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Tag Archives: servants

Regency jobs

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I’m recycling a blog post from a year or so ago about my ideal Regency job. I spent last weekend with the lovely ladies of Virginia Romance Writers at their conference, where I spoke on servants, so this is timely. And Amanda, have you opened the vampire bar yet?
The housekeeper came; a respectable-looking elderly woman, much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her.
After Amanda’s exotic and glamorous plans to open a vampire bar, I thought I’d like to describe my ideal Regency job as a housekeeper.

Just imagine it. All that power! Solely in charge of the nutmeg and other spices and maybe even the tea, gliding silently around the corridors of the great house and coming upon servant hanky-panky, unless the slight jangling from your chatelaine betrayed your presence. This lovely example is from early eighteenth century Holland (I think. An ebay find which I couldn’t afford) with a St. Christopher motif.

Just the position if you were a gentlewoman widowed and down on her luck, like Mrs. Fairfax in Jane Eyre (and then I’d be Judi Dench too!).

Or even the unmarried and troublesome member of the family who needs to be shuffled off somewhere to learn the folly of her ways and spend some time brewing stuff in the stillroom.

Housekeepers got nice, fat salaries, too, augmented with tips from tourists if they worked in a great house. When Darcy’s housekeeper (the one described in my opening quote) finished showing Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle around, you may be absolutely sure she had her hand held out. It was quite a cottage industry.

What’s your ideal Regency job?

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Spiders and other domestic matters

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Here’s a recent portrait of me.

No, really, this is the way I feel after massive cleaning, sorting, throwing out of items in preparation for some fairly substantial work to be done on my house.

This is a portrait of Mrs. Jane Ebrell when she was 87 by provincial artist John Walters of Denbigh, one of the servants at Erddig, a national trust property dating from the 18th century whose owners liked to commission servants’ portraits (and later photographs), embellished with poems. Mrs. Ebrell, a former housemaid, was hired as a Spider Catcher, possibly as a way for the family to support her in her later years. (I have been dealing with monumental spider webs.)

My thanks to the Two Nerdy History Girls who found the text of the poem:

To dignifie our Servants’ Hall
Here comes the Mother, of us all:
For seventy years, or near have passed her,
since spider-brusher to the Master;
When busied then, from room to room,
She drove the dust, with burhs, and broom
Anyd by the virtues of her mop
To all uncleanness, put a stop:
But changing her housemaiden state,
She took our coachman, for a mate;
To whom she prov’d an useful gip,
And brought us forth a second whip:
Morever, this, oft, when she spoke,
Her tongue, was midwife, to a joke,
And making many an happy hit,
Stands here recorded for a wit:
O! may she, yet some years, survive,
And breed her Grandchildren to drive!

She certainly sounds better at cleaning than me. (And to whichever member of the Yorke family of Erddig wrote the poem, don’t give up your day job.) I’ve mentioned Erddig before as it is such a rich source of servant info, but I may not have told you what an excellent cake shop it has–other food is sold there, but I ate only cake. The walls of the cake shop are hung with photos of the house as it was before restoration by the National Trust. This is Philip Yorke, the last private owner of Erddig, in the one habitable room of the house before he deeded it to the National Trust (note: no electricity!). It was a real mess with subsiding floors (built over a coal mine, something I borrowed for The Rules of Gentility), buckets scattered throughout the house to catch leaks from the roof–just horrible. Happily major restoration, funded by the Coal Board and sale of some of the land, put it to rights and it’s now one of the most popular stately homes in England.

But back to my humble home–any tips for surviving renovation? If I were in the Regency and wealthy I’d just take off to one of my other houses, leaving my faithful butler in charge. Sadly that is not the case. The best tip I’ve had so far is to eat out as much as possible and label the boxes.

And a small reminder that (1) The Malorie Phoenix is now 99 cents for kindle and (2) I’d love some amazon reviews. If you’re a legit blogger/reviewer, please contact me.

 

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Your servant, madam

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It’s tough to follow on after the heart-wrenching demise of Frisky the Goldfish (and now his successor, gone to both a watery and icy grave). So I thought I’d write today about servants, who I find far more fascinating than the folks upstairs in the drawing room in the labor-intensive regency household. Of course the best thing about servants, for a writer, is that they knew the household secrets and family dynamics better than anyone. I find it interesting, though, that so many regency-era writers get them all wrong, relying on vague ideas of what servants are like (and copying others’ mistakes).

For instance, a female servant would never answer the front door, unless the household was quite poor and she was theonly servant. Neither would she wear a black dress and white cap–that was a uniform that came in much later in the century. Footmen, dressed in livery, were the servants in an aristocrat household who dealed with visitors and guests–status symbols for the family, since there was a tax on male servants. It was the fashion to hire men who were similar in appearance and height, rather like a team of horses (leading to some very interesting possibilities if you have a mind like mine). Female servants hauled coals, emptied chamberpots, and did other dirty work, while their male (and better paid) colleagues minced around in daft uniforms and wigs opening doors and presenting billets-doux on salvers.

For an interesting breakdown on servants and their duties, visit this page (and if you poke around on the site you can also find out how to become a gentleman’s gentleman), http://www.butlerschool.com/interesting_facts.htm.

For a feel of servants’ living and working quarters, take a virtual tour of the “downstairs” at The Regency Town House–it’s described as a time capsule, as it’s the basement of a house in Hove (near Brighton) that has been virtually untouched for almost two centuries. Restoration of the main house, at 13 Brunswick Square is also underway and the servants’ quarters are a couple of doors down at number 10.

Another interesting servant-oriented stop on your next visit to England is Erddig, an historic house in North Wales, where the former owners (before it was taken over by the National Trust), bless them, didn’t throw away a thing for three centuries, including correspondence with their servants when the masters were away. This unusual family also had portraits painted of their servants and wrote poems in appreciation of them.

A book written for the National Trust about Erddig by Merlin Waterson, The Servants’ Hall, is out of print but you can find secondhand copies online. The Erddig family tradition of staff portraits continued well into the 20th century; in this 1912 photo, each staff member whimsically holdsa tool of their trade (the cook, front row left, is holding a dead pigeon. No wonder they look embarrassed).

The artist William Hogarth painted his servants’ portraits, too. Notice the age range, from a young boy to a middle aged man.

So what was it really like, to be in service? The servants themselves existed in a social heirarchy at least as complicated as that of the people Upstairs.You worked very long, hard hours for not much money, but it was a way, if you scrimped and saved, to make the upward trek into the middle-class. You might end up running an inn or a shop with your sweetheart of many years, if you’d saved up most of your wages and tips (a valuable addition to the low wages most servants earned). A manservant in the 1820s eloquently described his life: The life of a gentleman’s servant is something that of a bird shut up in a cage. The bird is well housed and well fed but is deprived of liberty, and liberty is the dearest and sweetest object of all Englishmen. Therefore I would rather be like a sparrow or a lark, have less housing and feeding and rather more liberty. A servant is shut up like a bird in a cage, deprived of the benefit of the air to the very great injury of the constitution.

Any good servant scenes in anything you’ve read recently? Have you ever wanted to write about servants?

Janet

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A recycled post: What would yoube?

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Sorry about this. I thought I’d take a look and see what was up at the Riskies, lateish in the afternoon, and realized it was Thursday, my day to blog. It doesn’t feel like a Thursday, you see. I’m at work…

So here’s a recycled post from a couple years ago which raised some interesting discussions then and might yet do so again. And next week, absolutely new content, I promise–an interview with a vampire.

I spoke at a workshop a few weeks ago with some other historical writers, and when we asked for questions, a woman asked this:

If I’d lived two hundred years ago, what would I be?
Chances are, we told her, you wouldn’t be a member of the aristocracy, or own land or wealth. If you lived in America, more than likely you’d be someone’s property. Adam Hochschild, author of Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves calculates that at the beginning of the English abolitionist movement, approximately two-thirds of the world’s population was in some form of slavery or bondage.

So…you’re living in England during the Regency. You’re not Lady Something or the Hon. Miss Something-Else. You’re not even a gentleman’s daughter. You have to earn a living.
If you were born in the country, you might be able to stay there–always assuming you weren’t forced out by foreclosure–or you might seek a job in a mill or factory in one of the rapidly growing industrial cities.

Or, you might go into service. Here’s another amazing statistic: in the eighteenth century, one-third of all the population (with the exception of the aristocracy) was in service at some time in their lives—usually until their mid-twenties. About one-third of London’s population was servants. Some people, working in the houses of the rich, rose in the ranks to enter the servant elite as butler, housekeeper, or lady’s maid; even though this illustration is from the mid-eighteenth century, you can see how well-dressed this lady’s maid is. Servants earned room and board, plus “perks”—for a ladies maid or valet, cast-off clothing they could wear or sell—or “vails,” tips from visitors usually given to footmen. The maidservant illustration is from the mid-nineteenth century, but gives you an idea of what it was like being at the beck and call of a bell, and negotiating stairs in a long skirt, possibly carrying something worse than a tea service. Becoming a servant for a few years gave you upward mobility; hopefully you’d have saved enough to leave, marry, and own your own business—a shop, maybe—and have a servant or two of your own.

But life was uncertain and who knows where you might end up (another interesting statistic, although one I find difficult to believe: one third of the female population of London during the nineteenth century were prostitutes). You might find yourself reviewed in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a sort of Michelin Guide to whores for the discerning gentleman.

Your best bet, really, as we told the woman smart enough to ask this interesting question, was to marry as well as you could.

So what what would you be?

If you want to be a contest winner, visit my website, sign up on my mailing list to enter my contest, and read various excerpts including one from JANE AUSTEN: BLOOD PERSUASION.

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On the road

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I really think I shall have to sack my maid. She is not only a saucy piece who makes the humble yet necessary job of ironing into some sort of grand seduction, but she’s incompetent! You should see the wrinkles in my clothes and the evidence of hasty, last minute laundering. When we reach our destination later today I shall have to stand over her and supervise her every move. I am just grateful that there will be very few gentlemen attending the event.

I shall spend the better part of an hour discussing the neverending problem of servants to anyone who cares to attend.

As for me, I shall be most modestly and suitably attired for travel–note that my maid seems to have lost her kerchief again–it is an excessively tiresome habit.

I shall take the precaution of taking my apothecary chest lest any of my acquaintances suffer a fit of the vapors or appear crapulous following an evening of gossip and refreshment.

And of course my writing slope will accompany me, for although I am not in such dire straits as Miss Jewell or Miss McCabe regarding their literary obligations, I do have a great deal of work to do.

In translation: Yes, I shall be attending the New Jersey Romance Writers Conference, giving my workshop on servants, and signing at the Literacy Bookfair on Saturday. I hope I’ll see you there! Next week I shall have pictures.

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