In the first book of the Rags to Richmonds series, we meet Adelaide Richmond, who ran away from her adoptive family at twelve and found work as a maid. She has remained in service for the eight years since, but what sort of life has she had?
It’s most likely that she would have been hired as a maid-of-all-work at first. It was not uncommon for children that young to follow such a path. James Hobson tells us, “Domestic service for young people was common … young girl servants often came straight from the countryside, pushed out of agricultural work by enclosure and the new technology that was destroying their casual seasonal work.”
As the circumstances of the lower classes slowly improved at the beginning of the nineteenth century, more families found themselves able to afford help. It was an understandable aspiration; to employ servants indicated a certain wealth, and with that came respectability—the cornerstone of Regency society. Moreover, in an age where there were no electrical gadgets—no vacuum cleaners, washing machines, driers, dishwashers, or even lights—domestic work was backbreaking and relentless. Who wouldn’t want a little help with it all? Commonly, however, the income of families newly raised to greater fortunes was still relatively small and often unreliable. The maid-of-all-work was the answer. She was inexpensive, and she could be asked to do pretty much anything that her mistress was not inclined to do herself.
A girl in this line of work could expect to earn something in the order of two shillings a week to cook, clean, mend, and look after the children. By all accounts it was far from a jolly existence—particularly as, when the chores were done, she was left in solitude, not a member of the family despite her intimacy with their concerns. Friends of any kind were discouraged, especially suitors, partly because it made it more likely that she would marry and leave (it was unheard of for married women to continue in service), but mostly because time spent socialising impinged on her working hours, which invariably stretched from dawn until nighttime, and occasionally during the night as well.
Consequently, positions in houses that paid more and provided kinder working environments were preferred. Unsurprisingly, employers disliked losing maids who were often young and inexperienced when they began and in whom they had therefore invested time in training. It was not unheard of for them to limit the instruction they provided in an attempt to prevent young maids from learning enough to secure a better job. Malcolm Day highlights a salient passage from the autobiography of a servant who wrote of her 1803 employer:
“My mistress made me nurse the child and do everything that was laborious; but all that required any art or knowledge, she not only would not let me do it, but would send me out of the way, with the little boy, while she did it herself. This was done that I should not leave her or think myself qualified for a better place.”
Young girls in service had to work unimaginably hard simply to haul themselves onto the bottom rung of the ladder; yet climb it they invariably did. It was, for example, rare to find the same servant in the same post in consecutive censuses, done every ten years. This begs the question, what was the next step for a young girl after she had trained as a maid-of-all-work?
If she was lucky, she would find herself a role at a larger house, where her work would be shared between a larger workforce. Households with bigger and steadier incomes might employ a cook and a nanny, possibly even a housemaid. In more affluent homes, there would be male servants as well. In the vast country estates of the nobility, servants could number in the dozens. The duke of Westminster had fifty indoor servants alone at Eaton Hall during the nineteenth century. A larger staff meant more hands to do the work—but of course, a larger house also meant there was more work to be done. So, what sort of work could a girl like Adelaide expect to find, and what would it entail?
Arguably the most desirable position was that of a lady’s maid—a personal attendant to the mistress of the house. Independently to her, but at the top of the organisational tree was the housekeeper. A young maid like Adelaide, however, would likely enter a large household at the very bottom, in the position of a scullery maid. She was responsible for washing the vast multitude of pots and pans. As Daniel Pool explains:
“A ten-course meal was not uncommon for a fancy dinner, and an eighteen-guest dinner party might generate as many as five hundred items to be washed when it was over. Even a normal, everyday meal in a large household might have to be served in the nursery (for infants), schoolroom (the older children), dining room (the adults), steward’s room (the upper servants), and servants’ hall (the lower servants).”
Above the scullery maid came the kitchen maids, who helped the cook(s) prepare and plate this gargantuan amount of food. Some houses had dedicated laundry maids, whose backbreaking job it was to wash the hundreds of linens and bedclothes, as well as the countless outfits of employers who often changed clothes several times a day. Country houses might have a dairy maid, who had to milk the cows, lug heavy urns of milk about, and churn the butter—not work for the delicate! Some families employed dedicated stillroom maids to assist the housekeeper in the preparation of preserves, medicines, wines, beers, and other family favourites. Families with children might also have a nursemaid, who would dress, care for, exercise, and entertain the children whenever they were not in the schoolroom.
‘Housemaid’ was a catch-all phrase for pretty much every other female member of the household workforce, from chambermaid to parlourmaid. In general, however, all these titles all point to the same thing: a woman who is, either by herself or with others, tasked with the upkeep of the house.
Responsibilities were almost always physically challenging: tidying the bedchambers, providing them with fresh water several times a day, making beds, changing linens, emptying and cleaning chamber pots, setting fires, cleaning and polishing hearths, heating water for bathing and carrying it upstairs to fill a bath, lighting and extinguishing possibly hundreds of candles, polishing furniture, dusting the hundreds of antiques and curiosities owned by well-to-do families, scrubbing floors, and cleaning windows. More irregular jobs might include beating carpets, cleaning curtains and bed canopies, airing or replacing mattresses, attending to guests, and even arranging cut flowers and decorations. All this was done for as little as five pounds a year.
As to where a housemaid would sleep, according to Malcolm Day, “servants often had to endure squalid, cramped quarters.” Whereas a maid-of-all-work might be expected to make her bed in the kitchen or cellar, female servants in larger households more commonly slept in (often freezing) attic rooms, leaving the basement for the male servants. They were often required to share rooms, and privacy was therefore a thing of daydreams.
Accommodations were not always indicative of an employer’s disdain, however, and some maids were held in relatively high regard. Hobson tells us that “In the best households, [a female servant] would be treated as one of the family in the same style as an apprentice.” Malcolm Day seconds this, asserting that “there was no stigma attached to servile roles and usually there was a good deal of familiarity between master and man, mistress and maid.”
That may have been the case, but we can safely assume this want of stigma only applied when the servant remained firmly in their allotted position. There most certainly was a stigma attached to anyone who dared to blur the distinction of rank. A case in point was Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, 2nd Baronet, who in 1825, at seventy-one years of age, married Mary Ann Bullock, his illiterate, twenty-year-old dairy maid. Society was not kind to either of them—and neither were her former workmates.
Respect was not a given even for those who did ‘remember their place’. Ian Mortimer describes how maids in Scotland were expected to work barefoot, and those in England were often allocated new names, such as Betty or Sarah, “thus being denied their identity.” Worse was the threat of violence; female servants were depressingly vulnerable to—and deprived of protection from—abuse from their ‘betters’. Lord Byron gave us lasting evidence of this when he wrote in 1822 of “the tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree with whom one is enamoured in good earnest – whereas we attack a fresh-coloured housemaid without … any sentimental remorse.”
One might wonder why anyone would subject themselves to such a life. For many women, there was no choice. If a woman could not find a husband to provide for her, or easier or more lucrative work elsewhere, or if a girl was too young for such recourse, then service was often her only respectable option.
Miserable though they might have been in many cases, guaranteed accommodation and food were not to be sniffed at when destitution was the alternative. Maids who worked for larger families sometimes got to travel with them when visiting other houses, or London, or even abroad. Others were able to stay at the family’s main seat while their employers travelled, with a significantly reduced workload for long periods of the year. Not having to pay rent meant that some women were able to save for the future, and some employers offered pensions for long-standing employees. All servants could expect to receive tips from grateful guests, and some received perks in the way of cast-offs and gifts from their mistress.
Whether these benefits made the work of a housemaid any more bearable is impossible to know, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Adelaide Richmond does not hesitate to give it all up in the blink of an eye for the chance of a better life—and if she second guesses that snap decision at some later date…well, it is for you, dear reader, to find out why.
*This blog post was originally posted on the Quills & Quartos website.
