Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History
10 best books like Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (Mark Girouard): Chatsworth: The House, Life Below Stairs: in the Victorian and Edwardian Country House, London: A Social History, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, Our Tempestuous Day: History Of Regency England, Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of English Upstairs/Downstairs Life, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, King of the Confessors, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London
| Author | Deborah Mitford |
| ISBN | 0711216754 |
When I toured this spectacular "house" in May 2014, I purchased the most recent edition of this book. I had wanted to see the huge estate for years - it far exceeded my high expectations. This book is a history of the family, the house, and the gardens with wonderful photos of much of it. If you saw the 2005...
| Author | Siân Evans |
| ISBN | 1907892117 |
From the cook, butler, and housekeeper to the footman, lady's maid and nanny, this is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of some of Britain's grandest houses. An entertaining social history, steering the reader through the minefield of etiquette and hierarchy that kept Britain's great houses...
| Author | Roy Porter |
| ISBN | 0674538390 |
Overall, Roy Porter has some great insights here that are unfortunately marred by excessive, unedifying lists and unnecessary editorializing.
Porter does discover a lot of great quotes about the city from a lot of great writers. Many know of Samuel Johnson's "If you are tired of London you...
| Author | Amanda Vickery |
| ISBN | 0300154534 |
In this brilliant new work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor...
Regency England has long been seen as a time of hedonism and romance, when dashing beaux and elegant belles played out their flirtations against a backdrop of opulence and style. Yet beneath the surface glitter of the Regency lay an underlying malaise, a pervasive hollowness and sense of loss, along...
Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of English Upstairs/Downstairs Life
| Author | Frank Victor Dawes |
| ISBN | 0800856058 |
The Great Age of Servants is long, long gone, but we are still morbidly fascinated by it. Look at the success of Downton Abbey, and before that Upstairs, Downstairs, which is referenced in this book's title. Needless to say, Downton is rose-tinted in its view of the lives of servants and their relationships...
| Author | Eamon Duffy |
| ISBN | 0300098251 |
This delightful book offers a rare glimpse of life in a remote sixteenth-century English village during the dramatic changes of the Reformation. Through vividly detailed parish records kept from 1520 to 1574 by Sir Christopher Trychay, the garrulous priest of Morebath, we see how a tiny Catholic...
| Author | Thomas Hoving |
| ISBN | 0345303709 |
King of the Confessors is Thomas Hoving's gripping account of the extraordinary events surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art's purchase, in 1963, of the magnificent medieval carved walrus ivory cross that the Museum calls 'The Cloisters Cross', but Hoving calls 'The Bury St Edmund Cross'....
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century
| Author | John Brewer |
| ISBN | 0374234582 |
This is a difficult book to review, mostly because I don’t consider myself qualified to properly criticize the amount of work that went into this well-crafted, well-written brick (and it is a brick – it’s a read-at-a-table-because-it’s-too-heavy-to-comfortably-hold-for-long-stretches-of-time...
City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London
| Author | Vic Gatrell |
| ISBN | 0802716024 |
Between 1770 and 1830, London was the world's largest and richest city, the center of hectic social ferment and spectacular sexual liberation. These singular conditions prompted revolutionary modes of thought, novel sensibilities, and constant debate about the relations between men and women....
Upstairs & Downstairs: The Illustrated Guide to the Real Life of Masters and Their Servants from the Victorian Era to the Second World War
| Author | Sarah Warwick |
| ISBN | 1847327907 |
This beautifully illustrated book takes readers on a guided tour of a single day in an upper-crust English home of the Edwardian era. Starting with the servants hard at work while the family is still abed, and culminating in a lavish dinner party, Upstairs & Downstairs lifts the curtain on this fascinating...
| Author | Adrian Tinniswood |
| ISBN | 1594489483 |
The remarkable story of one English family during the tumultuous seventeenth century, as revealed through their original letters and documents, which paint an extraordinarily accurate and detailed picture of life in England, Europe, and even the American colonies. "To know the Verneys is to know...
| Author | Maureen Waller |
| ISBN | 0340739673 |
Just the sort of book that gives history a good name, 1700: Scenes from London Life presents almost a glut of the kind of daily life (and death) detail which proves utterly engaging, striking chords of familiarity or describing almost unimaginable worlds. We discover where people lived and worked,...
| Author | Jeremy Musson |
| ISBN | 0719597307 |
Country houses were reliant on an intricate hierarchy of servants, each of whom provided an essential skill. Up and Down Stairs brings to life this hierarchy, showing how large numbers of people lived together under strict segregation and how sometimes this segregation was broken, as with the famous...
Nowadays, if a man penned a manual directed to women providing instruction on how to conduct personal and household affairs; one can bet that feminist groups would have a field day. However, in 1393 this was accepted behavior as women were expected to be submissive (sadly) to their husbands. During...
| Author | Lawrence James |
| ISBN | 0312615450 |
Aristocracy means "rule by the best." For nine hundred years, the British aristocracy considered itself ideally qualified to rule others, make laws, and guide the nation. Its virtues lay in its collective wisdom, its attachment to chivalric codes, and its sense of public duty. It evolved from a medieval...
| Author | Robert Graves |
| ISBN | 0393311368 |
"The long week-end" is Robert Grave's and Alan Hodge's evocative phrase for the period in Great Britain's social history between the twin devastations of the Great War and World War II. With brilliant wit and trenchant judgments they offer a scintillating survey of seemingly everything that went...
| Author | Paul Fussell |
| ISBN | 0195030680 |
The kind of felicity to which the Blue Train conveyed you, as it let you off at Marseilles or Toulon or Cannes or Nice or Monte Carlo, whence you could go on to the Italian Riviera, to Rapallo and all the way down to the Amalfi Coast, seemed novel in the 20’s. It seems novel no longer because those places have...
The English: A Social History, 1066-1945
| Author | Christopher Hibbert |
| ISBN | 0393023710 |
In this vivid and compelling book, Christopher Hibbert records the daily life of the English people from the days of the Norman Conquest until our own. Based on diaries, letters, memoirs, official reports, the works of modern social historians and the literature of every period, The English traces...
| Author | Elizabeth Longford |
| ISBN | 0831756462 |
For most of us Wellington equals Waterloo. But Waterloo was one peak only in the career of this phenomenal man, and it is the achievement of this major biography that it reveals the subtlety and full variety of Wellington's genius as well as the fascinating complexity of England in his time.
He...
| Author | Philip Davies |
| ISBN | 0955794986 |
A spectacular collection of more than 500 of the best images from the former London County Council archive of photographs, which has been held by English Heritage for the past 25 years. Most have never been published before. Taken to provide a unique record of whole districts of London as they were vanishing,...
