At Home - Bill Bryson [51]
“Nurse Mary,” the mother begins, “is going to tell you that there are no black men who creep into little boys’ rooms in the dark and carry them off when they are naughty. I want you to listen while Nurse Mary tells you this, for she is going away to-day, and you will probably never see her again.”
The nurse is then confronted with each of her foolish tales and made to recant them one by one.
The boy listens carefully, then offers his hand to the departing employee. “Thank you, nurse,” he says crisply. “I ought not to have been afraid, but I believed you, you know.” Then he turns to his mother. “I shall not be afraid, now, Mother,” he reassures her in an appropriately manly fashion, and all return to their normal lives—except of course the nurse, who will probably never find respectable work again.
Dismissal, especially for females, was the most dreaded calamity, for it meant loss of employment, loss of shelter, loss of prospects, loss of everything. Mrs. Beeton was at particular pains to warn her readers not to allow sentiment or Christian charity or any other consideration of compassion to lead them to write a false or misleading recommendation for a dismissed employee. “In giving a character, it is scarcely necessary to say that the mistress should be guided by a sense of strict justice. It is not fair for one lady to recommend to another a servant she would not keep herself,” Mrs. Beeton wrote, and that was all the reflection anyone needed to give to the matter.
As the Victorian era progressed, servants increasingly were required to be not just honest, clean, hardworking, sober, dutiful, and circumspect but also, as near as possible, invisible. Jenny Uglow, in her history of gardening, mentions one estate where, when the family was in residence, the gardeners were required to detour a mile when emptying their wheelbarrows in order not to become an irksome presence in the owner’s field of view. At one home in Suffolk, meanwhile, servants were required to press their faces to the wall when members of the family passed by.
Houses were increasingly designed to keep staff out of sight and separate from the household except to the point of absolute necessity. The architectural refinement that most added to segregation was the back staircase. “The gentry walking up the stairs no longer met their last night’s faeces coming down them” is how Mark Girouard neatly put it. “On both sides this privacy is highly valued,” wrote Robert Kerr in The Gentleman’s House, though we may safely assume that Mr. Kerr had a closer acquaintanceship with the feelings of those who filled the chamber pots than those who emptied them.
At the highest level guests and permanent members of the household were sometimes required to be as invisible as servants. When Queen Victoria went on her afternoon walks through the grounds of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, no one at all, from any level of society, was permitted to encounter her. It was said that you could fix her location by the sight of panicked people fleeing before her. On one occasion the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, found himself caught on open ground with nothing to hide behind but a dwarf shrub. As Harcourt was six feet four inches tall and very stout, his hiding could be no more than a token gesture. Her majesty affected not to see him, but then she was very accomplished at not seeing things. In the house, where encounters in the corridors were unavoidable, it was her practice to gaze fixedly ahead and, with an imperious glint, dematerialize anyone who unexpectedly appeared. Servants, unless extremely well trusted, were not allowed to look directly at her.
“The division of classes is the one thing which is most dangerous and reprehensible and never intended by the law of nature and which the Queen is always labouring