Behind Closed Doors

“If until now the Georgian home has been like a monochrome engraving, Vickery has made it three dimensional and vibrantly colored.  Behind Closed Doors demonstrates that rigorous academic work can also be nosy, gossipy, and utterly engaging.”

—Andrea Wulf, New York Times Book Review

"Vickery's great skill lies in combining a sharp forensic eye with the ability to spot and tell stories, moving between different scales so smoothly that you can't see the joins. And then there is the wit of the thing. Few academic historians manage to be so funny without compromising the seriousness of their work. She did it 10 years ago in The Gentleman's Daughter and she has done it again here. It was worth the wait."—Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian



"We see the Georgians at home as we have never seen them before in this ground-breaking book. Vickery can make a young wife’s arrangement of china into an event of thrilling social and psychological tension. Behind Closed Doors is both scholarly and terrifically good fun. Worth staying at home for."—Frances Wilson, Sunday Times


“[Behind Closed Doors] stands out … [It] not only revels in the details of domestic life, it offers a very funny way of looking at otherwise familiar historical characters. Whoever would have guessed that the Duke of Cumberland, the Butcher of Culloden, had such an eye for a well-turned vase?” — Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph


“An evocative account of life in Georgian England … How much we owe historians who trawl through the illegible and scattered archives for us to assemble these alternative accounts of history.” — Margaret Drabble, The Guardian


'This history of house interiors in Georgian England is a sparkling and erudite work from one of our best historians.' — Daily Telegraph

Shortlisted for the 2009 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History: Behind Closed Doors was highly commended by the judges of the Hessell-Tiltman prize and described as "outstanding in every way."

"Amanda Vickery has uncovered wonderful stories and characters, and written a book that is amusing as it is scholarly. You can hear her voice on every page."—John Mullan



"How many academic books make readers laugh out loud? My guess is that I won’t be alone in having that experience of Behind Closed Doors ... [Behind Closed Doors] reveals in a fundamentally novel way how the language of taste actually functioned for those outside of the well-known literary and philosophical elite in this period. Indeed, as someone who imagined they knew the scholarship on interiors, I learned something on almost every page; and it’s also not a small thing to say that unlike almost all the other published books on interiors available, I got the strongest possible sense that Vickery had lived in an interior, and understood how interiors work on a day to day level." - Dr. Jason Edwards, University of York


"Vickery is rare as an author who can speculate as to how certain events might actually have felt to those involved, whilst keeping the discussion firmly rooted in the sources and not seeming overfanciful. This is a beautifully written book. It includes important research and thorough engagement with current debates, whilst managing to tell a whole series of cracking good stories."—Dr. Kate Retford, Birkbeck College, University of London


Behind Closed Doors was highly commended by the judges of the Hessell-Tiltman prize for history and described as "outstanding in every way."