Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [79]
In Tono-Bungay, Wells’s narrator recalls of his mother: ‘I can see and hear her saying now, “No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom.” She had much exercise in placing people’s servants about her tea-table, where etiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of housekeepers’ rooms is as strict today, and what my mother would have made of a chauffeur.’13
Beyond the literary parody, the reality was more painful. Sarah Wells’s own diary chronicles her miserable struggles, right up to her dismissal at the age of seventy. On 30 January: ‘Busy all day – Wrote to Mrs Holmes hoping she will come and suit. What a worry this house is!!’ On 29 February: ‘Dairy Woman most disagreeable. What a party!’ On 6 September: ‘Worried with the Cook leaving, how unsettled this house is.’ On 27 October: ‘No walk how dull in these under ground rooms!’ On 6 December: ‘Today the Duke of Connaught arrived, Oh such fuss and work. How I wish I was out of it, what ignorant people as a rule servants are!’14
The following January she was given a month’s notice, apparently having indulged in some indiscreet gossip about her mistress. Fortunately, by then her son had begun to make money from his writing and as a result she lived in comfort until her death in 1905 at the age of eighty-three.15
Housekeepers such as Sarah Wells may well have had several household management books on the shelves of their snug, well-furnished sitting rooms (Sarah’s was so described by Wells in his autobiography). One can imagine her tremulously flicking through them in an attempt to solve the problem of the day, just as we in moments of crisis reach for the self-help manual. Two stand out, through whose pages can be discerned the carefully drawn portraits of the key roles of a servant of the period, and the compass of their responsibilities and duties. Even if in somewhat idealised form, they are intended as practical guides. One, published in 1825, was The Complete Servant being a Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties of all descriptions of servants . . . with Useful Receipts and Tables, by Sarah and Samuel Adams.16
The other is, of course, the world-famous Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton, first published in 1861, which ran into many later editions. It is less well known that its subtitle first read: ‘Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Nurse and Nurse-maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc etc – also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with the Home Life and Comfort.’17 Thus the reader was always the responsible senior servant as much as the mistress of a household. This celebrated volume began life as articles for various publications, especially The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1859–61. A comparison of the subtle variations between different editions over the next fifty years would be a fascinating study in itself.
Together these two books are a useful guide today to the shape of the larger households over the central decades of the nineteenth century, throwing light on the duties and daily lives of country-house servants as they developed from their counterparts in the previous century – if in a somewhat idealised form.
Clearly, there had come to be an accepted pattern into which servants could fit when moving between houses and jobs, although there would be wide variations depending on the scale and wealth of the household, the age of the principals and the size of the nursery (as well as the character and general behaviour of the employers).
Whilst thick the Adamses’ book was small enough to put in your pocket if you were an ambitious young footman who wanted to improve your understanding for future advancement,