At Home - Bill Bryson [48]
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