At Home - Bill Bryson [46]
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