A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Penguin) - Charles Dickens [440]
The popular 1860s novels of sensation and detection successfully adapted gothic themes. Dickens’s friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins, as well as another prolific sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, both relied on gothic tropes, as did the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe. The gothic as a literary phenomenon is pre-Victorian in its origins yet has a more than ghostly Victorian existence: the gothic continues to be modified, parodied, and reinvented even into our twenty-first-century culture.
Dickens and Victorian Servants
Domestic service was the most common source of employment for women and girls during the nineteenth century. By the mid- to late-Victorian years, about a third of all women employed worked as domestic servants. According to the 1851 census, 13.3 percent of employed men and women were in domestic service, and this number increased as the middle classes grew wealthier. By 1881 this number had risen to nearly 16 percent. Young girls generally entered service by the time they were twelve or thirteen.
Victorian servant life depended a great deal on the size and wealth of the house in which a servant was employed. The number of domestics in a household defined a servant’s duties, which in turn defined their status in the house. Three servants staffed a typical middle-class home—a cook, a housemaid, and either a nurse or parlor maid, depending on the ages of the family’s children. Servants worked long hours and had strict rules about behavior applied to their employment, often including being denied visitors. Their duties included everything from cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, carrying coal and tending to the fires that heat the home, hauling water upstairs and waste back downstairs, ordering supplies from tradespeople, and keeping track of accounts, child care, and chaperoning. Without refrigeration, even daily meals required frequent marketing, baking, and preserving, and in homes heated by coal fire, and without indoor plumbing, heavy items such as water and fuel were carried by women servants.
The heaviest manual labor was done by a maid-of-all-work, who might be the only servant in the home of a tradesperson or a skilled worker. Her day might last as long as seventeen hours, arising before the family to start the fire and not retiring until the family did. Her bed was often a simple pallet on the floor of the basement kitchen, where she labored most of her day. At the other end of the scale, a country estate or wealthy town house would keep a large staff, with a strict hierarchy that mirrored that of their masters’ society. In these homes, servants were divided into “upper” and “under” servants. The principal staff were the butler, the housekeeper, and the head cook. The second rank of servants included footmen, assistant cooks, ladies’ maids, parlor, nursery, and housemaids. Depending on the size and type of grounds, other servants that might be employed included additional maids for the kitchen, scullery, and dairy, and laundresses and boot-boys; grooms, gardeners, watchmen, coachmen, and carpenters also might be hired, though as outdoor staff they would typically report to the landowner’s agent. The butler and housekeeper divided responsibility of under servants according to gender. The mistress gave orders directly to the head cook, who was also responsible for the supplies and staples. The butler’s duties included serving the wine, as well as securing the wine cellar and the silver and plate. Personal attendance and the maintenance of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing were the duties of the gentlemen’s valets and ladies’ maids. These positions were much less demanding than a scullery