by Tessa Boase
When health failed, savings were exhausted and the last bit of respectable clothing was pawned, the workhouse was almost inevitable. In 1832, the year of Mrs Doar’s disgrace, it was still possible to seek financial support directly from one’s parish of birth. Under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the only relief possible was to be found within a workhouse. Did Mrs Doar exchange her black silk for a prison-style uniform and give up her husband and two young children to the rules of segregation? Did she finish her days eating gruel?
Just two months before her downfall she was held to be ‘a most excellent and zealous and faithful person who did her duty fully, amply and conscientiously’. Then, almost overnight, she was converted in their minds to a ‘hardened’ wretch; a ‘devil’ to be ejected swiftly. Agent William Lewis seems to have thought Dorothy Doar got off lightly thanks to the aristocracy’s aversion to scandal. She was a thief, and as everyone knew, Embezzlement of a Master’s property is Felony. ‘If he shall purloin, or make away with his master’s goods to the value of 40s it is felony, and he shall, himself, his aider, or abettor, on conviction, be transported for 14 years.’36
But thieving alone cannot explain how molested the Trentham agent felt. It was as if the whole house and the society it sustained, with all its elaborate hierarchies and rules, had been violated. One moment Mrs Doar was one thing, and then–suddenly–she was another. By dropping the mask of duty and subservience so readily she had somehow conned Lewis. This ‘good and faithful servant’ had roundly duped him, and he was furious.
Mrs Doar’s duplicity threatened all that the nineteenth century would come to hold most dear: the sanctity of the home. The black bombazine dress and bunch of keys–symbols of sobriety, dependability, morality–were revealed to be just a cloak, a veneer. Inside, she was human.
Part 2
Sarah Wells
Uppark, West Sussex 1880–1893
How dark in these underground rooms.
SARAH WELLS
Timeline
1851
– Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park attracts six million people.
1856
– The cage crinoline, worn by all classes of women, reaches six foot in diameter.
1857
– The Matrimonial Causes Act: divorce made easier and woman can retain earnings.
1858
– Can opener invented. Preserving jar with screw lid patented.
1859
– Houses of Parliament adopt gas lighting. Domestic homes swiftly follow. Most new middle class homes have a water closet.
1861
– Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management published.
1866
– First chocolate bar: Fry’s Chocolate Cream.
1870
– Married Woman’s Property Act: Women can inherit property. The corset grows longer and more rigid: hips and bottom are squeezed backwards.
1872
– Hair crimper invented.
1876
– Bissell’s carpet sweeper patented.
1879
– Europe’s first telephone exchange opens in London.
1885
– Invention of the motor car, and first ‘safety bicycle’. The Singer ‘vibrating shuttle’ sewing machine patented, the first practical sewing machine.
1893
– Chatsworth in Derbyshire installs electric lighting using water turbines, the first great house to do so.
1897
– Millicent Fawcett founds the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.
I
The Worst Housekeeper
The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age for the housekeeper. This was the era of wealth creation for the Victorians: the railway age. The moneyed classes built new houses, refashioned old ones and filled them with the spoils of Empire. To run them they employed many more servants than before. According to the national census, between 1851 and 1871 the number of housekeepers tripled, from 46,648 to 140,836.1 This ranged from women working in middle-class homes to those employed by the great estates. And as houses got bigger and more and more crammed with furniture and ornaments, so the housekeeper’s responsibilities grew.
The male house steward at the head of the household receded into the past. An all-powerful domestic matriarch took his place. The housekeeper commanded more girls–many more girls, each with specialised skills and separate areas of responsibility. A brisk new air of professionalism imbued her team. Maids’ uniforms become absolutely codified (print dresses for the dirty work of the morning; black dress with lace cap and apron for the afternoon); surnames rather than first names were used; salaries rose according to fine gradations laid out in a spate of domestic manuals.
But country houses also resisted change. For every Trentham Hall or Highclere Castle undergoing a fashionable Charles Barry rebuild, there was an Uppark. Change on a country estate usually came about with a new male heir, but Uppark had no new lord of the manor. During Queen Victoria’s reign it languished in a time warp. The outside world was moving swiftly on–gaslighting, central heating, hot-water plumbing, elevators–but Uppark slumbered in its green acres, oblivious to the modern era. It might as well have been situated in the remote Scottish Highlands rather than West Sussex, fifty miles from London on the steam locomotive. While recruitment agencies began to promote a new breed of ‘first class’ professional servant, at Uppark the approach was more arbitrary–and the choice of housekeeper was, arguably, reckless.
According to her son’s autobiography, Sarah Wells was ‘perhaps the worst housekeeper that was ever thought of’.2 This has become the accepted view of Mrs Wells’s tenure at Uppark, which ran from 1880 to 1893. She was bad at accounts, she was bad at managing her girls, she was ill experienced in buying stores and economising–so said her son, the writer H. G. Wells. If you visit the house today, push past the brass-tack-studded red baize door, descend the eighteen steps to the basement and peer into her little sitting room, this is the line that the hovering National Trust guide will give you: here sat Mrs Wells, the very worst of Victorian housekeepers. But is this fair? It seems nobody has really looked at the evidence. We have unquestioningly swallowed the judgement of her son, the famously prolific Edwardian novelist.
Fortunately, there is another source for Mrs Wells’s story: her own version of events. She was a habitual diary keeper, jotting down a few repetitive lines each night before climbing wearily into bed. Unlike so many housekeepers’ personal records, these have survived because of the fame of her son. Today they lie in the university library of Illinois, handled with reverential white gloves by scholars hoping to find insights on H. G. Wells. The diaries have also been photocopied by the West Sussex Record Office, and it was here, in Chichester, not ten miles from Uppark, that I laboriously read through hundreds of pages of her quavering copperplate script.
Using the five unpublished diaries of Sarah Wells, the Uppark archives and her son’s letters, I set out to resurrect her world and reassess her performance. Truthfully she should never have taken the job: she lacked the qualifications. But Mrs Wells was eager to make the best of it, elated at her apparent great change in fortunes. The reality of her daily round, in this twilight world below stairs, turned out to be relentlessly hard for a frail woman in her sixties–and nothing like the Victorian caricature of the housekeeper, haughty in her black bombazine dress and clinking keys, directing work from the comfort of a wing chair in her sitting room.
The story of Mrs Wells is one of unexpected physical labour and of humiliating old age. Women like this had to work to the bitter end; they had no financial cushion or job security. We find her organising the annual spring cleaning at nearly seventy years old, her rheumatic joints so tender she can hardly walk. She spends her working days, up to fifteen hours long, underground in the servants’ quarters at Uppark–sewing, linen checking, jam making, sugar pounding, writing off for replacement maids, bookkeeping. She must also deal with an en
dlessly quarrelsome tribe of maidservants and a more than usually prickly mistress. Our housekeeper works, most remarkably, for a lady who was born a dairy farmer’s daughter.
In trying to understand the particular nuance of Mrs Wells’s story, we need to consider what preceded it–the extraordinary marriage made by the master of Uppark, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh (pronounced ‘Fanshaw’), to the estate dairymaid Mary Ann Bullock half a century earlier. It was a marriage that jolted everything out of its place, with implications for the mistress–servant relationship ever after.
II
1825: The Dairymaid
For the price of one penny, No. 8, Vol. 13 of the Princess ‘Complete Story’ Novelettes (1886) tells the story of Kitty, a demure country girl who goes into service as a maid, falls in love with her mistress’s son and ends up as Countess of Masborough. ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ such as this were written for young maids in cold attic bedrooms; girls with no more chance of walking down the aisle with the lord of the manor than being given a morning lie-in. Things like this didn’t happen in real life.
But at Uppark, back in 1825, they did. When Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, 2nd Baronet, tired of gambling and gallivanting (and when society tired of him–‘the greatest goose that ever existed’, thought one), he turned his attentions to home, and to marriage. He was a red-nosed, haw-hawing old Etonian of 71. She was an illiterate, 20-year-old local girl, and she worked in the cool, tiled dairies of Uppark in West Sussex. Sir Harry took to sitting outside the dairy entrance in Sir Humphry Repton’s inspired little shelter–a curved white roof over four slender white pillars–resting his gout-ridden hulk on a white slatted seat while indulging in a Devonshire cream tea from the home farm. Before him was the far ridge of the South Downs; behind, the dairy’s showroom for visiting ladies, with decorative pitchers and earthenware bowls laid out on shelves. The working dairy was one door further in: worn paving slabs, the slap of butter pats, a sour smell in the air and the chatter of female voices.
One voice stood out for Sir Harry. Mary Ann Bullock was proposed to by His Lordship while standing at the door of the dairy, her skirts hitched up into her apron. ‘Taken aback, like,’ was her reaction, according to a workmate. ‘Don’t answer me now,’ said Sir Harry, ‘but if you will have me, cut a slice out of the leg of mutton that is coming up for my dinner today.’ Miss Bullock was no fool. When the mutton arrived, the slice had been cut.
The upper-class rumour mill ground into life–and as with any good rumour, they got the gist but were hazy on detail. ‘Sir Harry Fetherston, 76, has married his kitchen maid, aged 18’, wrote Mrs Arbuthnot in her racy journal (the political hostess went on to note several other ‘quite curious’ marriages between ‘old men’ and younger women that year).3 The Sussex County set snubbed Sir Harry’s new wife, while Uppark’s servants sniggered behind her back. A footman was dismissed on the spot by Sir Harry for laughing at the new Lady Fetherstonhaugh as she alighted from her carriage. It was so hard to take her seriously.
Mary Ann was sent to Paris to have her manners gentrified. She learnt to read. She learnt to write a good hand. She was also taught to embroider very precisely in wool, and once back at Uppark busied herself decorating fire screens and footstools. ‘I’ve made a fool of myself, Legge,’ Sir Harry reportedly told his old gamekeeper–but the goose was cooked. He hit back at unkind snobbery with his own brand of snobbery, negotiating with the College of Arms for the registration of the ‘Arms of Bullock’ so that he could have them ‘impaled’ with his own (‘Gules on a Chevron between Three Ostrich feathers Argent a Black roundel, with an escutcheon of Ulster’).
Casting around for companions for his isolated bride, Sir Harry brought into the house Mary Ann’s younger sister, Fanny Bullock, a pert country girl in want of refinement, aged around eight. He also brought in his protégée (and illegitimate daughter, reportedly), 20-year-old Ann Sutherland, to educate young Fanny. The unlikely new family was complete–and stayed this way for the next twenty-one years. No heir was born to Sir Harry. He died aged 92 in 1846, an enormous man of reduced fortunes, confined to a large Bath chair, surrounded by women and beautiful objects.
III
1874: Hedward and ’Enry
Uppark is a pleasing dolls’ house of a country house, as neat as an iced cake, set high on the West Sussex Downs with views, on a clear day, over the Solent to the Isle of Wight beyond. On a grey day the wind buffets the symmetrical, pink-brick Georgian facade and the immense, open prospect south seems bleak and forbidding. Behind are softer, gently enclosing beech woods, bluebells in May and herds of fallow deer. It is a place apart: an enclosed world with no other dwelling visible from its ninety-five windows.
Inside are all the spoils of several Georgian grand tours: two generations of voracious Fetherstonhaugh collecting. There are Canalettos, Batonis and Giordanos; there are chinoiserie lacquered cabinets, Dutch still lives, ormolu horses, Flemish tapestries, rococo giltwood mirrors, blue Sèvres vases and an immense quantity of Waterford chandeliers. There is a Saloon the size of half a tennis court, a Red Drawing Room, a Little Drawing Room and Little Parlour–‘little’ being a relative term.
Tea, in the Victorian era, was served by the butler from an urn on a finely worked silver salver. There were grape scissors and asparagus tongs on the dining-room table and Dresden washbasins painted with Meissen jonquils and roses in the bedrooms.
Presiding over all this in the year 1874 was Mary Ann’s younger sister–the living embodiment of High Victorian paranoia about class and transgression. The 1871 census has her down as Fanny Bullock, a name redolent of the farmyard, but three years later she is Frances Fetherstonhaugh. When Mary Ann died that year, aged 69, her will was very precise. Her sister Frances was to inherit her name, her coat of arms and the big house. And so this 55-year-old spinster vaulted all the rungs of the social ladder in one single, audacious leap.
But running a big house on a fairly frugal inheritance was a trial. Frances and her faithful older companion Ann Sutherland (rightful inheritor of the house, some thought, but anyway, permanently installed at Uppark and now aged 69) were not naturally authoritative with the servants. These first few years were thought to be something of a golden age in which to work below stairs at Uppark, because, so they said, you could get away with anything. The ladies muddled through. It was rumoured that they called the two footmen, who wore long-stemmed hothouse flowers in their lapels, ‘Hedward’ and ‘’Enry’ (no matter what their real names were) to save confusion. Servant turnover was high. The new Miss Fetherstonhaugh took to using Sir Harry’s Queen Anne silver christening bowl as a washbasin in her bedroom; tongues started wagging in the basement and beyond. As with her sister, Frances was still snubbed by much of society.
She had lived an uncommonly insular life for a country-house inheritor. There had been few suitors for her or for Ann Sutherland. No breath of change had penetrated Uppark, which remained apparently frozen in the eighteenth century. There was no gaslighting, no flushing sanitary closets or hot-water pipes. Visitors noted the quaint lack of contemporary taste: there were no aspidistras, no antimacassars, none of the obligatory three cushions per chair thought so essential to the High Victorian aesthetic (by this time all padding and plumpness, drapery and ornament). Unkind gossips laughed at these unworldly ladies conspiring to keep the house as it had always been–to ‘’ave everything as Sir ’Arry ’ad it’. (The two did not, as it happened, talk like this, but it was such fun for County wags to imagine that they did.)
Intimidating masculine decor loomed down at the ladies from every wall–antlered skulls, portraits of horses, still lives full of dead deer, lobsters, slaughtered boar and limp partridges. Above the Red Drawing Room fireplace hung a large oil painting of Sir Harry in his vigorous, curious youth, a dog at his side. A portrait of George III dominated the grand Saloon. Frances and Ann holed up in the Little Parlour, a calm, sunny, double-aspect room with a rare quality of cosiness. They were literally cornered–in a house too big, too gran
d and a touch anonymous. The ladies sat in gilt armchairs with their backs against the wall, on an uneasy footing with all around them.
In another life, Fanny Bullock might have become housekeeper of Uppark, had she gone into service like her sister. Now, six years into her tenure, she decided she needed one herself, as a marker of the social pretensions of the household. Miss Fetherstonhaugh, as she was now called, wanted to be treated with due respect as lady of the manor both by outsiders and insiders. She needed a go-between, a confidante; a cushion between her and the world. She longed, too, to be free of the bother of dealing with servants.
In her choice of housekeeper, Frances Fetherstonhaugh gave away both her ignorance and her insecurities. Rather than appoint an efficient professional with excellent references from another big house–a woman who might make her feel socially uneasy, threatened or displaced–she decided instead to give the job to someone from her past. Someone who would protect her. The new housekeeper’s name was Sarah Wells, and she was born an innkeeper’s daughter in Midhurst, seven miles away.
IV
1853: Others Have Servants
Some thirty years earlier, this same Sarah Wells had arrived at Uppark to take up the post of lady’s maid to Fanny Bullock. They were close in age (27 and 30), and natural companions in a household that Sarah recorded in her diary as ‘very quaint and feeble’, though she ‘got gradually used to them’. Fellow servants included lady’s maid Anne Austin, 64; laundress Sarah Blackman, 72; housemaid Sarah Horwood, 45; and nurse Sarah Chitty, 53.4
Sarah Neal, as she was then called, came via Miss Riley’s finishing school for middle-class girls, followed by a four-year apprenticeship as a dressmaker and a spell with one Lady Forde in Ireland. She nursed ambitions to learn French and to travel. What she got was Uppark’s under-gardener Joseph Wells. And with their engagement announced, she had no choice but to leave. It was not done to continue in service as a married woman. Having become ‘greatly attached’ to her mistress (as she recorded in her diary), the two parted with ‘deep regret…most reluctantly’. Miss Bullock, now aged 34 and unlikely to marry, watched her friend go off to the satisfactions of homemaking and babies, a life peculiarly out of her reach. Fanny Bullock might have thought her own good fortune a kind of curse, but she would have been wrong. The life Mrs Sarah Wells went on to lead was wretched by comparison.