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By Root 1614 0

lifted her skirt, trying to avoid the gooey sludge splashing over her boots whenever a carriage passed. One hundred tons of horse manure dropped in the streets each day, and Mrs. Tedder didn’t want to clean one more thing.1 It was but nine o’clock in the morning, and she’d already scrubbed floors, cleaned grates, and polished furniture. The widow worked as a servant in the city’s chic center, where middle-class professionals lived in terraced Georgian town houses adorned with lacy grillwork.

Hours before sunup, the forty-five-year-old had swept soot from the front steps, lit the fireplaces, and prepared the daily soup for Fitzowen Skinner and his wife, Laura. At five thirty in the morning, the mother of four shook her nineteen-year-old awake from dreams of silk dresses and handsome suitors, pulling her sleepy frame upright onto the damp basement floor. Eliza, her adopted daughter from her husband’s unmarried sister, had been hired as a maid-of-all-work in the Skinner residence. Ludlow’s youngest, eight-year-old Arabella, could sleep a bit longer. It was best for her not to be underfoot with so much to be done. Besides, talking was not allowed below stairs, and sometimes Arabella needed reminding that they were to speak only in their “under voices.”

Already Arabella had been taught her place. There was no laughing permitted for those who lived belowground in the servants’ quarters. She and her mother shared a straw-stuffed mattress in the scullery adjoining the kitchen. Eliza slept on a quilt atop a wooden pallet, where mildew was a chronic problem. It invaded the tiny room in a constant assault on Ludlow’s bedding, on her hairbrush, and on the cotton apron tied around her waist. Yesterday’s grease clung to the stone walls like a sticky veneer. A single tallow candle shed a band of light, illuminating the relentless patrol of black beetles and cockroaches crawling over the walls and across the kitchen floor. Smoky coal fumes crept down the narrow stairs from the dining room, where Ludlow lit the first fire of the day.

The essence of Ludlow’s station was captured in the words of Eliza Lynn Linton, who also lived in nineteenth-century London and was among the first women to earn a living as a journalist: “When harshly spoken to she must have only the soft answers which are said to turn away wrath. When fretted, nervous, ill, in trouble, she must wear the same smooth manner, the same placid face. . . . She must abandon every personal affection and the outward show of all personal desires when she enters this cold stranger’s house.”2

The moment Ludlow accepted the position in the thirty-year-old barrister’s household, she surrendered her private life. The no-nonsense widow had grown accustomed to the strict demarcation drawn between employer and maid. Practical and clever, she quickly honed the skills required for the part of obedient servant, exhibiting just the right calibration of deference and devotion. Careful not to wake the master and mistress, mother and daughter plunged into their sixteen-hour day. As senior housekeeper, Ludlow was also Eliza’s supervisor and didn’t hesitate to remind her about lighting the kitchen stove and heating water for the barrister’s shave.

Ludlow attacked the early-morning tasks in earnest. Down on all fours, she brushed the carpets by hand, cleaning a few inches at a time. Then it was back to the kitchen to awaken Arabella before kneading dough for the breakfast rolls she would later serve with jam and tea. Since Ludlow’s arrival in London nine months ago, the diligent head servant had acquired a knack for anticipating her twenty-nine-year-old mistress’s every need. From the second floor, a steady jingle of the bell alerted Ludlow to the family’s imminent arrival in the dining room.

While the Skinners sipped tea, Eliza toted hot water up two flights of stairs to their bedrooms. She retrieved their chamber pots and emptied them in a cesspit next to the garden. During the day, the pots were stored in a dining room sideboard. For the middle class, this was eminently superior to the single