Upstairs, downstairs
Harriet Waugh
The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant Pamela Horn (Gill and Macmillan £8.50) The Victorian Public School edited by Brian Simon and Ian Bradley (Gill and Macmillan, £8.50)
Between the death of Queen Victoria and the start of the First World War one microcosmic society collapsed and another changed, and in so doing altered the lot of the middle classes. The Victorian manservant went to war and legions of maidservants staggered out of the woodwork of Victorian red brick villas up and down the country, blinked in the sunlight and embraced with enthusiasm the life styles of bus conductresses, canteen assistants, land girls and nurses. They never went back. Those who had thought their lives pleasant enough before the war, working in the grand houses of the aristocracy under the autocratic and not always benevolent authority of the housekeeper or cook, found conviviality and freedom in the life of the cities, while the unfortunate and brutally overworked general servant of the middle-income, middle class family discovered that there was more money and leisure working in a factory. Their defection caused a revolution in middle class life and opened the way for the consumer society. Stainless steel, chrome dishwashers, washing machine, fridges and formica surfaces took the place of huge blackleaded kitchen ranges, highly polished copper pans and soda scrubbed floors.
However, before nostalgia takes too firm a grip it is worth reading Pamela Horn's book The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, where she describes in scrupulously measured prose the generally unhappy lot of the Victorian servant. Employing a servant was what divided the middle classes from the working class. A clergyman or tradesman earning as little as £150 per annum would scrimp and save enough money to employ a girl-of-all-work paying her, by the middle of the century, about £9 a year. She would be expected to work about eighteen hours a day. She would rise at 6.30 and lay and light the fires, sweep, dust, scrub, polish furniture, cook the meals, lay the table, wash up after meals, blacklead the kitchen range and the scraper outside the front door and wash down the paving stones and the window frames, etc. She would be extremely lucky if she were allowed free tea; she might easily be half-starved and would quite likely be got in the family way by the master of the house, and then dismissed by the mistress. She would either end up in the work-house, murder her baby, or become a prostitute (possibly all three). Mistresses felt preyed upon by their servants and complained about their dirt, slovenliness, dishonesty, stupidity and the amount they ate.
In larger households the lot of the servants was somewhat better, since there were more of them and they fulfilled certain designated tasks. Even so social positioning below stairs was so stratified that a ladies maid would not say "good morning" to a kitchen maid, and the kitchen maid at table would not speak unless spoken to. The housemaids cleaned the 'public rooms' at 6.30 in the morning and were supposed to be invisible by the time the family rose for breakfast. If glimpsed they were liable to be dismissed. It was quite possible that they would not recognise their employers if they passed them in the street. The men servants and the upper echelons of the servants' world had in comparison a fairly easy time, but despite this the housekeeper, cook, butler, footman and coachman were inclined to take to drink. Pamela Horn's book is meticulously researched and is a serious, definitive study of the servant covering every conceivable aspect of their lives up to the First World War.
While the servants were battling with their weary limbs through the dirt, dust and laundry of middle class Victorian homes, the male offspring of the household was being inculcated with a new Godly ethos in the public schools. The upsurge of the bourgeoisie with their belief in work, service and God produced in its wake the increase of the servant class and the rise of the public school. Until the 1820s, the public school was the preserve of the British aristocracy. Education consisted of a rudimentary knowledge of the classics. Teaching was not a respectable profession: masters were bacify paid and despised by their pupils as their social inferiors. Pupil power held sway, and outside the schoolroom they spent their time in any way they chose; it was generally held that "a man could only grow into a free man if he experienced freedom in youth". When Thomas Arnold became headmaster of Rugby in 1828 some boys kept their own packs of hounds and marauded over the countryside to the annoyance of farmers. Arnold introduced a system of prefects. God and football. With these three ingredients he produced a spirit of Community enthusiasm, cohesion, leadership and a belief in striving for the common good. Increasingly the Army and the Empire became the repository of these schoolboy virtues. But as the century progressed the natural sciences started to infiltrate the curriculum, and Muscular Christianity gave place to "Grecian aestheticism and finally a recruiting campaign."
With the beginning of the First World War the public school boy, like the servant, joined up, huge numbers of them only to die. With their deaths, the public /school ethos of seeing the playing fields and the Cadet Rifle Corps as a microcosm and preparation for life faded into a cynical twilight. Kipling described the feeling of disenchantment well when he wrote, . . Then ye contented your souls With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goal.
The Victorian Public School edited by Brian Simon and Ian Bradley is a series of essays gathered after a symposium on the subject, and differ greatly in quality. They cover narrowly a few aspects of the Victorian public school and inevitably perhaps the book lacks a cohesive image. It is in no way a definitive study of the subject. I found it disappointing, although some of the essays such as that on 'The Ideal of Manliness' by Norman Vance are entertainingly written, and give an indication of the book that could have been produced.
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