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By Root 1396 0

she romanticized her early life by claiming that she was a nursemaid, and biographers have continued to perpetrate the myth, but there was no such division of labor in the lower ranks of an eighteenth-century household. Moreover, the parish registers show that there were no babies in the house: Josiah Thomas was born in 1773, and no more children appeared until Sophia in 1780, after Emma had left. Like many thousands of girls across Britain between the ages of about eleven and sixteen, Emma was an unpaid child laborer carrying out the most physically demanding work in the household. Since female servants under sixteen were unsalaried and paid only with bed and board, families employed as many young maids as possible to cut costs. By the age of twenty-one, most had fallen ill from the round of heavy manual labor, become pregnant, married, or turned to prostitution. A tax had been introduced on male servants in 1767, and so in all but the richest families, girls such as Emma took on the jobs that we would consider the preserve of men: hauling coal, moving furniture, carrying and splitting firewood, and caring for the family's pigs.

When the twelve-year-old Emma was not carrying fuel, she was scrubbing or fetching water. The newest servant was given the most-detested tasks, such as scouring pans, dealing with the slops, and cleaning the chamber pots. Having grown up with the Kidds, anything else was probably beyond her. As one mistress complained, young girls could wash up, carry buckets, and scour floors but were incapable of dusting or washing delicate clothes and tea things, and they were hopeless at ironing. Most mistresses gave their servants negligible training because they expected to lose them within a year, and Mrs. Thomas was probably no different. She probably resented having to employ a wild, untrained young girl as a favor to her brother.

Emma's bed would have been a few blankets and a pillow in a cupboard or shared room, but most probably on the landing or kitchen floor, where she was vulnerable to the attentions of other servants, visitors, or family members. Servants were expected to sleep wherever they could, even with the family pigs or in the coal hole. Junior servants tended to curl up by the hearth, partly for warmth and also because their job was to stoke the fires in the morning. Wherever she slept, Emma would have been up before dawn. As there was probably no running water (even if there was, it would be cold, restricted to the scullery, and available only for a few hours a day), her first job was to fetch water at the pump and heat it for washing and cooking. Within a few months, the hands of most young maids were scarred with burns, and the most common cause of death for eighteenth-century girls was burns or scalds. Emma would have broken for her main meal at around eleven, eaten supper at four or five, and spent her evenings scraping the pots or perhaps carrying out basic mending.

Keeping a house clean was an enormous undertaking. Families such as the Thomases burned over a ton of coal every six weeks, and the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture needed regular scrubbing to remove the black dust. It could take a whole day to clean a room properly. The open range in the kitchen needed scouring daily, and one of Emma's least pleasant tasks would have been scraping off its grease and grime. The chimney needed to be swept as far as she could reach twice a week. Laundry consumed three or four days every fortnight. City maids commonly emptied commodes down the sides of buildings, but a country maid had to carry the chamber pot down the steep back stairs and throw the contents into the garden.

There was an impassable gulf between the upper and lower servants. Ladies' maids and companions were middle-class girls who could embroider, write neatly, play music, and often speak French. A very hardworking and lucky maid of all work in a miserly family might possibly be trained as a cook, but the others could look forward only to a future of the most tedious domestic labor. Worst of all, like all girls in