At Home - Bill Bryson [53]
Often the hardest work was in smaller households, where one servant might have to do the work of two or three elsewhere. Mrs. Beeton, predictably, had a great deal to say about how many servants one should have depending on financial position and breeding. Someone of noble birth, she decreed, would require at least twenty-five servants. A person earning £1,000 a year needed five—a cook, two housemaids, a nursemaid, and a footman. The minimum for a professional middle-class household was three: parlormaid, housemaid, and cook. Even someone living on as little as £150 a year was deemed wealthy enough to employ a maid-of-all-work (a job title that truly said it all). Mrs. Beeton herself had four servants. In practice, however, it appears that most people didn’t employ nearly as many people as Mrs. Beeton thought they should.
A much more typical household was that of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, the historian and his wife, who employed a single maid at 5 Great Cheyne Row in Chelsea. Not only did this underappreciated soul have to cook, clean, clear away dishes, tend fires, haul ash, deal with callers, manage supplies, and do all the rest, but each time the Carlyles wanted a bath—and they wanted many—she had to draw, heat, and carry eight or ten gallons of hot water up three flights of stairs, and afterward repeat the process in reverse.
In the Carlyles’ house, the maid didn’t have a room of her own, but lived and slept in the kitchen—a surprisingly common arrangement in smaller households, even refined ones such as the Carlyles’. The kitchen at Great Cheyne Row was in the basement, and was warm and snug, if a touch dark, but even this elemental space was not the maid’s to control. Thomas Carlyle liked its coziness, too, and often chose to read there in the evenings, banishing the maid to the “back kitchen,” which doesn’t sound too dire, but in fact was just an unheated storeroom. There the maid perched among sacks of potatoes and other provisions until she heard the scrape of Carlyle’s chair, the tap of his pipe on the grate, and the sounds of his retiring, which was often very late, and could at last claim her spartan bed.
In thirty-two years at Great Cheyne Row, the Carlyles employed thirty-four maids—and the Carlyles were comparatively easy people to work for since they had no children and were reasonably patient and compassionate. But it was nearly impossible to find employees who could meet their exacting standards. Sometimes the servants failed spectacularly, as when Mrs. Carlyle came home one afternoon in 1843 to find her housekeeper dead drunk on the kitchen floor, “with a chair upset beside her and in the midst of a perfect chaos of dirty dishes and fragments of broken crockery.” On another occasion Mrs. Carlyle learned to her horror that a maid had given birth to an illegitimate child in the downstairs parlor while she was away. She was particularly exercised that the woman had used “all my fine napkins.” Most maids, however, left or were asked to leave because they declined to work as hard as the Carlyles expected them to.
The inevitable fact was that servants, being only human, rarely possessed the acuity, skills, endurance, and patience necessary to satisfy the ceaseless whims of employers. Anyone in command of the many talents necessary to be an outstanding servant was unlikely to want to be one.
The greatest vulnerability of servants was powerlessness. They could be blamed for almost anything. There have never been more convenient scapegoats, as the Carlyles themselves discovered in a famous incident on the evening of March 6, 1835. At that time, the Carlyles had only recently moved to London from their native Scotland, with the hope that Thomas would there fashion a career as a writer.