An Englishman's Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House

The dusk spreads from the river. Candles are being lit all over London. The clatter of shuttering echoes and answers as every house in the Georgian metropolis fortifies itself against the advancing dark. The November gloom calls the lodgers home, scurrying back with sausages, oysters and a pennyworth of tea. At the corner of Shoe Lane in the City, the landlord, a carpenter, is still away at his workshop, and the landlady is seeing her tenants in, unlocking the street door and the individual rooms for her three newest inmates: a laundress, a fruit-seller, and a journeyman cabinetmaker. They exchange words on the cold stairs; she has changed their linen today. (Has she snooped through their things again? Almost certainly.) In the second-floor front chamber, the journeyman lights his fire, and then scuttles next door to fetch his dinner on a tray from the alehouse. Loosening his breeches, he empties his pockets and stashes the coin in the hiding place he has engineered in the leg of the oak bed. Unusually the landlady's linen press stands open in the corner. She must have forgotten to relock it. The journeyman runs his hands over the second best sheets, all initialled and numbered with red embroidery silk. Attractive, but he wants a quiet life, and he has had worse quarters than these. The fruit-seller heats her sausages over the hearth in the second-floor back chamber. Warmer, she idly unlocks her box (she carries the key always in her pocket), checking over her shifts, Sunday best gown and handkerchiefs. Her small stock of valuables — cash, a watch, a silver teaspoon and a ring — she keeps always on her person. In the draughty front garret, the young laundress eats her oysters, locks away some ribbons in her box, and hides some coins in a hole in the wainscot. Sometimes she has to share her bed with passing girls and she is no fool. Presently, the maid of all work leaves to visit a relative by arrangement, and as the landlady must pop out to the alehouse for beer, she leaves the street door key in the custody of her trusty, a mature needlewoman and widow who rents the first-floor back chamber. The widow can't complain; she holds her own room key and just now she is making her supper in the family kitchen, as she has done at this hour every night for the past seven years. Errand accomplished, the landlady takes back her keys, relocks the kitchen and retreats to the ground-floor parlour to await her husband. By nine everyone is gathered back in. The apprentice beds down in the back garret with the two little boys of the house, the maid in the warm back kitchen on a truckle bed, her bulging tie-on pockets stuffed under her pillow. At ten, the landlady locks the tenants, servants and children in their rooms for the night. The landlord hefts the iron bar across the street door, padlocks the door to the back lane, and double-checks the window shutters. Only streetwalkers and housebreakers are lurking about now, he tells his wife as he lights her to the first-floor front chamber. In their curtained conjugal bed, in shift and shirt, husband and wife rehearse the details of their day. The landlady puts the keys under her pillow and settles to sleep, just as the watch calls out the hour of eleven.1 Where in this story does personal privacy reside?