Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [101]
Hannah was certainly not afraid of hard work, expressing some pride in her strength and achievements. That her diary was written at all makes a curious tale in itself. She had a long and highly clandestine relationship with Arthur Munby, a barrister who worked for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, a very Victorian figure. His papers, which are now in Trinity College, Cambridge, include Hannah’s remarkable diaries.
They came about because he had asked her to keep a record, describing her life for him in detail. He cherished a special fascination for images of Hannah in her work clothes, with her arms dirty or raw (I leave readers to judge for themselves the weirdness of this). Although they later married in secret, it was not a success, apparently because he succumbed to the temptation of trying to gentrify her. She resisted this and stuck to her guns, begging him in June 1876, ‘please let me live as your servant and don’t bother me to be any thing else.’16
The account that she wrote of her life in the 1840s and 1850s reveals an industrious and independent-minded woman, forced through circumstance to work for her living from an early age, and yet, as is often surprisingly true of domestic servants, able to move quite easily from job to job.
Hannah worked as a nurserymaid at Ryton in Shropshire:
I stopp’d here through the winter & had a deal of hard work to do, for there was eight children. I’d all their boots to clean & the large nurseries on my hands and knees, & a long passage & stairs, all their meals to get & our own – the nurse only dress’d the baby & look’d over me. I’d all the water to carry up and down for their baths & coal for the fire, put all the children to bed & wash and dress of a morning by eight, & I wasnt in bed after 5.17
All this when she was little more than a child herself, perhaps ten or eleven at most.
She found the work uncongenial and managed to find another post with a family with only five children. In 1849, she worked for a clergyman’s family in Lincolnshire, where they were kind to her but ‘very particular & the young gentleman (Master Scotsman) used to correct me often in talk. I learned a good deal from them and was with them 15 months.’ They felt she was too young and when she left in 1850 then gave her a good character for a post at Aqualate Hall, Shropshire, to work for Lady Boughy. By then she was seventeen.
Here life was relatively happy but, in a clear illustration of how fragile some servants’ positions were, she was dismissed essentially for larking about while working: ‘I got on very well as under housemaid for eight months, but Lady Boughy saw me and another playing as we was cleaning our kettles (we had about 16 to clean, they belong’d to the bedrooms) & she gave us both warning.’18 Hannah found another job but regretted having to go: ‘I was dreadfully sorry to leave that splendid park at Aqualate. I was got used to the servants & I felt happy for I had a friend or two, & John the postillion was such a good-looking fellow & used to take me for a walk in the park with Mary Hart, a nice girl and kind to me. So I was vex’d to leave. I ax’d Lady Boughy if she would please forgive me & let me stop. But she said, “NO”, very loudly.’19
Nevertheless she gave Hannah a good character, and she went to work at Woodcote in Shropshire as a scullery-maid for Lady Louisa Coates, a daughter of the 3rd Earl of Liverpool. She remarked bitterly on the contrast between her work as a housemaid and the confined conditions of a scullion: ‘It was a very different work, & a very different place to me after being used to running along the splendid halls & gallery & rooms at Aqualate as a housemaid. And I had learnt to make beds & to do the rooms for company & all, so that I couldn’t help crying when I came to clean the stew pans & great