Victorian Servants, A Very Peculiar History

INTRODUCTION

‘The greatest plague in life'*
(* Title of a humorous book about badly behaved servants by Augustus and Henry Mayhew, 1847)

Imagine! You’ve travelled back in time to 1860, and you’re a woman servant. You’ve been working extra-hard this month, cleaning 83 pairs of dirty boots, plus all the windows and mirrors, in addition to your usual household duties. Looking down, you remark, with pride in all you have done, that ‘My hands are very coarse and hardish.’ But then your employer comes along. Her hands are white and soft. Although it’s July, ‘She lays her hand[s] lightly on mine for me to feel how cold they are’ (from the diary of Hannah Cullwick).

What’s going on? Is your employer unwell? Is she lonely or asking for sympathy? Has she had bad news, or a sudden shock? Or is her fine dress just too thin for a chilly English summer?

No, no, no, no and no. We’re puzzled, but you, the servant, understand the gesture. Your employer’s gentle, delicate touch is really a stern warning. She’s keeping you in your place; reminding you who you are. ‘We [servants] say it’s to show the difference, more than anything.’

What difference? Not just the contrast between hands: white and rough, smooth and hard, workaday and leisured. But also the vast, unbridgeable social gap between ‘them’ and ‘us’; between Victorian employers and their servants.

The Victorian age (1837–1901) was a time when more British people than ever before worked as domestic (household) servants. It was also a time when more British families than in any earlier era had servants to look after them. In this book we will look at the men and women who joined in this Victorian servant ‘population explosion’. What were their lives like?

Who were the ‘servant classes’ (as the Victorians called them)? Where did they come from? How did they find a job? And why on earth did they leave the freedom of their own homes and families to live in someone else’s household? Even more perplexing: how could clever, capable, thinking, feeling, fully grown men and women let themselves be ordered around – and despised, as in the true story above – by people who were richer, grander, more powerful than themselves?