The Rise & Fall of the Victorian Servant

Pity the the sorry young lackey on the left; stuck in Victorian domestic servitute.  Opportunities for a career shift were extremely limited.  The best she could hope for would be a job for life and the possibility of a secure retirement, depending on the employer.

Unless, that is, she was lucky enough to be the servant of Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, then she might have ended her days living in "Holly Village" - a charming enclosure of Gothic cottages in Highgate.  For a while I lived very close to Holly Village, in a little Gothic horror/domestic servitude situation of my own - but perhaps that story can wait for another day.

Few were as lucky as the Baroness's employees.  Thanks to the double standards of Victorian society, as a servant girl the chances were somewhat higher that the the man of the household would violate you then instruct his wife or a head housekeeper (depending on how wealthy/important the lech and his blind-eye turning family were) to kick you out.

Some workhouse masters bought
fancy cakes with blanket money
.

You'd then pick yourself up and  head for the nearest workhouse if there were no friends of family to take you in...or, if very far into your pregnancy, perhaps directly to the Foundling Hospital.  In the workhouse, you might have lain on a two foot wide, rock hard bed listening to the unhappy sniffles of your dormitory companions....shivering uncontrollably through a cold January night because  the workhouse master had embezzled the funds that were intended for blankets.   You might ponder on your future.  A brothel, perhaps, would offer some temporary respite before syphilis set in to rob you of whatever looks you had left, leaving you with nowhere to turn but the workhouse infirmary.

You could console with the knowledge, though, that 100 years later, in her book The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, Pamela Horn would refer to the age you lived in as the "Servant Heyday."    There's nothing like being part of a zeitgeist.


In Victoria's day, having servants was normal for the upper classes and de rigeur for the aspirational middle classes.  The Bronte family had two maids, though Mr Bronte's income just scraped the £200 per annum mark.  Often, maids would be recruited from the local workhouse.  Inhabitants, having no family of their own, were glad to be taken on by another family.  They were exploited to the hilt....often working 17 hours per day with little or no break.  Horn describes what she terms as a "moving account" of a servant girl by George Moore in "Confessions of a Young Man".

George Moore:  He meant well.

"To know nothing but a dark kitchen, grates, eggs and bacon, dirty children; to work seventeen hours a day and to get cheated out of your wages...[the landlady] owed you forty pounds...I calculated it from what you told me; and yet you did not like to leave her because you did not know how she would get on without you.  Sublime stupidity!"

Perhaps Moore failed to consider that "I don't know how she would get on without me" might have been another way of saying "I have no family, no self esteem and the limited alternatives I do have are no better - and possibly much worse - than my current situation."  The tough loving meddler continues relentlessly in his tirade:

"[You] were taken by this fat landlady...and you will be thrown away, shut out of doors when health fails you, or when, overcome by base usage, you take to drink.  There is no hope for you."

It was relatively easy to pick up skivvies from the workhouse so that they could clean your firegrate until it shone - while your artistic,  liberal friends could demolish whatever tiny fragments of hope and self respect the wretches had managed to hang on to..  Horn spends a large part of the book discussing the recruitment process in more detail, examining the typical working day and duties of a servant...and, more interestingly, taking a look at the soap opera aspect of it all.  Social Life "Below Stairs".  This is the chapter where a range of photographs (mainly early twentieth century ones) help the modern woman to appreciate her good fortune in having access to a range of anti-frizz hair products.

It's good to read the odd tale, in "Below Stairs" of servants getting the opportunity to skive off work a bit, but no surprise to hear that there were more opportunities for men to skive off than there were for women.  Mainly because menservants were more likely to be sent out on messages - giving them opportunities to loiter awhile in the pub.  Servants weren't generally permitted visitors, but would often arrange for them to come round in any event....and often even managed to hold fairly raucous parties downstairs.  In larger households, it wasn't uncommon for staff parties to be held at Christmas time.  Needless to say, there were the usual romantic fumblings at these social events - and generally there seems to have been no shortage of Downstairs Drama resulting in affairs, jealousy, heartbreak, trips to the Foundling Hospital - and the occasional murder.

Relations between upstairs and downstairs were usually more distant, of course....but at times they were downright cruel.  Horn gives several examples in her book of maidservants being repeatedly starved and abused - and, in one case, beaten to death by an employer.  One of the most hideous cases involved the case of Jane Wilbred - aged about 15, and employed by a lawyer (George Sloane) and his wife.  Poor Jane was beaten, starved, made to walk around the house half naked and subjected to various tortures.  All because Mrs Sloane's pet bird died, and Jane got the blame.

Jane Wilbred  was rescued by a barrister who worked near to Mr Sloane's office.  Sloane and his wife were found guilty of assault, and given a derisory two year sentence each.  The Apprentices and Servants Bill of 1851 came partly in response to the public outcry, and things began to improve somewhat for servants, although incidents of cruelty continued to be relatively common.  Toward the end of the Nineteenth Century, however, with the servant shortage beginning to hit, staff began getting a bit more shirty with their employers.  Thus began the fine tradition of studied insolence amongst servants - with those who worked for the higher rung families often adopting a pompous air of second hand grandeur.

In the early Twentieth Century, there were moves towards the unionisation of domestic staff, and the First World War heralded the speedy decline of servitude....with butlers and footmen being drafted in for service in the war, and young women taking up the vacant posts many men left behind.  Horn concludes her study with a brief look at the more modern day situation in the 2004 revised edition of the book....noting that the closest modern day equivalent to a maid might be the foreign au pair.

For me, this book was a fascinating and often troubling read.  More so when one considers the continued exploitation of those who continue to be exploited in servitude in the Twenty-first Century - particularly in the regions that women's suffrage forgot.  There's a  long way to go before we can claim to live in truly enlightened times.