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What Shall we Do about the Servants?

Amy Louise Erickson

History Workshop Journal, Issue 67, Spring 2009, pp. 277-286 (Review)

Published by Oxford University Press

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What Shall we Do about theServants?

by Amy Louise Erickson

Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial

Age, Cambridge University Press, 2007; pp. 263, 45 (hbk), 17.99 (pbk), ISBN

978-0-521-69773-6.

Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants: the Hidden Heart of Domestic Service,

Penguin Fig Tree, 2007; pp. 376, 20 hbk, 978-0-670-86717-2.

These studies are absorbing explorations of domestic service through single

families, in each case primarily through the writings of the master or

mistress.

The story of Phoebe Beatson, as told by Steedman, arises from the

voluminous archive created by the Revd John Murgatroyd in the West

Riding parish of Slaithwaite. Murgatroyd, the son of a Halifax blacksmith,

became a schoolmaster, and was ordained a priest in 1755. He held a curacyfor some years but never succeeded in gaining a benefice, so performed the

services of a peripatetic Anglican preacher for the rest of his life.

Phoebe Beatson went to work for John Murgatroyd and his wife Ann in

1785, at the age of nineteen. Phoebes mistress died in 1797, whereupon

Murgatroyds sister came to live with him until her death four years later.

But while her two mistresses may have had more contact with Phoebe than

Murgatroyd did, she still appears almost daily in his diaries. In 1802 Phoebe,

aged thirty-seven, somehow informed her master, aged eighty-three, that she

was pregnant. The father, a local man named George Thorp, refused tomarry Phoebe, despite Murgatroyd trying himself and then enlisting Thorps

mother and another of his employers to persuade him to do right by her. He

refused when she was pregnant and he refused after the baby was born,

although he came to see Phoebe (or perhaps the baby) after the birth and

after Phoebe had named him as the father before a magistrate. Why he

refused is a mystery. There is no settlement or bastardy examination extant.

But he did pay the childs maintenance ordered by the justices of the peace

(although we dont know the amount).

But having failed to achieve the desired outcome, Phoebes mastergave no hint in his private diaries that there was ever any question of

sending Phoebe away. Murgatroyd records only one neighbour arguing with

him about his course of action (p. 183). Phoebe stayed, and she gave birth in

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his house to a daughter whom Murgatroyd appears to have loved as a

grandfather. (Legally, a pregnant domestic servant could have been sent

away. But had Phoebe been turned away from Murgatroyds household, she

and her child had the right to poor relief from the parish of Slaithwaite

since, under the Elizabethan Poor Law, service in the parish for one year and Phoebe had by this time served seventeen earned the right to a

settlement there.) At his death in 1806 Murgatroyd bequeathed the house to

his niece by marriage. But he gave 300, plus furniture amounting to more

than half his movable estate, to Phoebe and Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, now

four years old, was also to have his globe. Three months later, Phoebe

married a Huddersfield clothier, who was probably the visitor to the house

in Slaithwaite noted by Murgatroyd in the 1790s as a wool-sorter. Except for

her X in the marriage register (she could not write), Phoebe Beatson left

not a single word of her own in the record.Steedman aims to explain how an elderly clergyman could neatly

and benevolently rewrite the plot of the descent-into-prostitution variant of

the romance (p. 55), when most of the accounts we have of masters

generally and clergymen in particular, and of the prescriptions and

prohibitions of their religious faith, suggest that they should have behaved

quite otherwise (p. 159).

As the archetypal image of the eighteenth-century pregnant single woman

as victim, against which she is writing, Steedman quotes the case of

Elizabeth Elless, from an article by Richard Connors.1 Elless either killed

herself, or was murdered or in any case suffered a fatally late abortion

after being dragged around the county of Sussex by the overseers of her

home parish, trying to find a magistrate before whom she could swear the

father of her child (p. 178). I have not read Connorss article, but the source

of this story can only be Thomas Turner, shopkeeper and overseer of the

poor in East Hoathly, and at least when he was in his late twenties and

early thirties in the third quarter of the eighteenth century a diarist like

Murgatroyd. Like Murgatroyd, Turner was also a schoolteacher, and deeply

concerned about his relationship with his God. The case of Elizabeth Elless

exercised Turner considerably. He was a man even more accustomed to

death than his contemporaries: as the shopkeeper, he furnished all of the

local funerals. On 3 July 1756, in his role as overseer, he asked the heavily

pregnant Elless to go with him on horseback in the company of two other

men to the magistrate in Lewes to swear her parish (Turner thought it was

East Hoathly) and in the hope of persuading her to name the father, because

if she would agree to do so then the father and not her parish would become

liable for the childs maintenance. Elless went with Turner to the magistrate,

apparently without struggle, but she steadfastly refused to name the father

and could not legally be required to do so until a month after the birth.Ten days later, she was very well all the day and baked bread but in the

evening became violently ill and died within a matter of hours. The parish

officers clearly thought the poor creature may have ingested poison, and

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quite possibly something given to her by the married labourer suspected of

being the father. The parish, above and beyond its legal requirement, paid

for a doctor and a man-midwife to perform an autopsy (Turner assisted in

the autopsy), but they could find no proof of poisoning.2 This process could

be interpreted as a punitive desire to convict the suspected father of thechild, but Turner appears in his diary to have been genuinely disturbed by

Ellesss death.

The striking thing about Turners diary is that he encountered nine

pregnant unmarried servants over the eight years in which his diary records

his activities as overseer of a small southern parish. And none of these

women except Elizabeth Elless lost their position or their baby, much less

their lives. In three cases where the woman refused to name the father, he

appears to have been the master, who either married his servant or

guaranteed to maintain the child, and they appear to have remained in hisservice.3 In one case the father was unclear, but the servants master and

mistress both confirmed that her settlement was in the parish by virtue of a

years service and they did not threaten to throw her out of the house.4

Where the father was not the master, the women did not hesitate to name

him: the parish then did its best to extract maintenance from him. But

bearing a bastard appears to have been no particular bar to future marriage,

perhaps because the new husband knew that the parish would support the

infant.5 Three women swore their infants on men of different parishes, who

had to be exhorted to marry, and in at least two cases the father was bribed

to do so (successfully) with substantial sums.6 These were hardly ideal

marriages, but they do suggest that the case of Elizabeth Elless by no means

represented the normal outcome of maidservant illegitimacy even in

relatively conservative southern England, where parishes were small and

the gentry and clergy were resident, and where they therefore exerted more

moral control than in large northern parishes where gentry were few and far

between and there were not enough clergy to go around. Illegitimacy was far

from uncommon (in addition to the nine cases Turner dealt with as an

overseer in his diaries, his own half-sister had a base-born son whom Turner

educated and apprenticed, according to the will of their father)7 and at least

in this parish rarely resulted in the literary tragedy prescribed for the

unmarried mother.

A century after Phoebe Beatson, the servants to the Stephen and later the

Woolf and Bell households still lived with their masters, but unlike her they

were physically separate from their employers, working in the cellar and

sleeping in the attic. Sophie Farrell served first the Stephens and then

Virginia and Vanessa for twenty-eight years; Flossie and Mabel Selwood, as

well as most of their five sisters at different points, worked through the years

of the First World War; Nellie Boxall came to the Woolfs in 1916 and stayedfor eighteen years, along with Lottie Hope, who served various family

members for over thirty years; Louie Everest came to the Woolfs in

Rodmell, Sussex in 1934 and nursed Leonard through his last illness in 1965.

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These servants moved between Virginia, Vanessa, their brother Adrian, and

their more extended family and friends. The relationships were characterized

by dependency on both sides, as was the relationship between Phoebe and

her master, but also by conflict. Nellie and Lottie in particular were

constantly being dismissed and then rehired, or giving notice and thentaking it back. Of course, in Bloomsbury the servants more often had to

tolerate their masters and mistresses extra-marital liaisons than the other

way around, although when the unmarried Flossie Selwood did bear a child,

her mistress was sympathetic (p. 156). If the Stephen clan lacked a religious

framework, they felt strongly about social reform.

Virginia and Vanessa both dreamed of a creative life without the

intrusions and irritations of servants, but could not manage the practicalities

of life without servants. For the Stephens in London in the later nineteenth

century, a parsimonious family of eleven required a uniformed staff ofseven. As adults in their own households, Virginia, Vanessa and Adrian

made do with a cook/housekeeper and a maidservant, or just one

(protesting) woman to do the work of both, and a nurse for the children.

They were relatively self-reliant in the war they lit their own fires,

something which would have been unthinkable for their parents (p. 137)

and they did not require their servants to wear uniform. But, as Alison

Light shows so clearly, both sisters remained dependent in the face of their

passionate desire for independence. Brought up in Victorian dependence,

they were seduced by the modern myth of an independent individual.

The enforced intimacy, the intrusion of strangers, by which they mean their

own servants, are repeated themes in their writing. As they cannot achieve

independence from their servants, they are concomitantly guilt-ridden. Their

letters and Virginias diaries intermingle guilt, pity and rage over the

servants. Virginia was particularly fierce in probing her own disgust with

her servants, with working-class women in general, and with herself. The

relationship between mistress and servant was always more complex than

between master and servant.

In contrast to Phoebe Beatsons silence, with the passage of less than a

century Light has tracked down letters written by and to the servants in the

Stephen and Woolf households, a few of which survive, lovely photographs

(some with the children but none with their mistresses), and radio and

television recordings made in later life reflecting on their glamorous masters

and mistresses. Their reflections, like those of their mistresses, were

ambivalent: envious and resentful but also grateful and appreciative (p.

157).

Both of these books involve extraordinary stories extraordinary insofar

as the records have survived to retell them in some fashion, and for the

length of the service relationship involved. Historians think that mostservants, throughout these centuries, stayed in a household for only a year

or two, if that. However, it is difficult to tell from the available sources in the

absence of life histories, and outside of London the assumption of short

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service has largely been based on other diarists. The household of Elizabeth

Shackleton, for example, on the other side of the Pennines from

Murgatroyds Slaithwaite, saw a veritable river of female domestic servants

flowing through in the 1770s.8

Reading Carolyn Steedman is always a bracing experience like a walk inthe Pennines on a windy day. In order to understand the context of John

Murgatroyd, and to a lesser extent Phoebe Beatson, the reader is whipped

through the wool and worsted industries, the law of settlement, the early

modern curriculum, gods both classical and English, love and relationships

and personal history, with visits to two of Phoebe Beatsons contemporaries,

the foundling Tom Jones and Nelly Dean, the servant narrator of Emily

Brontes Wuthering Heights. Lights investigation is more a stroll on the

South Downs, weaving together gently but firmly the strands of the

fragmentary information on the servants lives: Woolfs extensive intro-spective, analytical texts; the developed literature on the Bloomsbury circle;

and the surrounding fabric of modernism, politics, technological improve-

ments in housekeeping, and the brigades of Victorian female philanthropy

which produced the foundling-turned-housemaid Lottie Hope (Hope being

the surname given to nearly all the abandoned babies in Miss Sichels

Home).

Both Steedmans and Lights accounts can only be described as masterful.

I would like to use mistressful, but mistress has long been problematic in

English. If, as Steedman argues forcefully, the (female) servant has been

largely overlooked in the creation of female and of working identities, then

the mistress her authority, her power, her frustrations has barely been

acknowledged at all. The mistress is dogged by sexual innuendo, and by her

close association with the housewife. Once a purely descriptive term (the

exact counterpart of h[o]usband[man]) and indicating the possessor of skills

in housewifery, by 1700 the word housewife had already given rise to the

hussy (brazen or otherwise); by 1900 it denoted a woman lacking servants to

do her menial work; and in the latter half of the twentieth century it was

reduced to the phrase only a housewife. What hope for the mistress in the

modern world?

Both authors offer figures on the ubiquity of service and point out that

domestic service was the largest single occupation for women across at least

two centuries and probably longer, as is undoubtedly true. But that certainty

needs to be put in context. In 1851, between twelve and thirteen per cent of

adult women nationally were in full-time domestic service, whether live-in

or live-out. In London and some southern towns that proportion went up to

twenty per cent.9 In other words, less than one fifth of all adult women at

any time were full-time domestic servants. The proportion of women

reported as employed in the 1851 census varied dramatically by region, but ifwe use a rough estimate that half of all women were employed, then more

women in employment were not servants than were servants, and in London

slightly over half of women in full-time employment were servants.10 These

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census figures do not include part-time, seasonal or occasional employment,

but they do suggest that half way in between Phoebe Beatson and Lottie

Hope, domestic service may have been the largest single occupation for

women but most working women were not domestic servants.

There is a very large question over describing domestic service, whetherfull-time or not, as a single occupation. Phoebe Beatson cooked, cleaned

and brewed; she sowed, tended and harvested the vegetable garden; she

collected rents and paid taxes on behalf of her master in Halifax, when she

went there to visit her mother (pp. 31, 43); she nursed her dying mistress,

twice, and then her dying master; and when not otherwise engaged she spun

worsted thread for a nearby wool-comber, as had her predecessors in the

Murgatroyd household, thereby adding 2 or 3 to her annual wage (p. 41)

which could be saved up towards her own household, used to support her

aging mother, or put out at interest, thereby generating further savings.11

The Bloomsbury servants work included cooking, preserving, cleaning,

scrubbing floors, beating carpets, swilling chamber pots, pumping water,

carrying coal and washing clothes, as well as ordering and taking delivery of

food and cleaning supplies, or shopping (an experience Woolf described as

a degrading but rather amusing business (p. 132) when she tried it for the

first time at the age of thirty-three).

Medieval domestic service, both monastic and noble, was primarily male.

Female domestic and farm servants were employed by nunneries, but less

than one fifth of all monastic houses were nunneries. The feminization of

domestic service, which may have begun with the abolition of the

monasteries, was dramatically emphasized in 1777, when the British

states financial need inspired a tax on male domestic servants which

remained in place until 1937. The even more unpopular tax on female

domestic servants lasted only seven years, from 178592, and then

households lacking one parent, or with two or more children, were

exempt (Steedman, pp. 1619).

Early modern servants and perhaps especially female servants were

either relatively socially mobile or came from a family background similar to

that of the households in which they served. Turners brother was placed

servant to a shopkeeper for three years with a view to becoming a

shopkeeper himself, which should not be thought of as an option only for

boys, since Turners mother was also a shopkeeper. In Turners diary,

servants married their masters and thereby became mistresses: Turners

closest friend courted Turners servant but suddenly married a wealthy

butchers widow; Turner himself married Molly Hicks, servant to a justice of

the peace, in 1765 as his second wife.12 The servants (and their suitors) dined

with masters and mistresses and took tea together. Phoebe Beatson appears

to have done something similar with her master Murgatroyd, although thatis more obscure because Murgatroyd is unusual among eighteenth-century

clerics in not paying a good deal of attention to his stomach. It would not

have occurred to either Murgatroyd or Turner, or for that matter Elizabeth

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Shackleton with her stream of maids, to feel guilty in any way about their

relationship with their servants.

Before the nineteenth century, service was a life-cycle stage; from the

nineteenth century, the social status of servants and masters/mistresses

diverged much more dramatically. At the same time, the proportion offamilies employing servants halved, from an estimated thirty per cent of

early modern households to fifteen per cent of households around 1900.13

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 contributed to the bifurcation of

servants and their employers by removing the right to settlement in the

parish earned by a years service there (Steedman, pp. 14, 68). Servants

necessarily became more dependent on their employers, lacking the legal

right to support by the parish in which they had served.

By the later nineteenth century the service relationship was defined by

marked social distance: servants wore uniform (in the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries only male servants wore livery); they lived at the top

and bottom reaches of the household, and worked in conditions of enforced

silence and pretended invisibility. Work was what men did outside the

middle-class home, not what women did within it. Men from Adam Smith to

Karl Marx to E. P. Thompson have failed to take account of domestic

labour, perhaps largely because they never did it. Any man required to care

for his household would quickly call it work.

But the neglect of domestic service is also partly due to first and second-

wave feminists focus on what appeared to be the expansion of employment

for women: in the nineteenth-century textile factories; and in the formerly

male jobs that women moved into over the century, either displacing

men (as secretaries and school teachers) or very slowly joining them in

the higher professions (as lawyers, doctors, architects). The focus was on

achieving equality in paid employment, looking forward to the day when

women were not confined to low-paid, low-skilled, menial work. Virginia

Woolfs A Room of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) argued

passionately for the conditions for creative and intellectual work. But when

her housekeeper and cook Nellie Boxall was hospitalized in 1930, Woolf

wrote How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot

fathom (pp. 1945).

Like Light, and Steedman and perhaps like most historians, given the

ubiquity of domestic service I am descended from domestic servants.

I have also worked as one (albeit not live-in). For me, as for my and

Steedmans and Lights grandmothers, and most women in the past 500

years, service was a life-cycle event, although unpaid domestic labour was

not. The question of domestic service has metamorphosed into the questions

of cleaning, childcare, cooking and indeed gardening all of those skills

which were once termed the art and mystery of housewifery. Withthe virtual disappearance of live-in service in the mid twentieth century, the

responsibility for all of these areas fell once again on to the shoulders of the

middle-class mistress of the house, despite the fact that she was increasingly

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likely to be out at work herself. The growing middle classs growing clamour

for domestic service was challenged by the other opportunities available to

young women who might have gone into service, and exacerbated by the

other opportunities available to the mistress class. The movement of native

working-class women out of live-in service was followed within a matter ofyears by the movement of non-native women into positions of either daily or

live-in help: the au pair, the ex-colonial ayahs and the immigrant cleaners

with no other qualifications. Cooking could just about be done by the

professional couple, as Virginia and Leonard Woolf found; critical nursing

was now largely provided by the National Health Service. But the physical

care that Light dwells on the swilling of chamber pots, carrying water for

baths, bodily care in illness, as well as the much more momentous lying in

and laying out (p. 4) must still be done even if the tasks are made easier by

running water and central heating. Toilets still need to be cleaned, vomitcleared from wherever its landed; food washed, cut and prepared and then

the greasy dishes somehow returned to use all those processes that Woolf

found so difficult to stomach.

In the absence of any recognition of male responsibility for domestic

labour or care (and the evidence of developments in this area is so limited as

to be negligible) the mistress class, or in todays terms, professional women,

employ other lesser qualified women who want the job. There is no way of

measuring the extent of this sector of the economy because the great

majority of it, being live-out and daily or weekly, will not appear in the

census or in the tax records. If unable, as the majority of women clearly are,

to convince male partners of the need for shared care, they can either hire

others willing to do the work (overwhelmingly female) or they can do it

themselves. The latter choice may be preferable on moral grounds (on the

basis that one should do ones own dirty work) or economic grounds

(domestic help may cost more than a mistress could earn) or physical and

emotional grounds (it is too exhausting to work full-time outside the home

and undertake the domestic labour and care as well). The decision to opt for

a domestic role instead of a professional one among middle class women has

been characterized for fifteen years now as the mummy wars, pitching

working mothers against stay at homes, rather than being discussed in

terms of labour and structural inadequacies in the economy. There is one

more radical choice: women can refuse to bear children, like the outraged

young inter-war wife who fumed that she and her like were not going to

undertake the responsibilities of motherhood when they cannot get servants

on reasonable terms and conditions (Light, p. 180) or perhaps until

fathers take their fair share. In the face of massive structural inequities

within the economy,14 most women tread a middle ground and get by with

part-time paid help and the labour of whichever family members areavailable.

As Light says, the service relationship was at the heart of most womens

lives in nearly all periods of British history (p. xv). But the nature of that

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service relationship, in its economic, emotional and class dimensions, has

changed over time. If twenty-first-century service looks in some ways similar

to early modern service, conflicts over service have entered the marital

relationship in a way probably unparalleled in the past. It is now central

to most mens lives. When Virginia Woolf fired Nellie Boxall for the lasttime, she wrote, I at last got rid of an affectionate domestic tyrant (p. 211).

Who has become the domestic tyrant in contemporary households is an

open question.

Steedman goes to the West Yorkshire heart of The Making of the

English Working Class and asks how a majority of the eighteenth-century

labouring population came to be missing (p. 74). Light goes to the heart of

feminist, Fabian London in the early twentieth century and asks how the

servants upon whom that world depended came to be left out. These

intelligent, persuasive, thought-provoking studies challenge us not only tolook again at the service relationship, from the points of view of both

servant and master/mistress, but to recast the role of service in British

history.

Amy Louise Ericksonis Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical

Research, London, and Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Group

for the History of Population and Social Structure, where she works on the

Occupational Structure of Britain project (www.hpss.geog.cam.ac.uk/

research/projects/occupations/).

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Richard Connors, Poor Women, the Parish and the Politics of Poverty, in Gender inEighteenth-Century England, ed. Elaine Chalus and Hannah Barker, London, 1997.

2 The Diary of Thomas Turner 175465, ed. David Vaisey, Oxford, 1985, pp. 478, 504.3 Turner, pp. 110, 120, 1245, 1489, 2634, 333.4 Turner, pp. 589.5 Turner, pp. 56, 151, 326.

6 Turner, pp. 8594, 117.7 Turner, pp. 181, 185, 193, 294.8 Amanda Vickery, The Gentlemans Daughter: Womens Lives in Georgian England,

New Haven and London, 1998, esp. pp.13646. A London estimate based on settlementexaminations (which will of course eliminate those serving less than a year but alsoperhaps exaggerate those serving for a single year) is D. A. Kent, Ubiquitous but Invisible:Female Domestic Servants in mid-eighteenth century London, History Workshop Journal28,1989, pp. 1201.

9 In only two London enumeration districts did the proportion rise above 20%: LeighShaw-Taylor, Diverse Experiences: the Geography of Adult Female Employment in Englandand the 1851 Census, inWomens Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives,ed. Nigel Goose, 2007, p. 50 and Fig 2.14. The proportion of the population who were live-in

servants probably changed little between 1780 and 1890: Leonard Schwarz, English Servantsand their Employers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Economic History ReviewLII: 2, 1999, pp. 24450.

10 Shaw-Taylor, Diverse Experiences, Figs 2.3 and 2.3; Leonard Schwarz, London in theAge of Industrialisation, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 1415.

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11 Elizabeth Ewan notes maidservants in sixteenth-century Scotland performing work forthose other than their masters and mistresses for additional income, although there it wasbrewing and laundering, as well as money-lending: Mistresses of Themselves? Female DomesticServants and By-employments in sixteenth-century Scottish towns, in Domestic Service and theFormation of European Identity, ed. Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, Oxford, 2004. Phoebe Beatsonmay be the first known English example of a servant labouring for additional income, althoughservants moneylending and renting out animals have been observed elsewhere.

12 Turner, pp. 10, 18, 215, 303, 329.13 See further Sheila McIsaac Cooper, From Family Member to Employee: Aspects of

Continuity and Discontinuity in English Domestic Service, 16002000, in Domestic Service, ed.Fauve-Chamoux, p. 288 for the figures.

14 An interesting discussion of these is Paula England and Nancy Folbre, Contracting forCare, inFeminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man, ed. Marianne A. Ferber and JulieA. Nelson, Chicago and London, 2003.

doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn072

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