How the rich lived in Georgian times

Imagine doing an inventory of everything in your house, right down to the number of spoons and the slightly broken spade in the shed?

For probate purposes — depending on the circumstances — an inventory is sometimes taken but even then, unless there are very specific high-value items, it can be fairly general with broad descriptions of “furniture and fittings” and estimates of values. In the 18th century in the big houses, inventories were very different; typically pages of meticulous lists detailing everything, room by room, from the colour and value of the curtains in the housekeeper’s bedroom room — blue, 3 shillings in Luke Gardiner’s town house in Dublin’s Henrietta Street — to the number of saucepans in the kitchen and the maker and value of the numerous occasional tables in the drawingroom.

For historians — especially those working in the growing field of material culture, where even the most humble objects are as important to explore and interrogate as battle dates — they have been a particularly important primary source but their wide appeal only became obvious to specialist publisher John Adamson when his book of inventories of great British 18th-century houses sold in unexpected numbers, garnering a wider readership than might be expected that included designers, film directors, lexicographers and historical novelists.

It spurred him to now publish Great Irish Households; Inventories from the Long Eighteenth Century, with consultant editor Tessa Murdoch. It’s a compilation of the inventories of 18 Irish houses, drawn from public and private sources, all but two of which are published for the first time. “Most inventories were for probate, there’s no template for them, no one way of doing them,” he says, though some appear to be vanity projects, “to show off”. He cites the example of Kilkenny Castle where the inventory is rich in lavish details for every room. In her grace’s bedroom the colours of the curtains, cushions and upholstery are noted — crimson and white damask with green silk fringing, as well as her gilt headboard, two little pillows with tassels ... the list goes on. It’s all rather over the top, says Adamson. And tellingly, it is written in elaborate calligraphy and was not for probate or other legal purposes.

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Irish houses, he says, are particularly interesting in that their contents often reflect a shared European culture. In Castlecomer House in Co Kilkenny for example, the 1798 inventory — made as part of an insurance claim, the house had been burnt down during the rebellion — there’s a long list of fine wines from France, Spain and Portugal that totalled £1,700 (about €250,000 in today’s money).

“That shows to me that the people of the house were au fait with the consumption of fine things,” he says. Fashions in interiors can be spotted too. The lists in some houses include Sheffield plate, and references to “delf” and “Chynah”. He notes that in the case of Henrietta Street, Mrs Gardiner’s well-appointed bedroom and her separate dressingroom included several pieces of furniture all made from mahogany coming to a total value of £9 and 15 shillings. It was the same throughout the house — though not below stairs — with mahogany furniture aplenty. Some decades earlier in the inventory of the Bishop of Elphin’s palace there were only two small items of furniture made from mahogany, which shows he says just how fashionable the dark hardwood furniture had become. But how the exotic timber got here, who made the furniture and just who decided it was the most fashionable to have is for historians to tease out from this rich source material.

As a publisher he gets deeply involved in his publications; for this book he compiled the extensive index and appendices, taking particular note in the glossary of the Irish words that made their way into the “big house” inventories including madders — square shaped Irish wooden drinking cups, and “pillion side saddles” — derived he says from the Irish word pillín or pack saddle.

It’s not hard to see how a set designer on a film set in a grand 18th-century house would pore over the details in the book to find out how many paintings to put in the hall, whether there should be a rug on the floor and might it really be made of velvet (yes), how long the table in the servants’ diningroom should be and whether the cushions should have braid or tassels or both.

While not yet published — it is due in bookshops from around the middle of November — Adamson has already received queries that point to the book’s many uses. He got a call from Sotheby’s to inquire if his inventories included one for Carton House. It did, he replied and was then asked if by any chance there was a seven-pillar dining table listed, as one was coming up for auction and it was thought that it could have come from the great Kildare house. Shifting through the spidery handwriting in the 1821 inventory Adamson could report that there was an eight-pillar table listed — so the table could indeed have come from the house, albeit with a missing section.