Somebody has just died. The straw strewn on the pavement and the cobbled lane outside the house signify as much. Meanwhile the gas lamp flickers above the door, and a wooden handstick indicates that this is a weaver’s house. The house is dark inside, except for a few candles, and a Cockney expresses his concern for my safety – before driving his taxi on to Liverpool Street Station.

At 7.30pm, the door opens to reveal a Californian in jeans. This is Dennis Severs in his unique Georgian home in Folgate Street, Spitalfields. It is not open to the public, unless your manner appeals to him when you phone to book, and he also has a reputation for throwing people out if their attitude displeases him – even though they are paying Pounds 20 a head for the evening.

On arrival, Severs tells us that he gave up years ago trying to explain the purpose of the visit; but that does not deter this madcap American from talking about his house and its elusive inhabitants as if he had to make up for centuries of silence.

‘We’re not here to see a house or its pictures, furniture or porcelain. And we’re certainly not here to learn anything,’ he lectures the eight people now huddled in his candlelit kitchen – a kitchen, like the rest of the house, that is decorated and lived in as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries.

‘We’re hear to dream and get the 20th century out of our heads,’ he informs the assembled company, before locking us in his dark and dank 18th-century cellar to facilitate the process. Thus starts a three-hour tour. ‘Weird,’ exhales the American woman spilling out of the chair next to mine.

Severs lives in his 1723 home in proxy for a mythical 18th-century Huguenot family of his own extraordinary creation, called the Jervises.

The walk round his authentically detailed home is accompanied by entertaining chat by Severs and cleverly hidden cassette recordings. Entirely believable comments about the illusory family, their lifestyle and relationships are interspersed with intentionally incorrect historical detail and endless trivia.

Severs’s technique is to put his visitors into an atmosphere and bombard them with things that filled the hearts and minds of the Jervises, ‘so in the end you haven’t just had a glimpse of the past, you have been there’.

We stand in the kitchen in front of an open fire, a chicken turning on the spit; and it does not seem self-conscious because that is how Severs cooks every day. While he enthuses about the quirky life beneath the stairs, regaling us with stories of the cheeky maid Rebecca, one begins to feel as if his 18th-century servants have just left the room. The house retains its original atmosphere not just because of the material objects, but because of the magical environment he creates and its authentic temperatures and smells.

We go upstairs to the dining room, hushed and in mock excitement, like children looking for fairies they only half believe in. It is like walking on to a stage set for 1724: the pomegranate and half-empty wine glasses scattered on the table, and Mr Jervis’s wig left behind on a chair.

From there we move forward to 1760 and the smoking room where Mr Jervis holds his assemblies and organizes his business. He burns market palletts in the fire, and dust fills the room. We follow into the drawing room, where on dark evenings they listen to stories, just as we are doing. The smell of orange oil hangs in the air, mingling with the lavender flowers that are swept to the edge of the room. Then Mrs Jervis’s fan falls off the chair to the floor, and we hear her riotous party leaving downstairs.

Next is the bedroom, an intimate room containing Mrs Jervis’s messy make-up and sentimental knick-knacks. Here the carpet is cleaned every day with damp tea leaves, to restore the colour and pile. Just as everything in the house is faithfully dusted with rags steamed in cedar oil.

In the dressing room, the fire is burning and tea is steaming in cups on the table.

Upstairs the Dickensian attic represents 1835 and the Industrial Society. An entire family called the Laceaux live there. (William Jervis got Mrs Laceaux pregnant, so it was his Christian duty to bring the family into the house, one understands. ) The room shocks, for it is stark, with peeling paint and dripping water. It is freezing and one of our company complains. ‘They lived through it and so will you,’ retorts Severs curtly.

It is pleasurable then to move on to the second drawing room – and 1840. The room is the antithesis of those upstairs and represents the cosy bourgeois reaction to them with its gas lamps, well-dressed furniture, swathes of material and acres of ornaments.

The trip is not for those without imagination and a sense of irony. ‘Pernickity intellectuals who come always end up looking like char-women wearing tiaras,’ explains Severs.

Dennis Severs, 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields, London E1 (01-247 4013), by appointment only. Eight people at a time, three evenings a week at 7.30pm, £20 a head. (c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 1987