What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  A TAXONOMY OF MAIDS

  nursemaids, housemaids, parlormaids, scullerymaids, chambermaids, dairymaids, lady’s maids—a bewildering array of servants was necessary to keep the large nineteenth-century English household running smoothly.

  The most exalted was the lady’s maid, the only maid always considered one of the upper servants. She was free of the housekeeper’s control, unlike the other maids, and attended the lady of the house, personally dressing and undressing her, arranging her hair, reading to her if need be, and using her needlework skills to do repairs on items of personal dress. If possible, she was French, although, of course, it was sometimes felt that her consequent liveliness might be compromised by a deficiency of character. (Mrs. Greenow seems to deal with this problem in Can You Forgive Her? by referring to her unrelentingly English maid Jenny, who seems to be in part, at least, a lady’s maid, as “Jeannette.”) Less desirable was an English girl, but in all events a lady’s maid was supposed to be youthful and more personable than the housemaids who drudged away all day long doing the household’s heavy manual labor. “They told me I was pretty,” a woman told a mid-century inquirer, “and as I had not been accustomed to do anything laborious, they thought I would make a good lady’s maid.” The lady’s maid had the privilege of being given her mistress’s cast-off clothes.

  The housemaids were the people who really kept the household running. They were the ones who made the fires, brought up clean water for bathing and washing, and took away the dirty water (the former sometimes four times a day—before breakfast, at noon, before dinner, and at bedtime), emptied and cleaned the chamber pots, drew the curtains and turned down the beds at night, and cleaned the bedrooms and the public rooms and areas in the house. Their work was time consuming and back breaking. Floors had to be scrubbed on hands and knees, and the grates had to be emptied each day and then cleaned and polished with black lead as they filled up with coal ashes; since virtually all town houses lacked running water and the working area was in the basement, maids often had to lug the hot water up past the ground floor (where the dining room was) on past the first floor (the drawing room) and up to the second floor—the American third floor—where the bedrooms were. And this not once but several times a day in order to make sure that everyone got hot water for their bath and a clean water basin in which to wash their face and hands before each meal. Sometimes there was more than one housemaid. An upper housemaid might then undertake the light work of arranging decorations, getting flowers, and the like, while the under housemaid scrubbed and polished and cleaned.

  Next down the scale were the kitchenmaids. They worked in the sometimes miserable basement kitchens lighting fires in the stoves and helping the cooks prepare the food. Below them came the scullerymaids, the girls in charge of cleaning the pots and pans and dishes after breakfast and lunch and tea and dinner and supper and evening tea. They slaved away, at the bottom of the ladder in terms of respect and status, with the upper servants patronizing or mocking them and the household, of course, taking no notice of them whatsoever. Archdeacon Grantly’s son Samuel, we are told in The Warden, to demonstrate his mildness, was “courteous to all, he was affable to the lowly, and meek even to the very scullery maid.” “Poor little devils,” recalled the butler at Cliveden, “washing up and scrubbing away at the dozens of pots, pans, saucepans and plates, up to their elbows in suds and grease, their hands red raw with the soda which was the only form of detergent in those days, I’ve seen them crying with exhaustion and pain, the degradation, too, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  In the country there were sometimes dairymaids, too. Butter was much in demand at country estates and the dairymaid might well be the sort of strapping, robust creature she was made out to be by popular stereotypes—indeed, she would generally have to be in order to churn butter and carry around great pails of milk all day.

  The nursemaid was, of course, necessary in a household with children. Her job was to dress and care for the smaller children and take them for walks. Nursemaids were often singled out by soldiers and policemen on the make in London’s parks, no doubt because they were virtually the only female servants required—or able—to get out of the house on any regular basis and because they were usually quite young. Many were less than twenty—the loving and protective Susan Nipper in Dombey and Son is no more than “a short, brown, womanly girl of fourteen” when she scraps pluckily with her employer on behalf of her little charge Floy. “A nursery maid is perhaps more exposed to danger than any other class of servant,” darkly warned The Nursery Maid. “She walks out a good deal with no other companions but children who are not old enough to understand what is said and whose presence affords a pretence and an excuse for addressing her.”

  Parlormaids were not very common until later in the century. They were evidently employed chiefly in households that wanted the status of having a special servant to open the door but couldn’t afford a butler. (One snob refused to visit a household that had “only a parlour-maid” and not a male servant.) Male servants, after all, had to be paid higher wages, and until 1937 there was a special tax on them of fifteen shillings a year, plus they were often more difficult for the mistress of the household to handle with authority than a female servant. Parlormaids answered the door and announced visitors and sometimes served at dinner, doing, in short, all the things that a footman and butler were supposed to do. Just as a footman was supposed to be handsome and imposing, so a parlormaid was expected generally to be prettier than the housemaids who did their work “behind the scenes.” Perhaps as a consequence there was a belief that parlormaids were often the object of advances from male members of the family.

  Finally, in less affluent households, there was the poor maid-of-all-work, the young girl or teenager hired to do all the things for a household that a wealthier family would have divided up among a cook, housemaid, nursemaid, lady’s maid, and so on—washing, scrubbing, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children—with nothing to look forward to at the end of the day except falling asleep or sitting alone in the kitchen while the family enjoyed their evening together in the upstairs room. In Pickwick, the maid-of-all-work at the lodging house in Southwark, which Pickwick visits for Bob Sawyer’s supper party, washes the glasses, answers the door, and does God knows what else. When they ring for her to make supper, there is no answer—“it was necessary to awaken the girl, who had fallen asleep with her face on the kitchen table.” They were ubiquitous—perhaps some three fifths of all maids in the England of Queen Victoria were maids-of-all-work.

  A London dustyard.

  VICTORIAN RECYCLING

  Our Mutual Friend opens with Lizzie Hexam and her father dragging the Thames for bodies from which to retrieve money and other wealth. And from there the story progresses to the tale of Mr. Boffin, heir to the dustman who has made a fortune collecting dust and then sifting it for valuable and selling it. At a school frequented by naïve philanthropists, we are told of the mudlarks, who also survived off what they can scrounge from the river’s bottom, and after a while we have the sense of a novel dominated by a society that lives by scavenging.

  Dickens made none of this up, including the mudlarks, who scavenged for salable bits of coal and iron on the beaches of the Thames. Indeed, the nineteenth century poured an extraordinary amount of energy into the reuse of its households’ discards and leavings.

  It began at the top. When a lady finished with her gowns, it was very often the prerogative of her lady’s maid to take them and wear them next. Household servants were sometimes allowed to keep “ragbags” for the collection of stray bits of used cloth. (In David Copperfield’s household sheets are stolen from him and his wife in the ragbag.) From there the rags might well go to a street buyer or a rag-and-bone or rag-and-bottle shop like that run by the sinister Mr. Krook in Bleak House. If the rags were of linen they were bought for eventual shipment to a paper manufacturer, since paper was made of linen and rag until well into the century. A more sinister variation on the clot
hes-recycling theme turns up in the person of the “child-stripper” “Good Mrs. Brown” in Dombey and Son. “Don’t vex me,” she warns Florence Dombey when she manages to separate the child from her companions in the streets. “If you do, I’ll kill you . . . . I want that pretty frock, Miss Dombey,” she continues, “and that little bonnet, and a petticoat or two and anything else you can spare. Come! Take ’em off.” Mrs. Brown belonged to a category of criminal that, again, Dickens did not invent; it was not uncommon for certain thieves to lure well-dressed children into dark alleys and remove their good clothes to be subsequently sold “secondhand.”

  In private homes, used tea leaves were employed to clean carpets and sometimes given to charwomen, who sold them to dealers who eventually recycled them illicitly—with some artificial colors—as tea. Dripping—the fat from roasted animals—was sometimes the prerogative of the cook or housekeeper; it was used as substitute butter by the poor. Bones were sold to the rag-and-bone man for fertilizer, and the household ashes, or “dust,” that were emptied into the dustbin were sold for bricks and manure by men like Mr. Boffin’s employer after they were sifted for objects of value by his workers. (In addition to searching for inadvertently discarded pieces of silverware, sifters salvaged old tin kettles for trunk fastenings, brick chips and oyster shells for construction material, and old boots and shoes for makers of Prussian blue.) Even the soot swept out of the chimneys by chimney sweeps was turned into manure and insect killer.

  Public areas were picked clean, as the example of the draggers in the Thames suggests. The streets were scavenged for cigar butts, and some of the poor collected dog mess—or “pure” as it was called—and then sold it to tanyards who used it in processing the morocco and leather for the “kid” gloves worn by the upper crust at fancy operas and balls.

  There were a number of reasons for this immense amount of scavenging. The people scrounging through sewers and picking up dog excrement were desperately poor, and hence not likely to overlook any possible means by which to sustain themselves when the only alternative was the workhouse. (There were even those who scavenged in the sewers.) Also, technologies were different—unlike today when there are no longer coal ashes to recycle because gas and electricity provide heat and illumination. Then, too, the acceptance of social hierarchy in England seems to have made it easier for servants to take worn-out clothes of their masters and the poor to accept worn-out clothes—or drippings—from the household of their “betters.” Lack of concern about transmitting germs obviously helped here, as did the fact that much of the material was organic, and could be easily reused without complicated chemical processing—there were no synthetic fibers and no Styrofoam cups, and there was also a ready chain of buyers and sellers.

  And, finally, perhaps, the nineteenth century worshiped thrift.

  THE ORPHAN

  Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair, Jude Fawley of Jude the Obscure, Hareton Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, Bathsheba Everdene of Far from the Madding Crowd, Jane Fairfax of Emma, Pip of Great Expectations, Dorothy and Celia Brooke (and Mr. Bulstrode, too) of Middlemarch and Oliver Twist and David Copperfield of the novels that bear their names—all were orphans. Why so many parentless protagonists?

  There was a tradition of literary foundlings that influenced the nineteenth-century novel—Tom Jones comes to mind—and there was a contemporary “romantic” predilection for the abandoned protagonist who must make his or her way, unaided, alone through the world. This is presumably the sort of romantic fiction that Jane Austen mocks at the outset of Northanger Abbey, where she notes dryly of the mother of Catherine Morland, “instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more.” But there were real-life reasons why there were so many orphans in nineteenth-century English novels—there were, in fact, many orphans.

  In 1870 the rate of death in childbirth was 1 in 204. Given the Victorian penchant for large families, the chance of a mother dying in childbirth sooner or later was therefore fairly good. Fathers could be carried off at an early age, too, given the rather poor state of medicine and sanitation. In 1839 the average age at death was twenty-six and a half years in rural counties like Rutland, and in cities like Leeds or Manchester or Liverpool it was only nineteen. In mid-century working-class areas it appears that 8 percent of the children lost both parents by the time they were fifteen and almost a third had lost at least one.

  Once you became an orphan there was no official apparatus to take care of you except the workhouse. Oliver Twist was probably lucky to wind up there; at least, he had something to eat and some clothing. Before 1834, an effort was sometimes made to get orphans to board with their relatives, sometimes with a small payment to help out. In David Copperfield, we are told when David visits Mr. Peggotty that “Ham and Em’ly were an orphan nephew and niece, whom my host had at different times adopted in their childhood.” But Em’ly is seduced and ruined by the heedless Steerforth. It is perhaps significant in this connection that, uniformly, nineteenth-century sources found that only a third of the prostitutes they surveyed had both parents still living.

  OCCUPATIONS

  a host of nineteenth-century occupations have passed into oblivion, owing to changes in taste, scientific advances, social customs, and the like. Their practitioners still remain, however, alive and well in the pages of the nineteenth-century novel to mystify and intrigue the contemporary reader who cannot quite figure out just exactly what it was they did.

  Herewith, then, a short guide to some of the more striking occupations of the last century:

  Articled clerks—These were young men who had been apprenticed or “articled” to practicing lawyers, generally for a period of five years, so that they could learn the profession. Boys were not articled to courtroom lawyers like barristers but rather to solicitors and other nonlitigating practitioners. David Copperfield speaks of himself and his fellow “articled clerks, as germs of the patrician order of proctors.” In Pickwick Dickens alludes to “the Articled Clerk, who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in perspective, who runs a tailor’s bill, receives invitations to parties, knows a family in Gower Street, and another in Tavistock Square: who goes out of town every Long Vacation to see his father, who keeps live horses innumerable; and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks.”

  A ratcatcher with his terriers.

  Chandler—Originally, a chandler was a dealer in candles. By the nineteenth century, however, a chandler was the man who ran the neighborhood store on the corner. He sold many of the basics needed by the poor such as cheese, bacon, and other groceries.

  Cheap-jack—A familiar figure at fairs, the cheap-jack sold inexpensive metal objects and hardware like watch chains, carving knifes, and the like and was a “patterer”—his spiel was a key to his success.

  Coal porters—The men who unloaded coal from ships at wharfside or from the lighters into which coal had been unloaded by coal whippers from the colliers. In addition, coal porters often delivered the coal to residential customers.

  Coal whippers—So called because they “whipped” the coal out of the colliers that brought it down the coast and into the Thames into the lighters and barges from which it was then unloaded by coal porters. The whipping was done with a rope and pulley arrangement. As Pip makes his way down the Thames to try to spirit Abel Magwitch out of England in Great Expectations, he passes “colliers by the score and score, with the coal-whippers plunging off stages on deck, as counterweights to measures of coal swinging up, which were then rattled over the side into barges.”

  Costermonger—In theory a fruit and vegetable seller (the “costard” of “costermonger” was a kind of big apple), but he also sold fish, sometimes at a stall, sometimes walking street to street crying his wares. In London, costermongers bought their merchandise at Covent Garden or Billingsgate, sometimes traveling ten miles a day on foot to hawk it. Among the elite of street sellers, they probably numbered around 12,000 in mid-century
London.