At Home - Bill Bryson [57]
Hannah Cullwick photographed by her husband at various servants’ tasks, and dressed as a chimney sweep (bottom left). Note the locked chain around her neck. (photo credit 5.1)
It was only in 1910, after Munby died and his will was made public, that the news came out, causing a minor sensation. It was her odd marriage rather than her poignant diaries that made Hannah Cullwick famous.
At the bottom of the servant heap were laundrymaids, who were so lowly that often they were kept almost entirely out of sight: others took washing to them so that they would not be seen collecting it. Laundry duty was so despised that in larger households servants were sometimes sent to the laundry as a punishment. It was an exhausting job. In a good-sized country house laundry staff could easily deal with six or seven hundred separate items of clothing, towels, and bed linens every week. Because there were no detergents before the 1850s, most laundry loads had to be soaked in soapy water or lye for hours, then pounded and scrubbed with vigor, boiled for an hour or more, rinsed repeatedly, wrung out by hand or (after about 1850) fed through a roller, and carried outside to be draped over a hedge or spread on a lawn to dry. (One of the commonest of crimes in the countryside was the theft of drying clothes, so someone often had to stay with the laundry until it was dry.) Altogether, according to Judith Flanders in The Victorian House, a straightforward load—one involving sheets and other household linens, say—was likely to incorporate at least eight separate processes. But many loads were far from straightforward. Difficult or delicate fabrics had to be treated with the greatest care, and items of clothing made of different types of fabric—of velvet and lace, say—often had to be carefully taken apart, washed separately, and then sewn back together.
Because most dyes were impermanent and finicky, it was necessary to add precise doses of chemical compounds to the water of every load either to preserve the color or to restore it: alum and vinegar for greens, baking soda for purples, oil of vitriol for reds. Every accomplished laundress had a catalog of recipes for removing different kinds of stains. Linen was often steeped in stale urine, or a dilute solution of poultry dung, as this had a bleaching effect, but the resulting smell required additional vigorous rinsing, usually in some kind of herbal extract.
Starching was such a big job that it was often left to a following day. Ironing was another massive and dauntingly separate task. Irons cooled quickly, so a hot iron had to be used with speed and then exchanged with a freshly heated one. Generally, there would be one on the go and two being heated. The irons, heavy in themselves, had to be pressed down with great force to get the desired results. But because there were no controls, they had to be wielded with delicacy and care so as not to scorch fabrics. Heating irons over a fire often made them sooty, too, so they had to be constantly wiped down. If starch was involved, it stuck to the bottom of the iron, which then had to be rubbed with sandpaper or an emery board.
On laundry day it was often necessary for somebody to get up as early as three in the morning to get the hot water going. In many houses with only one servant it was necessary to hire in an outside laundress for the day. Some houses sent their laundry out, but until the invention of carbolic acid and other potent disinfectants, this was always attended with the fear that the laundry would come back infected with some dread disease