Amanda Vickery's Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England takes its readers on an intimate set of visits to homes across the English landscape, unlocking “the experience of interiors” in an effort to explore “an uncharted space between architectural history, family and gender history and economic history. It brings hazy background to the fore to examine the determining role of house and home in power and emotion, status and choices” (3; emphasis added). Vickery's doors, then, are not just solid wooden panels. Rather, in this book, doors serve metaphorically as barriers between space and architecture, house and home, and objects and individual identity.

By offering both a history of homes themselves as well as of the activity of being at home, Vickery unravels the complicated meanings—legal, familial, emotional, and personal—associated with home life in Georgian England. There is a reason that the English use words with foreign origins—the French-derived “apartment” and the Scottish-derived “flat”—to describe units in a communal building. In Georgian England, occupying one's own space was a statement about one's political status, dignity, and maturity, though one need not have actually owned a house. Often, the capacity to lease a private house established a person with the legal rights of household autonomy, particularly vis-à-vis lodgers who had only one room to themselves. For lodgers like Charles Maitland, the only privacy the world had to offer was a secret drawer inside a locked trunk, and Maitland's limited access to secure storage sorely circumscribed his respectability. “The bit of padlock is the crown of squalor. Access to privacy was an index of power” (41).

Perhaps the great success of Behind Closed Doors is the diversity of doors it opens. Having picked the lock on Maitland's hidden drawer, Vickery also sits us hearthside in the houses of England's middling sort and aristocracy. There, we find that power and privacy did not always translate into peace and tranquility. True, we pay a visit to Lord and Lady Shelburne, a loving couple whose home provided both the ceremonial public spaces demanded of Georgian grandees and intimate interior spaces—dressing rooms and closets—in which both he and she could celebrate a sense wonderfully described here as “snugitude” (147). But, for every happy couple she introduces, Vickery takes her readers to meet a less comfortably settled family—including the duchess of Grafton, scrambling in the wake of her failed marriage to reestablish herself and her household in a style that meets her status and her expectations.

Here, too, we meet a host of people for whom the house was less a home than a jail. Unmarried female relations stand out among those who could get tangled in the legal web of domestic life. Unable to claim a household of their own, these women frequently found themselves drawn into the households of male relations where they lived a life of dependence if not outright servitude. But, dependence “was not a uniquely female experience” (186). Indeed, Vickery's portrait of single men, often living as lodgers, demonstrates that men could be dependent upon domestic female labor for their survival. Though the arrangement does not suggest parity of social place, it does demonstrate the degree to which the lack of household autonomy could cut across gendered lines.

In interior design as in social arrangements, gender was not always a defining category. Design and style, both meaningful to those turning a house into a home, ought not, Vickery argues, be defined as exclusively masculine or feminine. To be sure, the account records Vickery has studied indicate that men often made major purchases while women tended to the less expensive consumption in a household, but Vickery reminds her readers that consumers were not bound by a designer's gendered aesthetic ideals (often to the designer's consternation). Blended styles and hybrid designs were often the result. As Vickery notes, “the battle of wainscot versus marble, or stucco versus rampant wallpaper … was a motif of a wider cultural debate in which gender was a weapon but not the central battle” (258).

Behind Closed Doors is an impressive book, the result of research in more than sixty archives. One might argue, though, that a book about the materiality of home life ought to be more than a mere book, that the book itself should be something to behold. Such is the case here. Yale University Press is to be credited for the high-quality of this book-as-object, and Vickery should take a bow for her masterful use of visual and material culture as objects of historical inquiry. With more than sixty images and nearly forty full-color plates, Behind Closed Doors is a bibliographic ornament. These images are not mere illustrations. Rather, they are essential to the book's emotional narratives and analytical arguments. Take, for instance, an image of a small piece of embroidered flannel left at the London Foundling Hospital by a mother who wanted her infant son to have some token of her (plate 22). This is but one of many instances when a well-chosen object helps the reader materially enter the domestic past.

Complementing this book's sumptuous images is Vickery's masterful literary style. When Lady Lumm of Cheltenham is informed that her decorators have jumbled her order for wall coverings, installing a crimson and white pattern that clashed with her yellow curtains, one cannot help but to enjoy Vickery's wry interjection “mistaken, mistaken, three times mistaken!” (172). Here, as so often, Vickery balances a historian's respect for the study of the past with a gentle sense of humor at her subjects' foibles and fussiness. The result is a marvelous book that is sharply argued and a pleasure to read. Behind Closed Doors will, no doubt, become a valuable addition to the historiography on Georgian life, but it is also a book with the potential to balance itself perfectly at the threshold between academic audiences and a wider reading public. Such is Amanda Vickery as a scholar; she knocks at many doors.