Once more we wend our way through the pages of cut-price Victorian domestic gittess Mrs Beetroot, who may be conducting a liaison with her publisher to get into print, or whose publisher is perhaps himself desperately cashing in on a profitable trend as households large and small reach for the big book.
Were it not gilding the dandelion I would offer advice in respect of reading this. First: I’d appreciate it if you’d read quickly as I have nothing of the exact same thickness as Mrs Beetroot’s tome to prop up the table leg. Second: the publishers of JaneLaverick.com refuse point blank to be held responsible for any consequences whatsoever of following Mrs Beetroot’s advice. In fact we strongly advise you not to.
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Accommodations for domestic servants.
In a household of any size the procurement of adequate accommodations for the servants should be attended to the very moment the household has taken possession of its abode. Foolish would be she who permitted the night to fall without having assigned suitable quarters to the servants and herself retired, only to find them later, milling around the downstairs hall like so many cattle – as happened to my friend Amelia who is herself a close acquaintance of a lady who knows someone who is slightly intimate with a friend of the Duchess of Gloucester.
Such an unfortunate occurrence can be avoided by assessing the house upon purchase not only for the suitability of the drawing room and parlour, for entertaining friends of the nobility, but also for the accommodations for the servants required to attend them. It is insufficient merely to make the servants stand together in a room when they are not working, particularly if the room is small, such as a boot cupboard and the servants are numerous, say, more than seven or fifteen. One cannot conceive of the Duchess of Gloucester being attended by a cramped footman or a thoroughly squashed butler any more than one could imagine the door being opened by a crushed housekeeper, especially when there is a possibility of the caller being royalty. This gracious occasion in truth occurred to an acquaintance of a friend of a lady served by the same coalman as a household known to my footman, whom I believe to be called James. Apparently it was merely the royal postilion who came to the door. However, I believe it not to have been the Queen’s postilion directly but the postilion of another distant Aunt of royalty and that occasion only to ask directions. Nevertheless, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that any person of rank or their servant could knock upon one’s door and that it should be answered by a crumpled domestic is a horror scarcely fit for contemplation.
Whilst servants cannot be stood together in a room too small to serve any other useful purpose, neither can they be stacked like rugs, while not in use. This would be equally as damaging to their uniforms as close quartering. To assign the correct space per servant it is merely necessary to count the total number of servants, including even the boot boy and the scullery maid if they live in, then to allow no less than two square yards per head. In this space may be fitted a small truckle bed for the servant to sleep upon, for curious to relate, when not working they sleep, just as we do. It is not advisable that servants of either gender should have sleeping accommodation in close proximity. The less experienced mistress of the house may initially feel that an advantage may be obtained by such an arrangement in that the servants would breed and thus become self-renewing. A moment’s thought would indicate that, unlike a donkey or a pig, the miniature servant is not immediately useful but is, in truth, a baby. These, one understands, require time and attention and have, in effect, to be attended constantly for as long as four years before any profit can be found. An acquaintance of mine did try to clean the chimneys with hers by dint of tying the baby, which was quite fat, to a pole and pushing it upward from the dining room. Unfortunately it became stuck and could be moved neither up nor down and a proper chimney sweep’s boy had to be engaged at the cost of fourpence three farthings to remove it, which he increased to five pence upon the wedged infant emitting noxious odours in a copious manner.
If stabling the servants in the hay loft above the horses, it is advisable to place the males up the ladder. Females are best kept in any underground rooms, providing they are in no wise contiguous to the wine cellar. It is not advisable to keep them in the coal cellar, unless coal deliveries are regular and predictable. Nothing spoils the appearance of a housemaid more than having a half hundredweight of nutty slack delivered upon her head while she sleeps.
In the larger household it is not uncommon for the more senior of both the male and female servants viz: the butler and the housekeeper, to expect separate accommodation from the other servants. Whilst this may appear an appallingly unnecessary expense, consider! If the senior servants are kept mysteriously separate it increases their authority to a degree that they may assume some of the more unpleasant aspects of the role of the lady of the house and can be used for dismissal of unsatisfactory underlings, to upbraid those who are negligent in their duties, to spy upon the work of their lowly subordinates and write a report secretly. With adequate instruction from the lady of the house they may be trained as one would a high born child or a monkey to observe and take note of any behaviour beyond the bounds of what may be expected from the lower classes. Feeling themselves to be favoured, the butler and the housekeeper can be expected to give their utmost of service and respect to the family and thus repay the extra expense of their quartering. I have an acquaintance who is familiar with someone who knows the cousin of an associate of the Duke of Rutland, whose butler apprehended a footman who had stolen a whole pennyworth of lard from the pantry, who made justice evident, the end result being the deportation of the footman to the colonies. The noble householder was in no wise obliged to be associated with the unpleasantness at all, except that he did subsequently make provision of a lard safe with only three keys and had only to have the butler arrest and deport three cooks before discovering that lard melts in warm weather and runs through gaps in the floorboards. Thus in one fell swoop the cause of colonisation and the advancement of science were achieved to the lasting credit of the Duke, whom I saw once, in the distance, on a Friday.
Finally it is recommended that before the servants take up their luxurious quarters that a new-fangled speaking tube and a siren is installed there connecting directly to the mistress of the house so that she may summon and arouse the servants at any hour of the day and night, preventing idleness, social chit-chat, fraternisation, camaraderie and other unfortunate consequences of over cosseting. Moreover, it should be noted that servants kept in this manner are apt to last more than twice as long as those kept in with the horses or herded into the twine shed.
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