English Prose of the Nineteenth Century by Fraser Hilary & Daniel Brown

Author:Fraser, Hilary & Daniel Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Such comments mark this as a nineteenth-century document. By the beginning of the century, the middle classes were defining themselves in part by their ability to maintain large and well-ordered homes. As the century wore on there was increasing pressure for middle-class house-holds to employ domestic servants to undertake the heavier domestic duties. The responsibility for the management and maintenance of the home fell to the lady of the house, and it was in this context that the servants came to be such a 'fearful item in our female existence'. By the middle of the century about 750,000 women were employed in residential domestic service. Many of these were young, unmarried, and far from home, and their relationship with their mistresses was often a complex and difficult one as a consequence of the radical social division between them coupled with the fact that they lived in such close domestic proximity.

As her letters testify, Jane Carlyle became very attached to some of her servants, and immersed herself in their problems. Helen Mitchell came to work for the Carlyles in 1837, and was to stay with them for about eleven years. But by 1840 Jane was writing to her mother about 'My poor little Helen [who] has been gradually getting more and more into the habit of tippling', and her subsequent letters record the ups and downs in Helen's unequal struggle with 'the perdition of strong liquors'.267 Her letters reveal her consciousness of the hardships and tragedies of her servants' lives, her affection for their eccentricities, and her enjoyment of their conversation. She records, for instance, in a letter to her Liverpool cousin Jeannie Welsh, Helen's comments, 'while clearing away the breakfast things', on some people's speedy recovery, and often remarriage, after the death of their loved ones: '". . . But I do think", she resumed after some interruption of dusting, "that Mr Carlyle will be (admire the tense) a very desultory widow! He is so easily put about – and seems to take no pleasure in new females"!. . . '268

Many of her letters reveal an intriguing fascination with the servant's attitude and relationship to her employers. And so she writes about her discovery of the perfidious behaviour of one of her housemaids, Mary, during one of her illnesses; of how she was informed,

'Well, ma'am . . . it is known to all the neighbours round here – you will be told some day, and if I don't tell you now, you will blame me for having let you be so deceived. Mary is the worst of girls! She had an illegitimate child in your house on the 29th of last July. It was her second child – and all the things you have been missing have been spent on her man and her friends. There has been constant company kept in your kitchen since there was no fear of your seeing it; and whenever Helen threatened to tell you, she frightened her into silence by threats of poisoning her

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