An entire chapter is devoted to bachelors who, instead of parading around town as frivolous dandies — as they have been portrayed in the past — often longed for marriage. Many despised their makeshift accommodations and take-away meals (by 1700, the commercial provision of food employed more people than most other sectors), as well as crowded taverns and a maid who might take “my sheets to her own use.” When comparing bachelorhood to marriage, Dudley Ryder, the son of a linen draper, decided he wanted a “constant companion” who would be “always ready to soothe me, take care of me.” Marriage, Vickery writes, “announced and confirmed men’s adulthood” and marked the beginning of a well-managed domestic life. Just because men didn’t fill their diaries with their notion of “homeliness” doesn’t mean they weren’t interested in it, nor does it deter Vickery from trying to find out the details. Few writers have such a talent for transforming the driest historical source into a gripping narrative, for teasing stories from account books, inventories, ledgers and pattern books.

Image “The Comforts of Matrimony — A Smoky House and Scolding Wife,” 1790. Credit... Engraving, British Museum; from “Behind Closed Doors”

Some of her most fascinating sources are the records of the Old Bailey, the main criminal court in London. During proceedings dealing with theft, witnesses often gave descriptions of their valuables and the places of safekeeping within the home. These records allow Vickery to chart the fraught and difficult negotiations that were necessary to secure at least some bit of privacy behind the uniform facade of the terraced 18th-century house. Since a maid didn’t have her own room, she might have only a small wooden box in which to lock her few belongings; a lodger might put his coins in the hollow leg of his bed to hide it from his preying landlady. Others protected their private property in secret drawers and boxes, or behind the wainscot. Such “personal receptacles,” Vickery writes, “stood proxy for individuality.” This battle over the frontiers of privacy wasn’t confined to servants and lodgers. Wealthy aristocratic women often had closets that functioned as private sanctuaries into which no one — not even their husbands — would intrude. “Behind Closed Doors” carefully describes how servants, married women, spinsters and widows struggled for a space they could call their own.

According to Vickery, these negotiations are at the core of domestic life in Georgian England and became part of “setting up home” — sometimes even before marriage. Mary Martin, the fiancée of a colonel, asserted her role as future wife and domestic manager when she oversaw the refurbishment of his London house. When her fiancé’s decorator painted a room in a shade of white that wasn’t quite what she had envisaged, she flew into a rage and “frighten’d him out of his Wits.”

What went on behind closed doors after her wedding (and most others) has been difficult to ascertain, but Vickery found three rare sets of matching account books for husbands and wives. (One was in my possession, for which I’m thanked in her acknowledgments.) The picture that emerges from the “His and Hers” chapter is that of efficient wives responsible for child-related expenses — schooling, dancing masters, clothes — as well as groceries, the husband’s personal linen, laundry and servants’ wages. Unsurprisingly, the husbands dealt with expenses related to their estates, loans and stables, but also bought most luxury goods. In one of the three examples, most of the family’s money flowed through the wife’s account book, with the husband receiving a ­rather enormous “allowance.” Though women have often been accused of ­“fetishistic self-indulgence,” these ­account books reveal husbands who bought “dandyish” waistcoats and women who didn’t indulge in new gowns.