by Bill Bryson
Houses were increasingly designed to keep staff out of sight and separate from the household except to the point of absolute necessity. The architectural refinement that most added to segregation was the back staircase. “The gentry walking up the stairs no longer met their last night’s faeces coming down them” is how Mark Girouard neatly put it. “On both sides this privacy is highly valued,” wrote Robert Kerr in The Gentleman’s House, though we may safely assume that Mr. Kerr had a closer acquaintanceship with the feelings of those who filled the chamber pots than those who emptied them.
At the highest level guests and permanent members of the household were sometimes required to be as invisible as servants. When Queen Victoria went on her afternoon walks through the grounds of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, no one at all, from any level of society, was permitted to encounter her. It was said that you could fix her location by the sight of panicked people fleeing before her. On one occasion the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, found himself caught on open ground with nothing to hide behind but a dwarf shrub. As Harcourt was six feet four inches tall and very stout, his hiding could be no more than a token gesture. Her majesty affected not to see him, but then she was very accomplished at not seeing things. In the house, where encounters in the corridors were unavoidable, it was her practice to gaze fixedly ahead and, with an imperious glint, dematerialize anyone who unexpectedly appeared. Servants, unless extremely well trusted, were not allowed to look directly at her.
“The division of classes is the one thing which is most dangerous and reprehensible and never intended by the law of nature and which the Queen is always labouring to alter,” Victoria once wrote, conveniently ignoring that the one place this noble principle didn’t apply was in her own regal presence.
The senior servant within the household was the butler. His female counterpart was the housekeeper. Below them came the clerk of the kitchen and the chef, followed by an array of housemaids, parlormaids, valets, houseboys, and footmen. Footmen were originally just that—men who trotted on foot beside their master or mistress’s sedan chair or carriage, to look glorious and perform any necessary services en route. By the seventeenth century, they were prized like racehorses, and sometimes their masters raced them against one another for high stakes. Footmen did most of the public jobs in the household—answered the door, served at table, delivered messages—and so were often chosen for their height, bearing, and general dishiness, much to the disgust of Mrs. Beeton. “When the lady of fashion chooses her footman without any other consideration than his height, shape and tournure of his calf, it is not surprising that she should find a domestic who has no attachment for the family,” she sniffed.
Liaisons between footmen and mistresses were popularly supposed to be a feature of some of the more relaxed of the nation’s households. In one well-known case Viscount Ligonier of Clonmell discovered that his wife had been consorting with an Italian nobleman, Count Vittorio Amadeo Alfieri. Ligonier offered a challenge, as honor required, and the two men had a duel of sorts in London’s Green Park, using swords borrowed from a nearby shop. They tapped weapons for a few minutes, but their hearts didn’t really appear to be in it, possibly because they knew the capricious Lady Ligonier wasn’t worth spilling blood over, a suspicion she confirmed almost immediately by running off with her footman. This prompted a good deal of appreciative ribaldry throughout the nation and some happy versifying, of which I can offer this couplet:
But see the luscious Ligonier
Prefers her post boy to her Peer
Life for servants wasn’t all bad by any means. The big country houses generally were lived in for only two or three months a year, so for some servants life was long periods of comparative ease punctuated by seasons of hard work and very long hours. For town servants, the opposite was generally the case.
Whether in the country or in town, servants were warm, well fed, decently attired, and adequately sheltered at a time when those things meant a good deal. It has been calculated that, when all the comforts are factored in, a senior servant enjoyed a salary equivalent to £50,000 in today’s money. Additional perks were generally also available for those ingenious or daring enough to seize them. At Chatsworth, for instance, beer was piped from the brewhouse to the house in a pipe that ran through Joseph Paxton’s great conservatory. At some point during routine maintenance it was discovered that an enterprising member of the household had, equally routinely, been tapping into it.
Servants often made pretty good money from tips, too. It was usual when departing from a dinner party to have to pass a line of five or six footmen, each expecting his shilling, making a dinner out a very expensive business for everyone but the servants. Weekend guests were expected to be lavish in their tips, too. Servants also made money from showing visitors around. A custom arose in the eighteenth century of providing tours to callers if they were respectably dressed, and it became common for middle-class people to visit stately homes in much the same way they do today. In 1776, a visitor to Wilton House noted that she was visitor number 3,025 that year, and it was still only August. Some properties received so many sightseers that arrangements had to be formalized to keep things under control. Chatsworth was open on two designated days a week, and Woburn, Blenheim, Castle Howard, Hardwick Hall, and Hampton Court similarly introduced opening hours to try to limit the throngs. Horace Walpole was so plagued with visitors to his house, Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, that he issued tickets and printed a long, rather peevish list of rules about what would be permitted and what not. If, for example, an applicant applied for four tickets, but five people then turned up, none would be admitted. Other houses were more accommodating. Rokeby Hall, in Yorkshire, opened a tea room.
Often the hardest work was in smaller households, where one servant might have to do the work of two or three elsewhere. Mrs. Beeton, predictably, had a great deal to say about how many servants one should have depending on financial position and breeding. Someone of noble birth, she decreed, would require at least twenty-five servants. A person earning £1,000 a year needed five—a cook, two housemaids, a nursemaid, and a footman. The minimum for a professional middle-class household was three: parlormaid, housemaid, and cook. Even someone living on as little as £150 a year was deemed wealthy enough to employ a maid-of-all-work (a job title that truly said it all). Mrs. Beeton herself had four servants. In practice, however, it appears that most people didn’t employ nearly as many people as Mrs. Beeton thought they should.
A much more typical household was that of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, the historian and his wife, who employed a single maid at 5 Great Cheyne Row in Chelsea. Not only did this underappreciated soul have to cook, clean, clear away dishes, tend fires, haul ash, deal with callers, manage supplies, and do all the rest, but each time the Carlyles wanted a bath—and they wanted many—she had to draw, heat, and carry eight or ten gallons of hot water up three flights of stairs, and afterward repeat the process in reverse.
In the Carlyles’ house, the maid didn’t have a room of her own, but lived and slept in the kitchen—a surprisingly common arrangement in smaller households, even refined ones such as the Carlyles’. The kitchen at Great Cheyne Row was in the basement, and was warm and snug, if a touch dark, but even this elemental space was not the maid’s to control. Thomas Carlyle liked its coziness, too, and often chose to read there in the evenings, banishing the maid to the “back kitchen,” which doesn’t sound too dire, but in fact was just an unheated storeroom. There the maid perched among sacks of potatoes and other provisions until she heard the scrape of Carlyle’s chair, the tap of his pipe on the grate, and the sounds of his retiring, which was often very late, and could at last claim her spartan bed.
In thirty-two years at Great Cheyne Row, the Carlyles employed thirty-four maids—and the Carlyles were comparatively easy people to work for since they had no children and were reasonably patient and compassionate. But it was nearly impossible to find employees who could meet their exacting s
tandards. Sometimes the servants failed spectacularly, as when Mrs. Carlyle came home one afternoon in 1843 to find her housekeeper dead drunk on the kitchen floor, “with a chair upset beside her and in the midst of a perfect chaos of dirty dishes and fragments of broken crockery.” On another occasion Mrs. Carlyle learned to her horror that a maid had given birth to an illegitimate child in the downstairs parlor while she was away. She was particularly exercised that the woman had used “all my fine napkins.” Most maids, however, left or were asked to leave because they declined to work as hard as the Carlyles expected them to.
The inevitable fact was that servants, being only human, rarely possessed the acuity, skills, endurance, and patience necessary to satisfy the ceaseless whims of employers. Anyone in command of the many talents necessary to be an outstanding servant was unlikely to want to be one.
The greatest vulnerability of servants was powerlessness. They could be blamed for almost anything. There have never been more convenient scapegoats, as the Carlyles themselves discovered in a famous incident on the evening of March 6, 1835. At that time, the Carlyles had only recently moved to London from their native Scotland, with the hope that Thomas would there fashion a career as a writer. He was thirty-eight years old and had already established a slight reputation—a very slight one, it has to be said—with a work of dense personal philosophy called Sartor Resartus, but he had yet to write his magnum opus. He intended to correct that deficiency with a multivolume history of the French Revolution. In the winter of 1835, after much exhausting labor, he had finished the first volume and given the manuscript to his friend and mentor John Stuart Mill for his valued opinion.
This was the background against which Mill turned up at Carlyle’s door on that chilly evening in early March, looking ashen. Behind him, waiting in a carriage, was Harriet Taylor, Mill’s mistress. Taylor was the wife of a businessman of such relaxed disposition that he essentially shared her with Mill, and even provided them with a cottage west of London, at Walton-on-Thames, where they could go to tryst. I’ll let Carlyle himself take up the story at this point:
Mill’s rap was heard at the door: he entered pale, unable to speak; gasped out to my wife to go down and speak with Mrs Taylor; and came forward (led by my hand, and astonished looks) the very picture of desperation. After various inarticulate and articulate utterances to merely the same effect, he informs me that my First Volume (left out by him in too careless a manner, after or while reading it) was, except for four or five bits of leaves, irrevocably ANNIHILATED! I remember and still can remember less of it than anything I ever wrote with such toil: it is gone, the whole world and myself backed by it could not bring that back: nay the old spirit too is fled.… It is gone, and will not return.
A servant, Mill explained, had seen it lying by the fender and had used it to light a fire. Now, you don’t have to consider the matter too carefully to realize that this explanation has some problems. First, a handwritten manuscript, however disposed, does not look inconsequential; any maid who worked in the Mill household would be used to seeing manuscripts and could not fail to have had impressed upon her their importance and value. In any case, it hardly takes an entire manuscript to light a fire. Burning the whole would require patiently feeding the pages in a few at a time—the action you would take if you wished to be rid of the manuscript, but not if all you wanted was to start a blaze. In short, it is impossible to conceive circumstances in which a maid, however dim and deficient, could accidentally but plausibly destroy such a piece of work in its entirety.
An alternative possibility was that Mill himself had burned the manuscript in a fit of jealousy or anger. Mill was an authority on the French Revolution and had told Carlyle that he had it in mind to write a book on the subject himself one day, so jealousy was certainly a possible motive. Also Mill at this time was going through a personal crisis: Mrs. Taylor had just insisted to him that she would not leave her husband but wished to maintain their peculiar tripartite relationship. So we might allow that the balance of Mill’s mind was disturbed. Still, such a wanton and destructive act simply didn’t fit with either Mill’s previous good character or his seemingly genuine horror and pain over the loss. The only possibility that remained, then, was that Mrs. Taylor, whom the staid Carlyles didn’t much like, was in some unspecified way responsible. Mill had told them that he had read large parts of the work to her at Walton, so the suspicion arose that she had been in custody of the manuscript at the time of the disaster and somehow was at the dark, unhappy root of the matter.
The one thing the Carlyles could not do was question any of this, even in a despairing, rhetorical sort of way. The rules of decorum decreed that Carlyle had to accept the facts as Mill delivered them and was not permitted any supplementary questions about how this terrible, amazing, inexplicable catastrophe had happened. An unspecified servant had carelessly destroyed Carlyle’s manuscript in its entirety, and that was the end of it.
Carlyle had no option but to sit down and recompose the book as best he could—a task made all the more challenging by the fact that he no longer had notes to call on, for it had been his bizarre and patently misguided practice to burn his notes as he finished each chapter, as a kind of celebration of work done. Mill insisted on giving Carlyle compensation of £100, enough to live on for a year while he redid the book, but their friendship, not surprisingly, never really recovered. Three weeks later, in a letter to his brother, Carlyle complained that Mill had not even had the courtesy to let them sorrow in private but had “remained injudiciously enough to almost midnight, and my poor Dame and I had to sit talking of indifferent matters; and could not till then get our lament freely uttered.”
It is impossible to know how the reworked version differed from the original. What can be said is that the volume we now have is one of the most unreadable books ever to attract the esteem of its age. It is written entirely in the present tense in strange, overwrought language that seems always to be tiptoeing around on the brink of incoherence. Here is Carlyle discussing the man behind the guillotine:
And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one other time? If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see him with the eye of prophecy: for indeed the Parisian Deputies are all a little late. Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner; doomed by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal from the resting-place, the bosom of oblivion!… Unfortunate doctor! For two-and-twenty years, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Caesar’s.
Readers had never encountered such perky intimacy in a book and found it thrilling. Dickens claimed to have read the work five hundred times and credited it as the inspiration behind A Tale of Two Cities. Oscar Wilde venerated Carlyle. “He made history a song for the first time in our language,” he wrote. “He was our English Tacitus.” For half a century, Carlyle was, for literary folk, a god.
He died in 1881. His written histories barely outlived him, but his personal history goes on and on, thanks in very large part to the exceptionally voluminous correspondence that he and his wife left behind—enough to fill thirty volumes of close-printed text. Thomas Carlyle would no doubt be astonished and dismayed today to learn that his histories are largely unread, but that he is known now for the minutiae of his daily life, including decades of petty moans about servants. The irony, of course, is that employing a succession of thankless servants is what gave him and his wife the leisure to write all those letters.
Much of this had always been thus. Like the Carlyles, but nearly two centuries earlier, Samuel Pepys and his wife, Elizabeth, had a seemingly endless string of servants during the nine and a half years in which Pepys wrote his famous diary, and perhaps little wonder since he spent a good deal of his time pawing the females and beating the boys—though, come to that, he beat the girls quite a lot, too. Once he took a broom to a servant na
med Jane “and basted her till she cried extremely.” Her crime was that she was untidy. Pepys kept a boy whose principal function seems to have been to give him something convenient to hit—“with a cane or a birch or a whip or a rope’s end, or even a salted eel,” as the historian Liza Picard puts it.
Pepys was also a great one for dismissing servants. One was sacked for uttering “some sawcy words,” another for being a gossip. One was given new clothes upon arrival, but ran off that night; when she was caught, Pepys retrieved the clothes and insisted that she be severely whipped. Others were dismissed for drinking or pilfering food. Some almost certainly went because they spurned his amorous fumblings. An amazing number, however, submitted. Pepys’s diary reveals that he had intercourse with at least ten women other than his wife and sexual encounters with forty more. Many were servants. Of one maid, Mary Mercer, the Dictionary of National Biography serenely notes: “Samuel seems to have made a habit of fondling Mercer’s breasts while she dressed him in the morning.” (It is interesting that it is “Samuel” for our rakish hero and “Mercer” for the drudge.) When they weren’t dressing him, absorbing his blows, or providing roosts for his gropes, Pepys’s servants were expected to comb his hair and wash his ears. This was on top of a normal day’s cooking, cleaning, fetching, carrying, and all the rest. Not altogether surprisingly, the Pepyses had great difficulty finding and keeping servants.
Pepys’s experience also demonstrated that servants could betray. In 1679, Pepys dismissed his butler for sleeping with the housekeeper (who, interestingly, remained in his employ). The butler sought revenge by claiming to Pepys’s political enemies that Pepys was a papist. As this happened during a period of religious hysteria, Pepys was imprisoned in the Tower of London. It was only because the butler was seized by conscience and admitted that he had made the whole thing up that Pepys was allowed to go free, but it was a painfully vivid reminder that masters could be as much at the mercy of servants as servants were of masters.