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    Life in a Victorian Household
    Life in a Victorian Household
    Life in a Victorian Household
    Ebook61 pages58 minutes

    Life in a Victorian Household

    By Pamela Horn

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    About this ebook

    What was it like to live in a Victorian household? What time did the servants have to get up? What was the food like and who cooked it? How did the clothing differ for the different types of servants? How much did the servants get paid? This fascinating book takes you back in time and shows you what it was really like to live in Victorian times, for those both above and below stairs, and what sights and smells would be around you.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateSep 16, 2011
    ISBN9780752470634
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      Book preview

      Life in a Victorian Household - Pamela Horn

      CHAPTER 1

      Middle-class Victorian Homes

      When Seebohm Rowntree conducted his social survey of the people of York in 1899 he took ‘the keeping or not keeping of domestic servants... as marking the division between the working classes, and those of a higher social scale’.A large proportion of the maids worked in households with one or two domestics only, around three-fifths of the nation’s servant-keepers falling into this category. Among them were artizans and small shopkeepers, like the Bethnal Green woman who employed a ten-year-old girl in the mid-1860’s to look after a baby and to serve in the shop. When she was thirteen the girl went to another small London household, where she had a good mistress and plenty of food but had to sleep in a basement kitchen. This swarmed with black-beetles and made her ‘very wretched at night’. She also had little free time, being allowed out on Sundays only to go to church. She left after a year.

      However, most domestic staff—both male and female—worked in more substantial middle and upper class homes than these, even when they were the sole helper in the house.

      The Victorian middle classes have been called ‘the most home-centred group in British history’. Charles Dickens in his Sketches of Young Couples (1840) claimed that a love of home and the ‘English virtues associated with it’ provided the ‘only true source’ of ‘domestic felicity’. As society became increasingly industrialized and commercialized, and as growing numbers of the population lived in towns, the home came to be seen as a refuge from the competitive pressures of the wider world. In 1801 around one in five of the 9 million people living in England and Wales were urban dwellers. By 1901, with a total population of 32.5 million, that proportion had swollen to four out of every five residing in towns. Significantly, out of the 32.5 million, around 1.3 million were domestic servants in private households—1.28 million of them women and girls.

      Houses came to be seen almost as personal kingdoms, protected from intrusion by those who were not family and friends by the gates, hedges and walls that marked their boundaries. Within this setting, the home served as a focus for entertainment and recreation, as well as for rest and recuperation, particularly for the menfolk when they returned from the daily demands of business or professional life. Outside the house, the gardens of the more affluent became showcases for plants, with carefully cultivated flower beds, and fruit and vegetables grown for the table. Some had hothouses, which enabled more delicate or exotic plants to be raised. Gardens were places for relaxation, too, with afternoon tea served on the lawn, croquet and archery contests organized, and impromptu games played by the children. As the Registrar-General put it, in connection with the 1851 census of population: ‘The possession of an entire house is... strongly desired by every Englishman; for it throws a sharp, well-defined circle round his family and hearth—the shrine of his sorrows, joys, and meditations’.

      That view was shared by John Ruskin’s father, the founder of a prosperous London wine firm, when he declared in sentimental mode: ‘Oh! how dull and dreary is the best society I fall into compared with the circle of my own Fire Side with my Love sitting opposite irradiating all around her, and my most extraordinary boy’.

      In reality, much of family life did not match this optimistic picture. For many individuals, the intimate daily contacts and close relationships proved stifling and led to quarrels and unhappiness, as John Ruskin’s own unfortunate marriage was to demonstrate. Single daughters at home, especially as they grew older, often found the restrictions irksome. In the early l830s, when Florence Nightingale was in her early thirties, she expressed this general discontent, complaining of the role expected of well-todo women like herself, and the lack of purpose in their lives: ‘They are taught from their infancy upwards that it is a wrong, ill-tempered, and a misunderstanding of woman’s mission... if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours... The actual life is passed in sympathy given and received for a dinner, a party, a piece of furniture, a house built or a garden laid out well, in devotion to your guests... in schemes of schooling for the poor... The time is come when women must do something more than the domestic hearth.’

      Nonetheless, those darker aspects did not prevent society from emphasizing the centrality of family life for the nation’s wellbeing. That applied to all classes and in reinforcing the philosophy, religion played its part, through

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