What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool

Author:Daniel Pool
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

SERVANTS

He must be respectable—he keeps a man-servant,” says a nervous lady apropos of Mr. Pickwick when he is found in dubious circumstances.

But, of course.

If you could afford one in the 1800s, you had one. Or more. Sometimes, indeed, you had more than you needed just to show off—and to keep ahead of other people who might be catching up to you socially.

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.

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