled to create in India during the age of empire.

  4. The Garden Indoors

    27/30The Victorians contrived increasingly ingenious ways to domesticate nature.

  5. Education in the Moral Home

    26/30Amanda Vickery assesses 19th-century learning at home through both mother and child.

  6. Neat and Not too Showy

    25/30How people lower down the social scale responded to the idea of taste.

  7. Courtship and Setting Up Home

    24/30Two 18th-century marriages, and how the husbands prepared new houses for their bride.

  8. Science and Nature at Home

    23/30How eccentric homes reflected wider 18th-century ideas about science and nature.

  9. Taste

    22/30The story of an 18th-century couple who spend life doing up their magnificent houses.

  10. Magnificence

    21/30One celebrity divorce was quite the scandal, because the husband was the prime minister.

  11. Two Widowers

    20/30The story of two different widowers and their desperate search for a new wife.

  12. Widows

    19/30How the richest widow in 18th-century England spent her late husband's coal fortune.

  13. Spinsters

    18/30What 18th-century home life held for spinsters. As many as one in five women never married

  14. Bachelors

    17/30The complicated arrangements that limited a man's search for a suitable wife.

  15. Servants

    16/30Amanda Vickery goes below stairs to find out about domestic workers in a household.

  16. Domestic Violence

    15/30Amanda Vickery reveals the dark side of private life, and how the home became a trap.

  17. Illicit Guests

    14/30Stories from adultery cases involving women sneaking lovers into the house.

  18. Men at Home

    13/30The stories of family 'black sheep'. Not everyone adhered to polite etiquette.

  19. Domestic Harmony

    12/30The importance of music-making at home, and the chances it created for finding a partner.

  20. Tea

    11/30Thanks to the introduction of tea, even people who were not rich could afford to entertain

  21. Mistress and Servants

    10/30The perils of running a house in Lancashire with unreliable servants.

  22. Ornamenting the Home

    9/30Sewing was a housewife's duty and also acted as valuable therapy.

  23. Kitchen Physic

    8/30Historian Amanda reveals housewives were once expected to concoct cure-all medicines.

  24. Pots and Pans

    7/30What do letters and diaries tell us about running the home in the 16th and 17th centuries?

  25. All My Life Is a Struggle With Dirt

    6/30Women's struggle to clean and care for their families in a household moral mission.

  26. Every Man's Home Is His Castle

    5/30Elaborate rituals of locking up at night protected the house from burglars.

  27. The Closet

    4/30The closet - a place for prayer, music and safety.

  28. The State in Miniature

    3/30The home as a microcosm of social order.

  29. Things That Go Bump in the Night

    2/30How the home protected from dark forces outside.

  30. The Bed

    1/30The hidden history of home, starting with the very heart of private life - the marital bed

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