The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  The life of the rich, especially the nouveau riche in the middle of the nineteenth century, impressed the middle classes. In 1867 the Polish-born Danish painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann wrote to her husband, the sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau, of the dinner she had while a guest at the country house of Baron Carl Joachim Hambro (Milton Abbey in Dorset, purchased by Hambro in 1852). Amazed at the ‘unnatural life of the rich’ (Hambro, who was Danish too, was the founder of Hambros Bank), she marvelled at the landscape designed by Capability Brown in the eighteenth century, and then described the dinner table:

  Everything imaginable ad nauseam in the way of delicacies offered: melons, strawberries, grapes, figs, etc., and then the inevitable champagne. And against this a background of thousands of poor starving children lacking the barest necessities.148

  In 1900 the prosperity that would be characteristic of the West in the second half of the twentieth century had only begun to reach the lower middle classes. Much of their expenditure was spent not on consumer goods but on food and rent: 80 per cent in the case of Parisian skilled workers (1907 survey), 65 per cent in the case of artisans.149 And, of course, there was progress. By 1910, on average a Frenchman consumed four times more wine than his counterpart in 1831, three times more beer, seven times more sugar, eleven times more tea, and thirty times more chocolate.150

  The middle classes, particularly the urban middle classes, were the main beneficiaries of the growth of industry and thus, not surprisingly, they were the backbone of modernity, and sometimes even of democracy. They were the true heirs to the Enlightenment, not necessarily because they were enlightened, though some were, but because the middle class was the only class truly at home in the new world of progress. Inequalities were still very high, though perhaps only as high as now. At the beginning of the twentieth century the 90,000 households that made up the British middle classes had a yearly income oscillating between £300 and £1,000, while an unskilled worker, working a six-day week, would earn £56 a year.151 By 1908, those earning above £700 a year (3.1 per cent of the population) could be deemed rich, while those earning between £160 and £700 were merely ‘comfortable’.152 In Chicago, in the late nineteenth century, the earnings of a white-collar worker were twice those of a skilled labourer (the gap since then has all but disappeared).153 Yet such was the degree of uncertainty about the future that the middle class saved obsessively, and expenditure for pleasure was restricted to the minimum. Pleasure, after all, was for the really prosperous.

  It must be remembered that everyday items of consumption taken for granted even by the very poor at the end of the twentieth century were still semi-luxuries at the end of the nineteenth. Take tea. The yearly consumption of tea in western and central Europe in 1840 was about four ounces per year per person (today in Turkey, the world leader, it is three kilos; in the UK and in Ireland around two kilos). At that time the Chinese drank two and a half times as much, hardly surprising since tea was, after all, ‘their’ drink.154 In 1800 the British annual consumption of sugar, then a luxury, was just over eight kilos per capita (21.9 grams a day), the average continental European only one kilo per capita (2.7 grams a day).155 By 2015, to the chagrin (or perhaps joy) of dentists, the average American per capita consumption of sugar per day was 126.4 grams, out-sugaring Germany (102.9 grams) and the Netherlands (102.5 grams). The British were seventh in the world, consuming 93.2 grams per capita a day, while Indians were at the bottom of the countries surveyed at only 5.1 grams a day (still nearly twice continental European consumption in 1800). The World Health Organization recommendation is 50 grams a day.156

  Around 1900 the lower middle classes could consume some such ‘luxuries’, but they lived in small dwellings, deprived of comforts. Shopkeepers lived at the back of the shop with the kitchen used as a dining room and sometimes as a bedroom.157 They eventually became more prosperous, narrowing the gap within the middle classes. Although numbers are difficult to estimate, it is likely that by the end of the nineteenth century what was once a plentiful supply of domestic servants began to decrease. Middle-class ladies, once the managers of the household, turned into housewives as it became more difficult to recruit maids and cleaners. The phrase, ‘you can’t find servants nowadays’, was already a cliché at the end of the nineteenth century. In Paris many ladies of the solid bourgeoisie had only one maid and had to do the shopping themselves, occasionally, it seemed, helped by their husbands. The fate of servants was dismal, though arguably an improvement over the homes they were born into.

  Eliza Lynn Linton provided us with a description of the bleak fate that awaited the typical maid in the London of the 1870s, all the more interesting since the author was a ferocious anti-feminist who raised ‘moral objections against the active political woman’, declaring it was ‘an absolute truth’ that the ‘raison d’être of a woman is maternity’.158 In a letter (26 January 1898) to William Woodall, a Liberal politician and supporter of women’s suffrage, she wrote that the advent of female suffrage together with full manhood suffrage would bring about ‘mob rule heightened by the hysteria of the feminine element’.159 Be that as it may, Eliza Linton was unenthusiastically married for less than ten years, had no children of her own, and was a well-paid and remarkably successful writer and journalist. But she had feelings for servants. In an article in The Cornhill Magazine in 1874 she wrote:

  the kindest-hearted mistress treats it as an impertinence when her maids stipulate for rights, say in the matter of a fixed holiday … She [the maid] is liable to be rung up at all hours; her very meals are not secure from interruption; she has no time that is absolutely her own; and even her sleep is not sacred. In the dead of night something may be wanted, and she must get up to bring or to do it … She lives under ground or just below the roof. Damp, drains, want of efficient ventilation, with the constant presence of draughts, surround her in winter … Her food is of poorer quality and less appetizing than the family’s … She comes up from the country and is plunged at once from the fresh air and free expanse of her old surroundings into the dismal darkness of a London kitchen … No followers, no friends in the kitchen, no laughing to be heard above stairs … this is English domestic service.160

  The large number of servants among the nobility was not (only) a matter of being ostentatious: it was imposed by the low level of household technology. Since there was no running water, it had to be pumped up by servants. Everything needed to be washed by hand. Hot water had to be carried to the masters’ bathrooms after heating it on the stove. Chamber pots had to be emptied regularly. In the evening ladies really needed someone to help them remove their boots, as well as their corsets tied by a complex system of laces. In the morning a similar ritual took place for dressing. Socks were expensive, so there was constant darning. There was no central heating, so fires had to be lit at various times according to a pattern set by the masters. Knives were not of stainless steel, so they had to be cleaned and dried with great care. When cars became available, they needed to be dried by the chauffeur after every rainfall to avoid rust. Since there were no well-stocked local shops, the rural nobility had to consume vegetables and fruits grown on their estate; this required a small army of gardeners. Before the First World War at the Château de Cheverny by the Loire, each male member of the family had a valet, each lady a chambermaid; in the kitchen the cook had a ‘saucier’ to make the sauces as well as various scullery maids and sous-chefs.161 All these servants had to be fed and clothed. This was so expensive that in 1914 the owners opened the château to a paying public. Today Cheverny employs even more people than at the beginning of the twentieth century, but that is because it is now a business, a place visited by tourists (an added bonus is that Cheverny was the inspiration for the Château de Moulinsart in the popular Tintin comic books). Such tourism would not have been possible had not the ‘masses’ become more prosperous and had there not been ‘socialist’ reforms such as paid holidays, one of the few achievements of the Popular Front government in 1936.

&nb
sp; Of course, lesser aristocrats and most bourgeois employed a fraction of those employed at Cheverny, but even in 1914 there were in Paris some 200,000 domestic servants: 11 per cent of the population.162 In Britain domestic service was the largest employer of female labour not just until the eve of the First World War but even in 1945.163 In 1881 one Londoner in fifteen was a servant (one in twenty-two for the whole of England). There were over 750,000 servants in Britain in 1851 and the numbers grew to a peak of almost 1.4 million in 1891 (though some historians set the peak in 1871).164

  What also changed over the course of the nineteenth century was the relationship between masters (or, rather, mistresses) and servants. Protective paternalism gradually faded away. The maid’s relationship with the ‘masters’ became mainly economic.165 One must, of course, beware of a mental image of ‘domestic servants’ derived from films, novels, and television serials. Domestic service is a generic term that covers (in census reports) ‘general servant’, ‘housekeeper’, ‘nurse’, ‘cook’, etc.166 Besides, many employers were not middle class and did not have live-in servants but recruited young women from the workhouse and obtained their labour in exchange for a meal and a few coins.167

  In Britain the typical middle-class family at the turn of the century employed two or three servants, one of whom would be a maid (answering the door, helping the lady of the house to dress, serving dinner). The others cooked and cleaned. By having two or three deferential servants, the growing ranks of the middle classes could bask in the illusion that they were approaching the lifestyle of the aristocracy.168

  Small entrepreneurs, though better off than the majority of the population, were, then as now, in a constant state of anxiety, partly because they were worried by the competition from larger firms, but also because they were envious of the salaried bourgeoisie, especially those in public employment. The latter spent more on rent, on the education of their children, on books and newspapers, than most traders and merchants.169 And they also had a more secure future. Not for nothing their allegiance to the existing political order was almost unassailable.

  What of those, the overwhelming majority, who had no servants? Take just a single and simple task indispensable before the introduction of indoor plumbing. Before, water required for washing, cleaning, and cooking had to be brought into the house several times a day. The water, once boiled, would be used to wash heavy articles such as sheets and tablecloths, using detergent that might be harmful to the skin. They needed to be rubbed, wrung, then dried on a line, and, finally, ironed.170 A North Carolina Farmer’s Alliance organizer calculated, in 1886, that a woman might walk 150 miles a year carrying water – water-carrying in North Carolina as in India was regarded as a woman’s task.171 Then there was the cooking, which took far longer than today, since chickens had to be plucked, bread needed to be baked – and finally there was looking after the children. A woman’s work was really never done.

  DEATH AND DISEASE

  Urbanization was a great killer.172 Towns, already unhealthy in pre-industrial times, became even unhealthier with industrialization and urbanization. Urban infant mortality rates were higher than in rural parts at least until the beginnings of the twentieth century.173 Cities, after all, are places easily devastated by disease since people are far more concentrated than in rural areas. This higher mortality rate would have caused the urban population to decrease if deaths exceeded births, but there was a constant stream of people to the cities to find work, thus replenishing the spaces left empty by the dead. This was the case, for instance, in Sweden, where most towns had a birth deficit as late as the first half of the nineteenth century.174

  Migrating from the rural to the urban world increased one’s chances of dying for much of the nineteenth century. In Italy, France, and elsewhere infant mortality was higher in cities than in the countryside.175 In 1811 life expectancy at birth in London was only 30 years. In the countryside one could expect to live, on average, until 41. Then things improved, albeit slowly. By 1911 life expectancy at birth in London was 52; in the countryside it was 55: the gap had narrowed considerably but had not been eliminated.176 Cities were murderous in the United States too. In his State of the Union address of 6 December 1904, Theodore Roosevelt lamented: ‘The slum exacts a heavy total of death from those who dwell therein; and this is the case not merely in the great crowded slums of high buildings in New York and Chicago, but in the alley slums of Washington.’177

  Towns were described as ‘graveyards’.178 In Berlin in 1880 more than 100,000 people lived in cellar flats (Kellerwohnungen), usually dark and humid and where the death rate was highest.179 In both Germany and England the urban mortality figures were above the national average until the tide turned in the 1870s.180 Average life expectancy at birth in the Prussian countryside in 1877 was around 38 (for males, females did a little better), but in towns less than 33. Only by 1905 did it become a little healthier to live in Prussian towns than outside them.181 Yet urbanization was unstoppable. In 1871, 36 per cent of the German population lived in towns; by 1914 it was 60 per cent.182

  In the urban streets of the 1870s and 1880s the dirt was not just caused by human excrement and the lack of sewers, but by what was then the prevalent mode of transportation: horses. While many today complain (rightly) about the pollution caused by the internal combustion engine, in pre-car days, in New York, horses daily excreted a considerable amount of manure and urine, and when they died their carcasses were often left in the streets for days.183 Pigs were allowed to roam in towns because they ate garbage. It was more dangerous to drink water or milk than to drink beer. Lactose intolerance, common in Japan and China, ensured that their populations were spared the disastrous effects of drinking milk in the pre-pasteurization era.184 Drinking tea was also safer than plain water, not for any particular property of tea leaves but simply because of the requirement of boiling the water first.185

  In 1882, New York was one of the richest cities in the world, yet only 2 per cent of its houses had running water (in France, as late as 1946, 31 per cent of homes in urban centres had no water or electricity).186 In its slums as many as eight persons shared a single small room. Workers in American coal mines and in the steel industry worked 60-hour weeks in dirty and dangerous conditions, exposed to lethal gas and smoke.

  Food was dangerous, far more so than today when people are worried about GM foods and pesticides. Since regulations were few, meat often came from diseased animals, lard contained carbonate of soda, and chocolate was often coloured. After the Public Health Act of 1848 (in response to Edwin Chadwick’s struggle against insanitary conditions in many cities), there were further initiatives, particularly in the 1850s and 1860s, when Dr Arthur Hill Hassall, a physician, brought to public attention food adulteration later listed in his Food: Its Adulterations, and the Methods for their Detection (1876). Hassall had found Cocculus indicus (the source of a poisonous substance) in beer, sulphate of copper in pickles and preserves, lead and mercury in confectionery, blancmange coloured by copper arsenite. No wonder chronic gastritis was a common disease in the nineteenth century.187 This led to the 1860 Food and Drink Adulteration Act, which made the adulteration of food and drink a criminal offence; the first of many public health measures. Then there were a series of Vaccination Acts establishing free vaccination for all children (1840, 1853, 1867, 1871, 1873, 1898, and 1907); the 1866 Sanitary Act and the 1875 Public Health Act, which compelled local authorities to ensure that there was an adequate water supply, drainage, and sewage disposal; and a string of regulations aimed at controlling ‘offensive trades’, reporting infectious diseases, and improving the quality of food (ten years later typhoid rates in England had fallen by 50 per cent).188

  In the United States the unhealthy and dangerous conditions of the Chicago meat-packing industry denounced in Upton Sinclair’s best-selling novel The Jungle (1906) helped the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), a historic piece of federal legislation initiated by President Theodore Roosevelt, which led to t
he establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.189 Thus in ‘liberal’ America public intervention in public health was considerable. By 1900 the overwhelming majority of the fifty largest cities in the America had public waterworks and by 1910, ‘70 per cent of cities with populations of more than 30,000 had shifted from private to municipal water services’.190 As a comparison, in 2016, in India, 75.8 million people (5 per cent of the population) had no access to clean water, causing the death from diarrhoea of over 140,000 children.191 Furthermore, according to UNICEF, there were, in 2014, one billion people in the world defecating in the open, 597 million of whom were in India.