The reality of life in a Georgian home

Visiting country houses is often listed second only to gardening as the favourite activity of the British, and Yorkshire has more than its fair share of exquisite Georgian palaces and houses – Beningborough, Castle Howard, Cusworth Hall, Harewood House, Fairfax House, Nostell Priory, Temple Newsam.

But their seductive elegance may be misleading us – all spacious drawing rooms and decorous dcor, chinoiserie wallpaper, clipped lawns and cedar trees. So peaceful. So ample. So under-populated. Was life in a Georgian house really as calm and well-regulated as a piano sonata?

Of course not. Vast numbers of urban houses accommodated a workshop or a commercial shop, live-in tenants, as well as servants and apprentices, children and stepchildren, plus visiting kin – so the idea of calm, quiet, unhurried gentility behind closed doors is laughable.

Almost half of all houses in Georgian London contained lodgers. Living hugger mugger with strangers robbed the internally-divided urban terrace of any refinement of privacy as we understand it.

Jane Austen did not invent drawing room manners. The Georgians had long put a premium on polite performance indoors.

Fashionable architects tried to draw a distinctions between rooms for "convenience", where you lived and worked, and rooms for "show", where you set out your best things and displayed your company manners.

When the Doncaster architect, William Lindley, proposed a new house for Brian Cooke, of Owston, in 1785, he made a clear distinction between formal and family rooms: "The Dining & Drawing room, being chiefly design'd to accommodate Visitors in Form & c; and the Library & Breakfast Parlour, for the accommodation of the Master & Mistress of the family… What I call the breakfast parlour would, of course, be your own common dining room; and its opening to the back stairs renders in singularly convenient… placed near the Offices by which means the servants has no occation to cross over the best staircase, or vestibule."

Wherever possible, polite guests were to be insulated from the business of housekeeping and clatter of servants.

Parlours for meeting guests and conversation existed in urban houses from the early Middle Ages. By 1600, roughly half of all farmers' houses in Kent had a parlour. At first, these were likely to contain beds, but by the Georgian era, evidence of sleep was banished upstairs to make way for exotic new tea tables and comfy, upholstered chairs.

But in backward areas in remote rural Yorkshire and the Midlands, beds could still be found in the farmer's parlour at the end of the 18th century. North Yorkshire labourers still crowded their families into one-room cottages, while in remote West Wales, even the gentry were late to build the polite new dining rooms and you still came across beds downstairs. Imagine tinkling on the piano-forte while your brothers were still snoring around you. Not so elegant.

Ladies may have longed for an elegant drawing room, but most were resigned to a flurry of tidying and adapting their family rooms when guests arrived on the threshold.

A Bedfordshire parson was given some ingenious advice on how to make the most use of his best room in 1751, which involved an elaborate Wallace and Grommit-style performance with a bed-cum-cupboard.

The "scheme for preserving the chamber in its full magnitude" involved "a handsome sham clothes press" which turned into a bed at night. In the morning, the bed could be collapsed and decorated with "two or three figures, busts or Mrs Williamson's china" and "there's your large, handsome dining room again".

Maids and menservants often had the run of the house for the purposes of their labour, but their own time and space was strictly controlled.

"Rules for servants" were favourite proclamations from employers. York grocer's daughter Elizabeth Forth was typical in denying her two maids light in the garret of her Slingsby house, in 1792, for fear of fire. She insisted they "snuff their candle before they go upstairs and never to work or sew in their bed room by candle light" or they would be sacked.

Even the comfortably off, did not expect the privacy that we take for granted – Jane Austen had to share a bedroom with siblings for most of her adult life.

Gorgeous Georgian houses open to the public, neatly arranged and empty of inhabitants offer a vision of impossibly gracious living, but it is a perfumed fantasy. Next time you walk down a roped-off passage in a hushed historic house – remember you are seeing a skeleton, not a living body.

Superimpose a bevy of beady-eyed visitors, brothers and sisters whispering in corners, maiden aunts eavesdropping, and servants clattering down the stairs with last night's brimful chamber pots.

Inject the whiff of unwashed bodies and animals, belching fires and yesterday's cooking – and you're almost there.

Amanda Vickery is a Professor in History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She opens the York Literary Festival with an illustrated talk, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, at Fairfax House, on March 18. This is sold out, but there will be a second chance to hear the talk at 10am on March 19.

FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

Judith Murray, March 20, 2pm: The publisher of the likes of Sarah Waters, Mark Barrowcliffe and Maeve

Haran on how to get published.

Jim Crace, March 22, 6pm:

The author of Continent, Arcadia, Quarantine and Being Dead reads from his new novel, All That Follows.

Kate Atkinson, March 25, 7pm: Having attracted a loyal following with her Jackson Brodie series, the author of Behind the Scenes at the Museum will talk about the secrets of her success.

Andrea Gillies, March 26, 5pm: Author of Keeper, a moving account of caring for her mother-in-law who has Alzheimer's,will talk about putting family life in print.

Jon McGregor, March 26, 7pm: Booker-prize nominated author McGregor will speak about his acclaimed first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, and give a preview of "that difficult third novel", Even the Dogs.

For a full programme visit wwwl.yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk