At Home

• CHAPTER V •

THE SCULLERY AND LARDER

Among the many small puzzles of the Old Rectory as it would have been originally is that there wasn’t anywhere much for the servants to put themselves when they weren’t working. The kitchen was barely big enough for a table and a couple of chairs, and the conjoined scullery and larder, where I have brought you now, were smaller still.*

As with the kitchen, these were rooms that the rector Mr. Marsham almost certainly entered diffidently, if at all, for this was very much the servants’ realm—though it wasn’t much of a realm. By the standards of the day, the servants’ area was curiously deficient for a rectory. At Barham Rectory in Kent, built at about the same time, the architect gave the servants not only a kitchen, larder, and scullery but also a pantry, a storeroom, a coal store, miscellaneous cupboards, and, crucially, a housekeeper’s room, which was clearly meant for retreat and relaxation.

What makes all this rather hard to figure is that the house as built doesn’t always match up with the house that Edward Tull designed. Mr. Marsham evidently suggested (or perhaps even insisted upon) some substantial revisions—and not altogether surprisingly, for Tull’s design for him contained a number of arresting peculiarities. Tull stuck the principal entrance on the side of the house, for no logical or deducible reason. He put a water closet on the main staircase landing—a truly odd and irregular spot—leaving the stairs without windows so that they would have been as dark as a cellar even in daytime. He designed a dressing room to go with the master bedroom but failed to include a connecting door. He built an attic that had no stairs to it but did have an excellent door to nowhere.

Most of the more wayward of these ideas were revised out of the house at some unknown point before or during construction. In the end, the principal entrance was placed more conventionally on the front of the house, not the side. The water closet was never built. The staircase was provided with a large window that still pleasantly bathes the stairs in sunlight when there is sunlight to be had, and provides a lovely view of the church beyond. Two extra rooms—a study downstairs and additional bedroom or nursery above—were added. Altogether, the house as built is quite different from the house that Tull designed.

Out of all the changes, one is particularly intriguing. In Tull’s original plans, the area now occupied by the dining room was much smaller and included space for a “Footman’s Pantry”—what clearly would have been a room for the servants to eat and rest in. That was never built. Instead the dining room was roughly doubled in size to fill the entire space. Why the bachelor rector decided to deprive his employees of a place to relax and instead give himself a really spacious dining room is of course impossible to say across such a distance of time. The upshot is that the servants had nowhere comfortable to sit when they weren’t working. It may be that they hardly sat at all. Servants often didn’t.

Mr. Marsham kept three servants: the housekeeper, Miss Worm; the village girl who worked as an underservant, Martha Seely; and a groom and gardener named James Baker. Like their master, all were unmarried. Three servants to look after one bachelor clergyman might seem excessive to us, but it wouldn’t have seemed so to anyone in Marsham’s day. Most rectors kept at least four servants, and some had ten or more. It was an age of servants. Households had servants the way modern people have appliances. Common laborers had servants. Sometimes servants had servants.

Servants were more than a help and convenience; they were a vital indicator of status. Guests at dinner parties might find that they had been seated according to the number of servants they kept. People held on to their servants almost for dear life. Even on the American frontier and even after she had lost almost everything in a doomed business venture, Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, kept a liveried footman. Karl Marx, living in chronic indebtedness in Soho and often barely able to put food on the table, employed a housekeeper and a personal secretary. The household was so crowded that the secretary—a man named Pieper—had to share a bed with Marx. (Somehow, even so, Marx managed to put together enough private moments to seduce and impregnate the housekeeper, who bore him a son in the year of the Great Exhibition.)

So servitude was a big part of life for a great many people. By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London—those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five—were servants. Another one in three was a prostitute. For many, that was about all the choice there was. The total number of servants in London, male and female, was greater than the total populations of all but the six largest English cities. Service was very much a female world. Females in service in 1851 outnumbered males by ten to one. For women, however, seldom was it a job for life. Most left the profession by the age of thirty-five, usually to get married, and very few stayed in any one job for more than a year or so. That is little wonder, as we shall see. Being a servant was generally hard and thankless work.

Staff sizes, as you would expect, varied enormously, but at the upper end of the scale they were usually substantial. A large country house typically had forty indoor staff. The bachelor Earl of Lonsdale lived alone but had forty-nine people to look after him. Lord Derby had two dozen just to wait at dinner. The first Duke of Chandos kept a private orchestra for his mealtimes, though he managed to get extra value out of some of his musicians by making them do servants’ work as well; a violinist, for instance, was required to give his son his daily shave.

Outdoor staff swelled the ranks further, particularly if the owners did a lot of riding or shooting. At Elveden, the Guinness family estate in Suffolk, the household employed sixteen gamekeepers, nine underkeepers, twenty-eight warreners (for culling rabbits), and two dozen miscellaneous hands—seventy-seven people in all—just to make sure they and their guests always had plenty of flustered birds to blow to smithereens. Visitors to Elveden managed to slaughter over a hundred thousand birds every year. The sixth Baron Walsingham once single-handedly shot 1,070 grouse in a day, a toll that has not been bettered and we may reasonably hope never is. (Walsingham would have had a team of loaders providing him with a steady supply of loaded guns, so managing to fire the requisite number of shots was easy. The real challenge would have been in keeping up a steady flow of targets. The grouse were almost certainly released a few at a time from cages. For all the sport in it, Walsingham might just as well have fired into the cages and given himself more time for tea.)

Guests brought their own servants, too, so at weekends it was not unusual for the number of people within a country house to swell by as many as 150. Amid such a mass of bodies, confusion was inevitable. On one occasion in the 1890s Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom and with a lusty cry of “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” leaped into the bed only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. To avoid such confusions, guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes containing personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridors to help find their way back to, or between, rooms.

Everything tended to be on a grand scale. The kitchen at Saltram, a house in Devon, had six hundred copper pots and pans, and that was pretty typical. The average country house might have as many as six hundred towels, and similarly vast quantities of sheets and linens. Just keeping everything marked, recorded, and correctly shelved was a monumental task.

Servants at all levels put in long hours and worked hard. Writing in 1925, one retired servant recalled how early in his career he had had to light a fire, polish twenty pairs of boots, and clean and trim thirty-five lamps, all by the time the rest of the household began to stir. As the novelist George Moore wrote from experience in his memoir Confessions of a Young Man, the lot of the servant was to spend seventeen hours a day “drudging in and out of the kitchen, running upstairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water, or down on your knees before a grate.… The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognized you as one of our kin; only the pity that might be extended to a dog.”

Before the advent of indoor plumbing, water had to be carried to each bedroom and then taken away again once used. As a rule, each active bedroom had to be visited and refreshed five times between breakfast and bedtime. And each visit required a complicated array of receptacles and cloths so that, for instance, fresh water didn’t ever come up in the same receptacle that wastewater went down in. The maid had to carry three cloths—one for drinking glasses, one for commodes, and one for wash basins—and remember (or be sufficiently unpeeved with her mistress) to use the right ones on the right objects. And that of course was just for general light washing. If a guest or family member wished for a bath, the workload rose dramatically. A gallon of water weighs eight pounds, and a typical bath held forty-five gallons, all of which had to be heated in the kitchen and brought up in special cans—and there might be two dozen or more baths to fill of an evening. Cooking likewise often required enormous strength and reserves of energy. A full cooking kettle could weigh sixty pounds.

Furniture, fire grates, drapes, mirrors, windows, marble, brass, glass, and silver—all had to be cleaned and polished regularly, usually with their own particular brand of homemade polish. To keep steel knives and forks gleaming, it wasn’t enough to wash and polish them; they had to be vigorously stropped against a piece of leather on which had been smeared a paste of emery powder, chalk, brick dust, crocus, or hartshorn liberally mixed with lard. Before being put away, knives were greased with mutton fat (to defeat rusting) and wrapped in brown paper, and so had to be unwrapped, washed, and dried before they could be used again. Knife cleaning was such a tedious and heavy process that a knife-cleaning machine—essentially a box with a handle to turn a stiff brush—became one of the very first labor-saving appliances. One was marketed as “The Servant’s Friend.” Doubtless it was.

It wasn’t just a question of doing the work, but often of doing it to the kind of exacting standards that generally occur only to people who don’t have to do the work themselves. At Manderston, a stately home in Scotland, a team of workers had to devote three full days twice a year to dismantling, polishing, and then reassembling a grand staircase. Some of the extra work was as demeaning as it was pointless. The historian Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett notes one household in which the butler and his staff were required to put down spare stair carpet around the dining room table before setting it so as not to tread on the good carpet. One maid in London complained that her employers made her change out of her work clothes and into something more presentable before being sent out into the street to hail a cab for them.

The provisioning of households was an enormous preoccupation. Often groceries were brought in just two or three times a year, and stored in bulk. Tea was purchased by the chest, flour by the barrel. Sugar came in large cones called loaves. Servants became adept at preserving and storing items for long periods. They also had to make the materials with which their work could be done. If you needed to starch a collar or polish shoes, you had to concoct your own ingredients. Commercial boot polishes didn’t become available until the 1890s. Before that it was necessary to boil up a supply of polish at home, a process that stained not only boots but also pots, stirring spoons, hands, and anything else the mixture came into contact with. Starch had to be laboriously made from rice or potatoes. Even linens didn’t come in a finished state. One bought bolts of cloth and had them made up into tablecloths, sheets, shirts, towels, and so on.

Most large households had a still room for distilling spirits, and here were brewed an exhaustive repertoire of items—inks, weedkillers, soap, toothpaste, candles, waxes, vinegars and pickles, cold creams and cosmetics, rat poisons, flea powders, shampoos, and medicines, as well as solutions for removing stains from marble, for taking the shine off trousers, for stiffening collars, and even for removing freckles. (A combination of borax, lemon juice, and sugar was said to do the trick.) These treasured concoctions could involve any number of ingredients—beeswax, bullock’s gall, alum, vinegar, turpentine, and others even more startling. The author of one mid-nineteenth-century manual recommended that paintings be cleaned annually with a mixture of “salt and stale urine,” though whose urine and how stale were left to the reader to determine.

Many houses were so filled with pantries, storerooms, and other service areas that the greater part of the house actually belonged to the servants. In The Gentleman’s House (1864), Robert Kerr stated that the typical stately home had two hundred rooms (counting all storage spaces), of which almost exactly half were household offices—which is to say rooms devoted to servants and their tasks, or their bedrooms. When stables and other outbuildings were added in, the property was overwhelmingly in the servants’ control.

The division of labor behind the scenes could be enormously complicated. Kerr divided the suites of offices into nine categories: kitchen, bakery and brewery, upper servants’ hall, lower servants’ hall, cellars and outhouses, laundry, private rooms, “supplementaries,” and thoroughfares. Other homes used different reckonings. Florence Court in Ireland had more than sixty departments, while Eaton Hall, the Cheshire seat of the Duke of Westminster, got by with just sixteen—quite a modest number bearing in mind that he had more than three hundred servants. It all depended on the organizational predispositions of master, mistress, butler, and housekeeper.

A large country house was likely to have a gun room, lamp room, still room, pastry room, butler’s pantry, fish store, bake house, coal store, game larder, brewery, knife room, brush room, shoe room, and at least a dozen more. Lanhydrock House in Cornwall had a room exclusively for dealing with bedpans. Another in Wales, according to historian Juliet Gardiner, had a room set aside for ironing newspapers. The grandest or oldest homes might also have a saucery, a spicery, a poultery, a buttery, and other rooms of more exotic provenance, such as a ewery (a room for keeping water jugs, the word somehow derived from aquaria), a chandry (for candles), an avenery (for game beasts), and a napery (for linen).

Some of the workroom names are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. Buttery has nothing to do with butter. It refers to butts, as in butts of ale. (It is a corruption of boutellerie, the same word from which butler and bottle are derived; looking after the wine bottles is what butlers originally did.) Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.

In all but the most modest households owners rarely set foot in the kitchen or servants’ area and, as Gardiner puts it, “knew only by report the conditions in which their servants lived.” It was not uncommon for the head of the household to know nothing about his servants beyond their names. Most would have had little idea how to find their way through the darker recesses of the servants’ areas.

Every aspect of life was rigorously stratified, and these anxious distinctions existed for houseguests and family as much as for servants. Strict protocol dictated into which parts of the house one might venture—which corridors and staircases one might use, which doors one might open—depending on whether one was a guest or close relative, governess or tutor, child or adult, aristocrat or commoner, male or female, upper house servant or lower house servant. Such were the rigidities, Mark Girouard observes in Life in the English Country House, that afternoon tea in one stately home was served in eleven different places to eleven different castes of people. In her history of country house servants, Pamela Sambrook notes how two sisters worked in the same house—one as a housemaid, one as a nursemaid—but were not allowed to speak or indicate acquaintance when they met because they inhabited different social realms.

Servants were given little time for personal grooming, and then were constantly accused of being dirty, which was decidedly unfair since a typical servant’s day ran from 6:30 in the morning to 10:00 at night—later if an evening social event was involved. The author of one household manual noted wistfully how she would have loved to provide her servants with nice rooms, but sadly they always grew untidy. “The simpler, therefore, a servant’s room is furnished, the better,” she decided. By the Edwardian period servants got off half a day per week and one full day per month—hardly munificent when you consider that that was all the time they had to shop for personal items, get their hair cut, visit family, court, relax, or otherwise enjoy a few hours of precious liberty.

Perhaps the hardest part of the job was simply being attached to and dependent on people who didn’t think much of you. Virginia Woolf’s diaries are almost obsessively preoccupied with her servants and the challenge of maintaining patience with them. Of one, she writes: “She is in a state of nature: untrained; uneducated … so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.” As a class they were as irritating as “kitchen flies.” Woolf’s contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay was rather more blunt: “The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.”

It was unquestionably a strange world. Servants constituted a class of humans whose existences were fundamentally devoted to making certain that another class of humans would find everything they desired within arm’s reach more or less the moment it occurred to them to desire it. The recipients of this attention became spoiled almost beyond imagining. Visiting his daughter in the 1920s, in a house too small to keep his servants with him, the tenth Duke of Marlborough emerged from the bathroom in a state of helpless bewilderment because his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put the toothpaste on the brush for him, and the Duke was unaware that toothbrushes didn’t recharge automatically.

The servants’ payoff for all this was often to be treated appallingly. It was common for mistresses to test the honesty of servants by leaving some temptation where they were bound to find it—a coin on the floor, say—and then punishing them if they pocketed it. The effect was to instill in servants a slightly paranoid sense that they were in the presence of a superior omniscience. Servants were also suspected of abetting burglars by providing inside information and leaving doors unlocked. It was a perfect recipe for unhappiness on both sides. Servants, especially in smaller households, tended to think of their masters as unreasonable and demanding. Masters saw servants as slothful and untrustworthy.

Casual humiliation was a regular feature of life in service. Servants were sometimes required to adopt a new name, so that the second footman in a household would always be called “Johnson,” say, thus sparing the family the tedium of having to learn a new name each time a footman retired or fell under the wheels of a carriage. Butlers were an especially delicate issue. They were expected to have the bearing and comportment of a gentleman, and to dress accordingly, but often the butler was required to engage in some intentional sartorial gaucherie—wearing trousers that didn’t match his jacket, for instance—to ensure that his inferiority was instantly manifest.*

One handbook actually gave instructions—in fact, provided a working script—for how to humiliate a servant in front of a child, for the good of both child and servant. In this model scenario, the child is summoned to the study, where he finds his mother standing with the shamed servant, who is weeping quietly.

“Nurse Mary,” the mother begins, “is going to tell you that there are no black men who creep into little boys’ rooms in the dark and carry them off when they are naughty. I want you to listen while Nurse Mary tells you this, for she is going away to-day, and you will probably never see her again.”

The nurse is then confronted with each of her foolish tales and made to recant them one by one.

The boy listens carefully, then offers his hand to the departing employee. “Thank you, nurse,” he says crisply. “I ought not to have been afraid, but I believed you, you know.” Then he turns to his mother. “I shall not be afraid, now, Mother,” he reassures her in an appropriately manly fashion, and all return to their normal lives—except of course the nurse, who will probably never find respectable work again.

Dismissal, especially for females, was the most dreaded calamity, for it meant loss of employment, loss of shelter, loss of prospects, loss of everything. Mrs. Beeton was at particular pains to warn her readers not to allow sentiment or Christian charity or any other consideration of compassion to lead them to write a false or misleading recommendation for a dismissed employee. “In giving a character, it is scarcely necessary to say that the mistress should be guided by a sense of strict justice. It is not fair for one lady to recommend to another a servant she would not keep herself,” Mrs. Beeton wrote, and that was all the reflection anyone needed to give to the matter.

As the Victorian era progressed, servants increasingly were required to be not just honest, clean, hardworking, sober, dutiful, and circumspect but also, as near as possible, invisible. Jenny Uglow, in her history of gardening, mentions one estate where, when the family was in residence, the gardeners were required to detour a mile when emptying their wheelbarrows in order not to become an irksome presence in the owner’s field of view. At one home in Suffolk, meanwhile, servants were required to press their faces to the wall when members of the family passed by.

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 standards. 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 named 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.

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 themselves 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.