by Bill Bryson
As for the servants themselves, we generally don’t know much about them because their existences went mostly unrecorded. One interesting exception was Hannah Cullwick, who kept an unusually thorough diary for nearly forty years. Cullwick was born in 1833 in Shropshire and entered household service full-time as a pot girl—a kitchen skivvy—at the age of eight. In the course of a long career she was an undermaid, kitchen maid, cook, scullion, and general housekeeper. In all capacities, the work was hard and the hours long. She began her diary in 1859 at the age of twenty-five and kept it up until just shy of her sixty-fifth birthday. Thanks to its span, it constitutes the most complete record of the daily life of an underservant during the great age of servitude. Like most house servants, Cullwick worked from before seven in the morning till nine or ten at night, sometimes later. The diaries are an endless, largely emotionless catalog of tasks performed. Here is a typical entry, for July 14, 1860:
Opened the shutters & lighted the kitchen fire. Shook my sooty thing in the dusthole & emptied the soot there. Swept & dusted the rooms & the hall. Laid the hearth & got breakfast up. Clean’d 2 pairs of boots. Made the beds & emptied the slops. Clean’d & washed the breakfast things up. Clean’d the plate; clean’d the knives & got dinner up. Clean’d away. Clean’d the kitchen up; unpack’d a hamper. Took two chickens to Mrs Brewer’s & brought the message back. Made a tart & pick’d & gutted two ducks & roasted them. Clean’d the steps & flags on my knees. Blackleaded the scraper in front of the house; clean’d the street flags too on my knees. Wash’d up in the scullery. Clean’d the pantry on my knees & scour’d the tables. Scrubbed the flags around the house & clean’d the window sills. Got tea for the Master & Mrs Warwick.… Clean’d the privy & passage & scullery floor on my knees. Wash’d the dog & clean’d the sinks down. Put the supper ready for Ann to take up, for I was too dirty & tired to go upstairs. Wash’d in a bath & to bed.
This is a numbingly typical day. All that is unusual here is that she managed a bath. On most days she concludes her entries with a weary, fatalistic: “Slept in my dirt.”
Beyond her spare account of duties, there was something even more extraordinary about Hannah Cullwick’s life, for she spent thirty-six years of it, from 1873 to her death in 1909, secretly married to her employer, a civil servant and minor poet named Arthur Munby, who never disclosed the relationship to family or friends. When alone, they lived as man and wife; when a visitor called, however, Cullwick stepped back into the role of maid. If overnight guests were present, Cullwick withdrew from the marital bed and slept in the kitchen. Munby was a man of some standing. He numbered among his friends Ruskin, Rossetti, and Browning, and they were frequent visitors to his home, but none had any idea that the woman who called him “Sir” was actually his wife. Even in private, their relationship was a touch unorthodox, to say the least. At his bidding, she called him “massa” and blacked her skin to make herself look like a slave. The diaries, it transpires, were kept largely so that he could read about her getting dirty.
Hannah Cullwick photographed by her husband at various servants’ tasks, and dressed as a chimney sweep (bottom left). Note the locked chain around her neck. (photo credit 5.1)
It was only in 1910, after Munby died and his will was made public, that the news came out, causing a minor sensation. It was her odd marriage rather than her poignant diaries that made Hannah Cullwick famous.
At the bottom of the servant heap were laundrymaids, who were so lowly that often they were kept almost entirely out of sight: others took washing to them so that they would not be seen collecting it. Laundry duty was so despised that in larger households servants were sometimes sent to the laundry as a punishment. It was an exhausting job. In a good-sized country house laundry staff could easily deal with six or seven hundred separate items of clothing, towels, and bed linens every week. Because there were no detergents before the 1850s, most laundry loads had to be soaked in soapy water or lye for hours, then pounded and scrubbed with vigor, boiled for an hour or more, rinsed repeatedly, wrung out by hand or (after about 1850) fed through a roller, and carried outside to be draped over a hedge or spread on a lawn to dry. (One of the commonest of crimes in the countryside was the theft of drying clothes, so someone often had to stay with the laundry until it was dry.) Altogether, according to Judith Flanders in The Victorian House, a straightforward load—one involving sheets and other household linens, say—was likely to incorporate at least eight separate processes. But many loads were far from straightforward. Difficult or delicate fabrics had to be treated with the greatest care, and items of clothing made of different types of fabric—of velvet and lace, say—often had to be carefully taken apart, washed separately, and then sewn back together.
Because most dyes were impermanent and finicky, it was necessary to add precise doses of chemical compounds to the water of every load either to preserve the color or to restore it: alum and vinegar for greens, baking soda for purples, oil of vitriol for reds. Every accomplished laundress had a catalog of recipes for removing different kinds of stains. Linen was often steeped in stale urine, or a dilute solution of poultry dung, as this had a bleaching effect, but the resulting smell required additional vigorous rinsing, usually in some kind of herbal extract.
Starching was such a big job that it was often left to a following day. Ironing was another massive and dauntingly separate task. Irons cooled quickly, so a hot iron had to be used with speed and then exchanged with a freshly heated one. Generally, there would be one on the go and two being heated. The irons, heavy in themselves, had to be pressed down with great force to get the desired results. But because there were no controls, they had to be wielded with delicacy and care so as not to scorch fabrics. Heating irons over a fire often made them sooty, too, so they had to be constantly wiped down. If starch was involved, it stuck to the bottom of the iron, which then had to be rubbed with sandpaper or an emery board.
On laundry day it was often necessary for somebody to get up as early as three in the morning to get the hot water going. In many houses with only one servant it was necessary to hire in an outside laundress for the day. Some houses sent their laundry out, but until the invention of carbolic acid and other potent disinfectants, this was always attended with the fear that the laundry would come back infected with some dread disease like scarlet fever. There was also the squeamish uncertainty of not knowing whose clothes were being washed with one’s own. Whiteley’s, a large London department store, offered a laundry service beginning in 1892, but the service didn’t do well until a store manager thought to post a large notice that servants’ clothing and customers’ clothing were always washed separately. Until well into the twentieth century, many of the wealthiest London residents chose to send their weekly laundry to their country estates by train and have it done by people they felt they could trust.
In America the servant situation was very different in almost every way. Americans, it is often written, didn’t have nearly as many servants as Europeans. That is true only up to a point, however, for Americans had slaves. Thomas Jefferson owned more than two hundred slaves, including twenty-five for his household alone. As one of his biographers has noted, “When Jefferson wrote that he planted olive trees and pomegranates, one must be reminded that he wielded no shovel, but simply directed his slaves.”
Slavery and race were not automatic in the early days. Some blacks were treated as indentured servants, and freed like anyone else when their time was up. A seventeenth-century black man in Virginia named Anthony Johnson acquired a 250-acre tobacco plantation and grew prosperous enough to be a slave owner himself. Nor was slavery a southern institution at first. Slavery was legal in New York until 1827. In Pennsylvania, William Penn owned slaves. When Benjamin Franklin moved to London in 1757, he brought with him two slaves, named King and Peter.
What America didn’t have a lot of were free servants. Even at the peak of service in America, fewer than half of U.S. households employed a servant, and many servants didn’t see themsel
ves as servants at all. Most refused to wear livery, and many expected to sit down to meals with the family—to be treated, in short, as something much closer to equals.
As one historian has put it, rather than try to reform the servants, it was easier to reform the house, and so from an early period America became besotted with convenience and labor-saving devices, though nineteenth-century appliances often added nearly as much labor as they saved. In 1899, the Boston School of Housekeeping calculated that a coal stove required fifty-four minutes of heavy maintenance a day—emptying ash, replenishing coal, blacking and polishing the stove, and so on—before the harried homemaker so much as boiled a pot of water. The rise of gas actually made matters worse. A book called The Cost of Cleanness calculated that a typical eight-room house with gas fittings required fourteen hundred hours a year of special heavy cleaning, including ten hours a month of washing windows.
In any case, many of the new conveniences mostly eliminated work previously done by men—chopping wood, for instance—and so were of little benefit to women. In fact, lifestyle changes and technological improvements mostly just brought more work to women through bigger houses, more complicated meals, more copious and frequent laundry, and ever higher expectations of cleanliness.
But a potent and invisible presence was about to change all that for everyone, and for the story of that we need to proceed not to another room, but to a small box that hangs on the wall.
* The scullery (from escullier, an Old French word for dishes) was where dishes were washed and stacked, and it was here that you found a big, deep sink. Larder—referring to a place where meat was kept—isn’t, as one might suppose, directly related to lard; it is from the French lardon, for bacon. The terms are the ones used on the original plans for the Old Rectory, but the servants themselves might well have called the second room a pantry, from the Latin panna, or “bread room,” which by the mid-nineteenth century had come to signify a place of general food storage.
* Incidentally, our standard image of servants in black uniforms with frilly caps, starched aprons, and the like actually reflects a fairly short-lived reality. Servants’ uniforms didn’t become routine until the rise of cotton imports in the 1850s. Before then, the quality of clothes worn by the upper classes was so instantly and visibly superior to that of the working classes that it wasn’t necessary to distinguish servants with uniforms.
• CHAPTER VI •
THE FUSE BOX
In the autumn of 1939, during the slightly hysterical confusion that comes with the outbreak of war, Great Britain introduced stringent blackout regulations to thwart any murderous ambitions by the Luftwaffe. For three months it was essentially illegal to show any light at night, however faint. Rule breakers could be arrested for lighting a cigarette in a doorway or holding a match up to read a road sign. One man was fined for not covering the glow of the heater light from his tropical fish tank. Hotels and offices spent hours every day putting up and taking down special blackout covers. Drivers had to drive around in almost perfect invisibility—even dashboard lights were not allowed—so they had to guess not only where the road was but at what speed they were moving.
Not since the Middle Ages had Britain been so dark, and the consequences were noisy and profound. To avoid striking the curb or anything parked along it, cars took to straddling the middle white lines, which was fine until they encountered another vehicle doing likewise from the opposite direction. Pedestrians found themselves in constant peril as every sidewalk became an obstacle course of unseen lampposts, trees, and street furniture. Trams, known with respect as “the silent peril,” were especially unnerving. “During the first four months of the war,” Juliet Gardiner relates in Wartime, “a total of 4,133 people were killed on Britain’s roads”—a 100 percent increase over the year before. Nearly three-quarters of the victims were pedestrians. Without dropping a single bomb, the Luftwaffe was already killing six hundred people a month, as the British Medical Journal drily observed.
Fortunately, matters soon calmed down and a little illumination was allowed into people’s lives—just enough to stop most of the carnage—but it was a salutary reminder of how used to abundant illumination the world had grown.
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle—a good candle—provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt lightbulb.* Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed.
Occasionally we can see into the dimness, as it were, when we find descriptions of what was considered sumptuous, as when a guest at a Virginia plantation, Nomini Hall, marveled in his diary how “luminous and splendid” the dining room was during a banquet because seven candles were burning—four on the table and three elsewhere in the room. To him this was a blaze of light. At about the same time, across the ocean in England, a gifted amateur artist named John Harden left a charming set of drawings showing family life at his home, Brathay Hall in Westmorland. What is striking is how little illumination the family expected or required. A typical drawing shows four members sitting companionably at a table sewing or reading by the light of a single candle, and there is no sense of hardship or deprivation, and certainly no sign of the desperate postures of people trying to get a tiny bit of light to fall more productively on a page or piece of embroidery. A Rembrandt drawing, Student at a Table by Candlelight, is actually much closer to the reality. It shows a youth sitting at a table, all but lost in a depth of shadow and gloom that a single candle on the wall beside him cannot begin to penetrate. Yet he has a newspaper. The fact is that people put up with dim evenings because they knew no other kind.
Reading by candlelight, by John Harden (photo credit 6.1)
The widespread belief that people in the pre-electric world went to bed at nightfall seems to be based entirely on the presumption that anyone deprived of robust illumination would be driven by frustration to retire. In fact, it appears that most people didn’t retire terribly early—nine or ten o’clock seems to have been standard for most people in the days before electricity, and for some, particularly in cities, it was even later. For those who could control their working hours, bedtimes and rising times were at least as variable then as now and appear to have had little to do with the amount of light available. In one of his diary entries, Samuel Pepys records rising at four in the morning, but in another he records going to bed at four in the morning. The writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson famously stayed abed till noon if he could; generally he could. The writer Joseph Addison routinely rose at three on summer mornings (and sometimes even earlier), but not till eleven in winter. There certainly seems to have been no rush to bring the day to a close. Visitors to eighteenth-century London often noted that the shops were open till ten at night, and clearly there would be no shops without shoppers. When guests were present, it was usual to serve supper at ten and for company to stay till midnight or so. Including conversation beforehand and music after, a dinner gathering could last for seven hours or more. Balls often went on until two or three in the morning, at which time a supper would be served. People were so keen to go out and stay up that they didn’t let much get in their way. In 1785 a Louisa Stewart wrote to her sister that the French ambassador suffered “a stroke of the palsy yesterday,” yet guests turned up at his house that night anyway “and played at faro, etc., as if he had not been dying in the next room. We are a curious people.”
Getting around outside after dark was hard. On the darkest nights it was not uncommon for the stumbling pedestrian to “run his Head against a Post” or suffer some other painful surprise. People had to grope their way through the darkness, although in some cases they simply groped: lighting in London was still so poor in 1763 that James Boswell was able to have sex with a prostitute on Westminster Bridge—hardly the most private of trysting places. Darkness also meant danger. Thieves were at large ev
erywhere, and as one London authority noted in 1718, people were often reluctant to go out at night for fear that “they may be blinded, knocked down, cut or stabbed.” To avoid smacking into the unyielding, or being waylaid by brigands, people often secured the services of linkboys—so called because they carried torches known as links made from stout lengths of rope soaked in resin or some other combustible material—to see them home. Unfortunately, the linkboys themselves couldn’t always be trusted and sometimes led their customers into back alleys where they or their confederates relieved the hapless customers of money and silken items.
Even after gaslights became widely available for city streets in the mid-nineteenth century, by modern standards it was still a pretty murky world after nightfall. The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb. Moreover they were distantly spaced. Generally, at least thirty yards of darkness lay between each, but on some roads—the King’s Road through London’s Chelsea, for instance—they were seventy yards apart; thus, they didn’t so much light the way as provide distant points of brightness to aim for. Yet gas lamps held out for a surprisingly long time in some quarters. As late as the 1930s, almost half of London streets were still lit by gas.
If anything drove people to bed early in the pre-electric world, it was not boredom but exhaustion. Many people worked immensely long hours. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers “must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night”—giving an eighty-four-hour workweek. At the same time, it is worth bearing in mind that a typical London theater like Shakespeare’s Globe could hold two thousand people (about 1 percent of London’s population), of whom a great part were working people, and that there were, moreover, several theaters in operation at any time, as well as alternative entertainments like bearbaiting and cockfighting. So, whatever the statutes may have decreed, it is apparent that on any given day several thousand working Londoners patently were not at their workbenches but were out having a good time.