• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1387 0

cellar, and kitchen in the basement were three or four stories of elegant, high-ceilinged living quarters lit by large sash windows. New houses no longer included space for the occupant to carry on his trade downstairs, for they were built for the growing class of people who commuted to separate workplaces. The dining room, library, parlor, and perhaps two or three reception rooms were on the ground and upper floors, and the domestics slept in the attic or down by the kitchen. The design of the Georgian townhouse suited families like the Budds, who wanted to avoid seeing their servants.

∗ The value of the pound fluctuated throughout Emma's lifetime, due to inflation during the wars, but to gain an approximation of values, sums should be multiplied by one hundred.

No researcher on Emma has explored her life as a maid with the Budds, but her experiences of service in London were crucial in forming the woman she became. Although Emma never spoke about working for the Budds, we know she was in service because she later recognized the actress Jane Powell as her old friend from domestic work. Pettigrew, an early biographer of Nelson, confirmed with Budd that he had been her employer. It makes sense that Emma worked for a middle-class family, and Jane Powell's biographers assert that she worked as a maid in Chatham Place. We can piece together Emma's life with the Budds by delving into the history of the Blackfriars area and by collating all the sources on the life of a maid in a townhouse from contemporary servants' manuals, diaries kept by mistresses, and handbooks for housewives. Emma's disillusioning experiences of domestic service fueled her ambitions to be famous.

On arrival, Emma would have been taken to meet the cook, who organized the maids. The cook gave Emma her duties and instructed her in the house rules. She was forbidden to entertain visitors, have boyfriends, drink, gamble, or speak to the men of the house or to visitors unless necessary. She may even have been given a new name: few mistresses had the energy to learn names, and instead called a new girl the same name as her predecessor. After lunch in the kitchen and an hour to arrange her few belongings around the small bedroom she shared, probably with Jane Powell and another maid, Emma was set to work. Country girls, with no immunity to London germs, were renowned for falling ill as soon as they arrived in the metropolis, and a mistress had to extract her money's worth. Even one as robust as Emma would have struggled with initial bouts of coughing, flu, or stomach complaints. The summer of 1778 was the first of four very hot summers, and diseases spread fast. From 1779 to 1782, the "Epidemic Ague," a disease of fever, delirium, and quick death, swept through the damp, windowless, airless slums of London, killing thousands, becoming one of the most devastating diseases of the century.

In 1775, one journalist estimated that one in eight of those living in London were servants, which would imply an astonishing eighty thousand domestics. Many, like Emma, had come from the country, and commentators believed they were drawn by the "pleasures to be enjoyed in the capital."1 Female servants in London had more freedom than their country counterparts. In addition to the usual Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter, most London maids were allowed to take eight days off per year (ostensibly to view the public hangings at Tyburn). Over half of the population of girls between fifteen and twenty in London were domestic servants, and a veritable teenage culture sprang up to cater to them—shops, cafés, fairs, and cut-price early nightclubs, perhaps a band and a beer supply under an awning in the city center. Commentators grumbled about the "excessive" sums "expended in these Temples of Idleness" by maids, apprentices, and laborers.2 Otherwise, they hung around street corners and outside shops. Horace Walpole claimed that he had twice been about to "stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob, and it was only nymphs and swains sauntering or trudging." Female servants did