What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  Aside from land, carriages and servants were the two sure signs of wealth in nineteenth-century England—so much so, that they were taxed, along with fancy carriages, during the Napoleonic Wars to ensure that the rich paid their share.

  Quite apart from reasons of status, you had to have servants unless you wanted to do housework yourself. There were no electric lights for most of the century, nor vacuum cleaners, nor floor polishers, nor dishwashers, nor driers—if you wanted to do something, you did it by hand. And even transportation required horses that someone had to groom, water, and feed every day of the year. If you wanted a hot bath, you generally had to heat the water over a fire and then transport it upstairs in buckets and pour it into a hip bath. Plates and dishes all had to be scrubbed by hand after each meal or dinner party. Carpets had to be beaten and cleaned manually, and halls and floors and stone stoops had to be scrubbed on hands and knees. It all took manpower or womanpower—there were no technological shortcuts.

  Plus there was always a lot to be done, given the lavish scale on which the nineteenth-century middle and upper classes lived. A ten-course meal was not uncommon for a fancy dinner, and an eighteen-guest dinner party might generate as many as five hundred items to be washed when it was over. Even a normal, everyday meal in a large household might have to be served in the nursery (for infants), schoolroom (the older children), dining room (the adults), steward’s room (the upper servants), and servants’ hall (the lower servants). By mid-century women’s clothes came in multiple layers of petticoats and skirts, and they would be changed several times during the day at, say, a house party, as a woman went from morning gown to walking dress to archery dress to tea gown to formal evening dress—and they all had to be washed and cleaned by hand. Homes were cluttered with intricately carved and designed furniture and bric-a-brac well suited for catching dust. Heavy carpets, mirrors, old china figurines, Uncle Albert’s malacca walking cane, the stuffed cockatoo from Australia, the chimneypiece ornamentation, the epergne and so forth—all these had to be kept clean and dusted, and the more of them there were the more servants were needed to keep them clean. Plus there were always guests coming to stay, and a servant would need to attend to their rooms at least four times a day. In the morning, she—it was usually a housemaid—would draw the blinds and curtains, remove soiled boots and clothes, and bring hot water for bathing or washing before breakfast. She would bring fresh water at noon and seven o’clock for washing before meals, and then before bedtime she would prepare the bed, close the windows, and bring fresh towels and clean water.

  It would certainly not have occurred to nineteenth-century English gentlemen to do any of this, nor could Victorian ladies undertake housework either. That was, after all, the whole point of being a lady—you didn’t do anything, except tell the servants what to do, receive your callers, and work on your embroidery or perhaps paint decorative flowers on the fire screen for the hearth. Manual labor of any kind would have cast serious doubts on your eligibility to be received in polite society. Explaining why she needed a lady’s maid, Trollope says of Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds that “it was necessarily part of the religion of such a woman as Lizzie Eustace that she could not go to bed, or change her clothes, or get up in the morning, without the assistance of her own young woman. She would not like to have it thought that she could stick a pin into her own belongings without such assistance.”

  To do the work that the master and mistress did not do, then, required “help.” A small household would be able to afford only a maid-of-all-work, a girl who cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, mended, looked after the children, and got to stay home at night by herself in the dank, empty kitchen while the family went out or enjoyed themselves reading the latest installment of Dickens aloud to one another in the front parlor. She was paid perhaps something on the order of two shillings a week. A grander household, say that of a professional man, like a doctor or a banker, would perhaps have had a cook, a housemaid, and a nurse. In the still grander households, there would be male servants as well, at which point an elaborate hierarchy of upper (and under) male and female household servants would be organized.

  The servants in a great house could amount to a small army. The duke of Westminster had fifty indoor servants at his Eaton Hall. Indeed, servants made up 16 percent of the national work force in 1891. Each large household had a male staff presided over by a butler and a female staff presided over by a housekeeper. (In an unusually grand household a steward would preside over the entire staff.) The butler and housekeeper were each typically in charge of hiring, firing, and supervising the servants under them. As a mark of respect, the butler was addressed by the family by his surname (and called “Mr.” by the under servants); the housekeeper was “Mrs.,” whether she were married or not. Besides supervising the footmen (including their waiting at dinner), the butler was in charge of the wine cellar (the word “butler” comes from bouteille), taking care of the “plate,” or family silverware, announcing visitors when the occasion called for it, and, due to the fact that the ink on nineteenth-century newspapers was generally still tacky when they were delivered, ironing the master’s newspaper each morning. The butler’s command post was a special pantry where the plate and fine china were kept when not in use, the plate sometimes in a safe which he slept nearby to guard. His job often called for an ability to intuit social distinctions; when his mistress was “at home,” he was to lead a gentleman or lady directly into the drawing room while ensuring that all other callers, e.g., tradesmen, waited in the hall. The housekeeper had a special room to work out of as well, and, in addition to supervising the maids’ housework, she made preserves, saw to the tea and coffee, ordered and kept the household accounts, and was responsible for the household linen. Her mark of office was the great ring of keys she carried wherever she went.

  The male staff reporting to the butler might consist of one or more footmen and a boy or page. The footmen had duties both outside and inside the home—in the residence they trimmed lamps, carried coal, sometimes cleaned silverware, announced visitors, and stood around looking imposing. In their public capacity they waited at dinner and attended the mistress when she went calling—leaving the visiting cards at the front door while she waited in the carriage. They also attended family members to the opera, riding on the back of the coach or carriage—partly to keep street boys from jumping up and getting a free ride—in their “livery,” or household uniform of fancy coat, knee breeches, stockings, and powdered hair, a costume that endured to the end of the 1800s. Because of their appearance at dinner and in public with the family, footmen were supposed to be the most “presentable” of the male servants. They were evaluated on the basis of the appearance of their calves in silk stockings, and they often gave their height when advertising for positions in the paper—it was considered absurd to have a pair of footmen who didn’t match in height. Ideally, they were supposed to be quite imposing. Lizzie Eustace’s “footman was six feet high, was not bad looking, and was called Thomas,” we are told. Popular writings joked incessantly about their humorless self-importance.

  There was generally some kind of “outdoor” staff as well, typically consisting of a coachman (who maintained as well as drove the coach), a groom (who looked after the horses), and, in the country, a gardener and a gamekeeper, the latter with the responsibility for raising and protecting the game on the property and taking the master and guests shooting. The bailiff or land agent who collected the rent from tenants and oversaw the argricultural management of a large estate was typically a local tenant farmer, or, in the case of an agent, an “independent contractor.”

  On the female side, below the housekeeper came the housemaids. They were in charge of keeping the house spic and span and supplying bedrooms with water for washing and bathing and with keeping the fires going so no one got cold. Below them came the kitchenmaid, who helped the cook prepare meals, and then the scullerymaids, who washed the dishes and the pots and pans.

  Being in service
was not a glamorous life. The hours were long and hard—a maid-of-all-work might begin work at six in the morning and often not go to bed until eleven at night. Servants were paid poorly—some mid-century housemaids got only £11 to £14 a year. Standard vacations were two weeks off a year plus a half day off on Sunday, one evening out a week, and a day off each month. The servants slept in tiny, overheated or freezing-cold attic rooms and worked in dank, dark basement areas that were too hot or too cold, making sure to keep out of the way of the master and the rest of the household (unless they were a lady’s maid or butler or footman) in keeping with the Victorian dictum that servants generally be neither seen nor heard. Married help was not usually wanted, and maids with young male “followers” were told to discourage them—if found pregnant, even by members of the household, women servants were liable to summary dismissal. They were ordered around, sometimes insulted, and frequently treated with minimal respect for the long, hard back-breaking hours of work they put in.

  Why, then, did they do it? Many did not. By the end of the century, admittedly when the bloom of domestic service was off the rose, the average length of service in a home was not even a year and a half. Those who did stay with it, however, liked the security of the job, the chance, perhaps, to be eligible for some sort of pension at the end of years of service, or the possibility of travel (even going up to the London town house from the country estate would have been something, especially in the days when London was the most important and exciting city in the world). And what were the alternatives? Not always very good; for a woman, say, without education, primarily shopwork or the factories. Besides, in a great household, there was the opportunity to attain a higher status.

  Status was taken very seriously by those in service. A butler might have spent years working his way up to his post of responsibility from a boy or a footman, and a housekeeper might have worked years as a housemaid before being entrusted with the keys to the household storerooms. The butler and the housekeeper, together with the lady’s maid and valet—if any—were the upper servants. (The coachman and head gardener from the outdoor staff also had senior status.) As such, they were entitled to respect and deference from the under staff. “i had to wait on the butler & the town housekeeper & clean their sitting room,” wrote one young kitchen-maid of the upper staff; in the servants’ hall, the upper staff sat in the head places at dinner, in a caricature of the middle-class Victorian dinner party, with the other servants ranged along the side of the long table; visiting servants were seated according to the ranks of their master or mistress. Sometimes upper servants even ate separately in the steward’s or housekeeper’s room, while the other servants had to eat in the servants’ hall. Mr. Rochester’s housekeeper tells Jane Eyre what a relief it is to have a nice, intelligent girl like herself at Thornfield after all this time, the others being “only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality; one must keep them at due distance for fear of losing one’s authority.”

  Perquisites were accorded some servants. A lady’s maid was generally entitled to her mistress’s cast-off clothes and could also keep a rag bag of linen that she was free to sell, presumably to a rag-and-bone shop. The cook was permitted to sell the household’s “dripping,” if she wished, once the household was done with them. All servants who were materially helpful to visitors at a great house expected tips, or “vails,” when a guest left; the Sedleys’ groom refuses to hand down Becky Sharp’s trunks from the carriage when she departs “as she had given nothing to the servants on coming away.” As a rule of thumb, it was suggested by one aid to the perplexed that lady visitors tip their housemaid five shillings for a stay of three or four days, ten shillings for a week or more. Gentlemen were to tip the valet if they didn’t bring one of their own, and also give the coachman a half-crown if that servant drove him to the railroad station. He was also to give five to ten shillings to the groom if he went riding, and the gamekeeper was to get at least ten shillings for every day’s good shooting. “I never bring a man with me,” announces the experienced Mr. Rather to the eponymous hero of Phineas Finn as they are traveling to visit Mr. Kennedy. “The servants of the house like it much better, because they get fee’d.” By century’s end, it appears, the tips expected were often so high that some people were deterred from visiting friends in the country not by the costs of the railroad ticket but by the anticipated cost of tipping all the staff.

  At the beginning of the century, there was very little to distinguish servants by dress from their masters. This changed, the general rule thereafter being that the costume, or livery, of servants was the dress of their betters or masters—only of a generation or so before. Thus the formal knee breeches and stockings of the footman—perfectly fine for a gentleman’s formal wear in 1800 but rather anachronistic by 1840 (butlers wore them until 1870), while the streamers and cap of the parlormaid of the 1890s reflected the attire of a well-dressed middle-class miss of some thirty years before. Dress was not necessarily simple either. Maids were expected by century’s end to wear print dresses in the morning and then change into black (with a white apron) for the afternoon work. Grooms and coachmen wore the crest, if any, of the family on their buttons, and close students of old photographs of waistcoated male staff will note that coachman and groom wear vertically striped waistcoats—those of indoor staff like the butler are invariably horizontally striped.

  THE GOVERNESS

  a young lady accustomed to tuition’ (had I not been a teacher two years?) ‘is desirous of meeting with a situation in a private home where the children are under fourteen.’ (I thought that as I was barely eighteen, it would not do to undertake the guidance of pupils nearer my own age.) ‘She is qualified to teach the usual branches of a good English education, together with French, Drawing, and Music.’ ”

  Thus, Jane Eyre preparing the fateful newspaper ad that will land her at Thornfield Hall. In 1850, there were 21,000 governesses registered in England, and probably many of them were well-educated but impoverished, just like her. Some, apparently, were massively cultured. Miss Pinkerton in Vanity Fair holds out her young ladies as being “perfectly qualified to instruct in Greek, Latin; and the rudiments of Hebrew; in mathematics and history; in Spanish, French, Italian and geography; in music, vocal and instrumental; in dancing, without the aid of a master; and in the elements of natural sciences. In the use of the globes both are proficients.” (The globes consisted of a celestial and a terrestrial globe, used, respectively, to teach heavenly and earth-bound geography.)

  A governess taught the children of middle- and upper-class households until they were old enough to go away to school, college, or to a private tutor, or, as was sometimes the case with girls, “come out.” She was probably often not as well educated as the ladies from Miss Pinkerton’s. Many, no doubt, were like Mrs. Garth in Middlemarch, who “had been a teacher before her marriage” and therefore presumably had “an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall’s Questions,” the latter (Miss Mangnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People) being a widely known rote question-and-answer book for the desperate governess in over her head. Being a governess was one of the few occupations considered suitable for middle-class girls who needed to earn their own living, but although the governess was expected to have the education and mien of a “lady,” she was treated as a servant. “I can be treated as one of the family, except on company days, when the young ladies and I are to dine upstairs,” writes Becky Sharp to her friend Amelia, and we can be sorry—even for Becky Sharp—for the neither-an-outsider-nor-insider status of the post that made the task lonely and difficult. (At the same time, this in-between position made it a marvelous, relatively detached standpoint from which the novelist could describe at close quarters the workings of a household.)

  Many women hated the work. Jane Fairfax, anticipating in Emma that she will become a governess, avers that she is in no rush to go to town and visit “offices, where inquiry would soon procure something�
�offices for the sale not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect.” Similarly, the independent Mary Garth, as Rosamond Vincy observes in Middlemarch, is resigned to looking after the querulous Peter Featherstone “because she likes that better than being a governess.” The help hated governesses because “they give themselves the hairs and hupstarts of ladies,” as Mrs. Blenkinsop says in Vanity Fair, “and their wages is no better than you nor me,” while people of their employers’ class found them too “low.” George Osborne is horrified to find Joe Sedley contemplating an alliance with Becky Sharp while he’s thinking of marrying Amy: “Who’s this little schoolgirl that is ogling and making love to him? Hang it, the family’s low enough already, without her. A governess is all very well, but I’d rather have a lady for my sister-in-law.” The extraordinarily genteel Mrs. General agrees graciously to undertake the instruction of the Dorrit female children in the finer ways of society but when Mr. Dorrit timidly inquires “what remune—” “Why, indeed,” the old battleaxe interrupts, she is too delicate to talk of cash. “I am not, as I hope you are aware, a governess—” “O dear no!” says Mr. Dorrit. “Pray, madam, do not imagine for a moment that I think so.”

  Being neither family nor servant could lead to a terrible isolation in the very midst of a bustling household life. One real-life governess made a point of spending five hours writing each letter that she sent: “ . . . it has been a great amusement . . . during many a solitary hour when I had no other employ.” Perhaps it was worse, because, if the examples of Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, and Lucy Morris in The Eustace Diamonds are anything to go by, many were orphans.

  However, as the cases of the three fictional governesses suggest, governesses did sometimes have a way of catching the masculine eye in a family. Alone, genteel, perhaps in “reduced” or “distressed” circumstances—and well-educated with all the character and refinements of a lady—can it be wondered at that younger sons or even the head of a household under the same roofs with such creatures found them appealing? Especially in a culture that emphasized the sacred obligation of the gentleman to come to the aid of all distressed members of the weaker sex? The case of Jane Eyre—romance-novel prototype though it may seem—was evidently not altogether atypical. Becky snags Rawdon Crawley, and David Copperfield’s mother (also an orphan) explains in a rather wistful portrait of the governess’s life how “I was nursery-governess in a family when Mr. Copperfield came to visit. Mr. Copperfield was very kind to me, and took a great deal of notice of me, and paid me a good deal of attention, and at last proposed to me.” For every fictional Jane Eyre, who knows how many real-life counterparts there were, like the governess in the household of the editor of the Westminster Review, on which George Eliot worked, who carried on an affair with him while they lived together with his family. The visiting Hippolyte Taine maintained that a good many well-off men in London kept governesses as their mistresses. If Thackeray is correct, the susceptibility of males in a household to a governess’s charms was well understood. And he suggests how the canny employer may have solved the problem. In Vanity Fair, Miss Pinkerton writes to Mrs. Bute Crawley to recommend two candidates for a post as governess, noting that both are well qualified, though one, in fact, is slightly more so than the other. “But as she is only eighteen years of age, and of exceedingly pleasing personal appearance, perhaps this young lady may be objectionable in Sir Huddleston Fuddleston’s family. Miss Letitia Hawley, on the other hand, is not personally well-favored. She is twenty-nine; her face is much pitted with the small-pox. She has a halt in her gait, red hair, and a trifling obliquity of vision.”