Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [83]
A housekeeper ought, the Adamses wrote, to be ‘a steady middle-aged woman, of great experience in her profession, and a tolerable knowledge of the world’. The prudent housekeeper ‘will carefully avoid all approaches to familiarity; as that destroys subordination, and ultimately induces contempt.’42 Mrs Beeton, echoing the writings of Hannah Wolley and Mary Evelyn in the seventeenth century, as well as Elizabeth Raffald in the eighteenth, thought that the housekeeper ‘must consider herself as the immediate representative of her mistress, and bring, to the management of the household, all those qualities of honesty, industry, and vigilance, in the same degree as if she were at the head of her own family.’43
The housekeeper’s role was therefore almost that of a mistress by proxy, and many junior female servants would have certainly looked to the housekeeper as their boss. Mrs Beeton asked housekeepers to be ‘Constantly on the watch to detect any wrong-doing on the part of any of the domestics, she will overlook all that goes on in the house, and will see that every department is thoroughly attended to, and that the servants are comfortable, at the same time that their various duties are properly performed.’44
In most houses there was also a still-room maid, who worked under the housekeeper and in whose steps she might well hope to tread. This maid would usually help look after the china kept in the housekeeper’s room, lay out the breakfast for the upper staff in the housekeeper’s room and prepare the trays for early-morning tea in the bedrooms as well as afternoon tea in the drawing room, thus relieving the pressure on the main kitchen. Scones, sandwiches and cakes were made in the still room, not in the main kitchen, and the still-room maid might also help with the preparation of meals in the servants’ hall.45
In households with children, especially with the dramatic decrease in infant mortality rates over the century, several members of staff might be devoted solely to the care of the family’s children. It would be headed by a nurse for the younger ones, a role that had turned into that of ‘nanny’ by the end of the nineteenth century; although the origins of the word are obscure, it can be traced back to the eighteenth.46 The nurse, or nanny, had a nurserymaid to assist her in serving meals and looking after the infants, whilst the older children would have a governess to give them lessons at home, and sometimes a male tutor, although boys would probably go away to school after a certain age.
Clearly the correct nursing of children was critical in landowning families where inheritance was so crucial an issue. As Samuel and Sarah Adams wrote in 1825, ‘as the hopes of families, and the comfort and happiness of parents are confided to the charge of females who superintend nurseries of children, no duties are more important, and none require more incessant and unremitting care and anxiety.’ Personality had to be taken into consideration: ‘This important Servant ought to be of a lively and cheerful disposition, perfectly good tempered and clean and neat in her habits.’47
Mrs Beeton had her own contribution to make: ‘The responsible duties of the upper nursemaid commence with the weaning of the child: it must now be separated from the mother or wet-nurse, at least for a time, and the cares of the nursemaid . . . are now