- 1 Mrs William Parkes was one of the sisters who ran the school attended by the young Elizabeth Gaskel (...)
1The 1851 census introduced the new category of ‘housewife’, as distinct from the paid post of ‘housekeeper’. Clearly housewifery was not a new invention, but with the rising cult of domesticity it had achieved a new significance. The forty years from 1825 to 1865 had seen a sudden growth in publications instructing women in the art of household management, of which the best remembered is undoubtedly Mrs Beeton’s The Book of Household Management which sold 60,000 copies in 1861, the year of its publication. Beeton’s magnum opus, like most of its rivals, relied heavily on two Ur-texts of 1825: The Complete Servant by Samuel and Sarah Adams; and Mrs William Parkes’s Domestic Duties, or Instructions to young married ladies, on the management of households, and the regulation of their conduct in the various relations and duties of married life.1 The various attempts to amalgamate under one cover the content and register of information gleaned from a book written by servants for servants, and Parkes’s instruction manual for middle-class newly-weds often resulted in an implicit acknowledgement of the mutual suspicions operating between employer and servant.
2There have been at least three major recent works that have addressed the relation between domestic servants and employers. Leonore Davidoff’s Worlds Between (1995) investigated the way in which female servants in particular were associated in their representation with the feared underside of a bourgeois culture that depended for its survival on an economy of hidden labour both at home and abroad. Bruce Robbins’s The Servant’s Hand (1993) again focused on the politics of representation but with little attention to either changing historical context or gender. Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995) examined Victorian fiction for the mechanisms by which middle class women used the home as a site where they could seek to impose the mythology of class power. This paper will concentrate upon the gender specific position of the housekeeper, which usually headed the list of role descriptors for servants, and will explore the ways that this figure so frequently became the site for the expression of class and gender anxieties in Victorian fiction.
3The sales success of domestic manuals suggests that it was not always easy for the new bride to negotiate the transition between the two ideals of Victorian womanhood: the passively obedient daughter and the active directrice of a smoothly-run household. For one thing, not all new brides were presented with a tabula rasa on which to inscribe their own design. In grander houses the housekeeper might well have enjoyed long-standing occupancy of her position; and in more modest establishments a widowed mother or sister had often conducted household affairs for the heir. Mrs Henry Wood’s sensation novel, East Lynne (1861), identifies this problem as a major contributory factor in the fall of Isabel Vane. When Lady Isabel returns to her father’s former home, where she had been the cosseted daughter of the widowed Earl, she does so as the bride of the new owner, a lawyer who has formerly been under the domestic management of his older sister, that redoubtable battle-axe, Miss Corny. Ill-equipped by upbringing and lacking guidance as to how to take up the reins of her new position, she finds that despite her capacity to produce children she is not to be mistress of her new home: the seductive blandishments of the wicked Sir Francis Levison are merely a catalyst in her bowing to the inevitability of her failure to become a good wife within the house and so she leaves, to return, in disguise, as a governess, who at least has her own room entirely at her own disposal and the undisputed charge, for much of the day, of her pupils, who in this case are the same children whose uncontested care and control she had failed to achieve as their mother. Meanwhile her replacement as the lawyer’s wife has assumed with ease the role of almost chillingly competent housewife because of the experience she had gained managing her invalid hysteric of a mother and irascible tyrant of a father. Nor is it accidental that other super housewives of Victorian fiction, such as Charles Dickens’s key-jingling Esther Summerson (Bleak House, 1852), or David Copperfield’s wife in waiting, Agnes Wickfield (David Copperfield, 1850), or the omni-competent Mary Garth of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), could all cite previous experience on their curriculum vitae before they combine running a household with marriage. In each of these three cases it could be said with little exaggeration that marriage effects their promotion from housekeeper to housewife; though each of these women, it is important to note, always kept a toehold on membership of the middle-class.
- 2 For the history of the châtelaine as an object see, G. E. Cummins, N. D. Taunton, Chatelaines: Util (...)
4That the two roles of paid housekeeper and housewife, were in danger of a troubling confusion can be seen in the evolution of the word ‘chatelaine’, which in medieval French had been used to describe the mistress of the castle whose symbol of office was the bunch of keys hung from her waist. By the eighteenth century the word seemed to have disappeared from English usage, making its way back on the wings of the Gothic revival, but in the process of re-entry the chain and keys, now paraded as a miniaturised accessory, gained a symbolic role in creating the concept of the mistress, of queen-like dignity and virtue, tending the nineteenth-century home. When, in the 1870s, Alexandra, Princess of Wales, took to wearing a version hung from a belt, chased with coronets and monograms the chatelaine’s dissociation from its workaday counterpart was complete.2
5The chatelaine, and its commodification as a product which had come to have a value, both financial and symbolic, wholly independent from a bunch of keys, and from the working lives of the domestic servants who used them would have been a useful image for the young Karl Marx busy in the eighteen-forties hammering out his concept of the alienation of industrialised labour. The proletarians may have had nothing to lose but their chains, but the prospect of watching wealthy Victorian women adopting parodic imitations as an overt reference to the very work they were precisely not doing was an affront. The distance such women managed to keep from dirtying their hands in actual cleaning, darning and cooking, was advertised by their possession of the doll-like accoutrements of miniature scissors, needles and knives, which were always ‘to hand’ while the real work went on below stairs performed by the unseen ‘hands’ of domestic skivvies.
6Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, though it does not make any acknowledgement of the debts she owed to previous writers, does interpolate amongst her copious plagiarisms, remarks that articulate the particular anxieties of the 1860s. Observing that it was traditional for each society to abuse its servants, she added:
- 3 Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1861) 1001.
It is the conviction of ‘Society’ that the race of good servants has died out, at least in England, although they do order these things better in France; that there is neither honesty, conscientiousness, nor the careful and industrious habits which distinguished the servants of our grandmothers, that domestics no longer know their place, that the introduction of cheap silk and cottons, and still more recently, those ambiguous ‘materials’ and tweeds, have removed the landmarks between the mistress and her maid, between the master and his man.3
7Her solution to this all too visible blurring of hierarchy was to increase the rungs and gaps on the ladder and ensure observance by instituting a system where each subsequent rank monitors and polices its inferiors:
The Housekeeper must consider herself as the immediate representative of her mistress, and bring to the management of the household all those qualities of honesty, industry, and vigilance in the same degree as if she were the head of her own family. Constantly on the watch to detect any wrong-doing on the part of any domestics, she will overlook all that goes on in the house.4
8Needless to say, the housekeeper herself was also under the vigilance of her mistress. Beeton concludes: ‘Like “Caesar’s wife,” [your housekeeper] should be above suspicion, and her honesty and sobriety unquestionable; for there are many temptations to which she is exposed.’—the exact nature of the temptations is passed over so that we may skip to other important features:
In a physical point of view, a housekeeper should be healthy and strong, and be particularly clean in her own person, and her hands, although they may show a degree of roughness, from the nature of some of her employments, yet should have a nice inviting appearance. 5
9It is tempting to speculate that Dickens, whose interest in housekeeping bordered on the obsessive, had alighted on this passage while he was in the throes of writing Great Expectations (1861). Molly, the tamed tramp of a housekeeper, kept by Jaggers the lawyer, whose forensic skills had kept her from the gallows, is a sort of fantastic cadenza on Mrs Beeton’s prescription. As in Beeton, Molly’s strong physique is reduced to a pair of serving hands, and it is to these strong but serviceable hands that Jaggers repeatedly and sadistically draws his guests’ attention, for they still ‘show a degree of roughness, from the nature of some of her employments’—notably the alleged murder of her rival and her own child. Molly’s history is, of course known to Jaggers, but her attendance at the bourgeois dinner table conveys the frisson of danger involved in appointing a servant trusted to deputise for the mistress.
10Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) was also to make full use of this manoeuvre identified by Freud, as turning the heimlich into the unheimlich: the governess trusting in the absent master’s insistence on his housekeeper’s respectability ignores the potent resonance of her name, Mrs Grose, with fatal consequences. Once admitted to the family a housekeeper could equally threaten destabilisation to the ordered hierarchy she is meant to guarantee. Her keys of office could just as well open up the cupboards containing the family skeletons, the attics housing abandoned wives, and the bedrooms facilitating illicit couplings, as keep them secure against intruders. Two factors, however, must always separate her from her mistress, her class, and the knowledge that the one area in which she is not expected to deputise for her mistress is in the master’s bed.
- 6 Genesis, chapters 16; 17; 21: 9–21.
- 7 William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848) chap. 39.
11Patriarchal literature had long indulged the delicious horror of imagining sexual deputising: the handmaid Hagar, who presented his firstborn Ishmael to Abraham,6 was the forerunner of many another woman made to fall in aiming too high. Dickens and Thackeray, who had both had cause in their private lives to contemplate the difficulty, experienced by men separated from their wives, in acquiring housekeepers without attracting notoriety, nervously explored the problem in their fiction. In Vanity Fair (1848) Thackeray distances the anxiety from polite bourgeois society of his own day by having that wicked old reprobate, Sir Pitt Crawley, install Miss Horrocks, the butler’s daughter, as housekeeper and companion intimate enough to use the front stairs. Sir Pitt derives much cynical amusement at the housekeeper practising the signature, ‘Lady Betsy’ and of her vulgar refashioning of his previous wives’ wardrobes—a practice that gains for her, behind her back, the nickname of ‘Ribbons’.7 Dickens, himself a housekeeper’s grandson, repeatedly turned to good comic effect the ways in which newly successful men might be haunted and taunted by the unmanageable household servants their new status demanded. In Hard Times (1854) he depicted that parvenu bachelor, Josiah Bounderby, deliberately acquiring a widow of ancient, if decayed, lineage, to preside over his tea-table, like a captive princess paying tribute to his triumphant rise from the gutter. Both Dickens’s Mrs Sparsit and Thackeray’s Betsy Horrocks are made to pay for their overweening desire to transgress boundaries and become wife rather than paid housekeeper, and are, like Hagar, cast out into the wilderness.
12Class and sex, then, formed the glass ceiling for housekeepers, preventing them, however well they performed their duties, from further promotion. The young Karl Marx expressed such a working condition thus:
. . . it is activity that is passivity, power that is weakness, procreation that is castration, the worker’s own physical and intellectual energy, his personal life (for what is life except activity?) is an activity directed against himself, independent of him, and not belonging to him. It is self-alienation.
13Furthermore, he added:
- 8 D. Mclellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 89-91.
When man is opposed to himself, it is another man that is opposed to him. What is valid for the relationship of a man to his work, of the product of his work and himself, is also valid for the relationship of man to other men and of their labour and the objects of their labour.8
14Marx was not much interested either in domestic labour or in ways that alienation might be differently gendered, but Victorian novelists showed themselves very alive to the ingenious outlets that resentment could find among women accustomed to plotting a household’s activities.
- 9 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, London: Smith Elder, 1847, chap. 11.
- 10 Jane Eyre, chap. 37.
15For one thing nineteenth-century novelists were writing for a rapidly expanding market of middle-class readers, and knew that their readership enjoyed reading not only about the stuff of their own lives, but that of the classes above them. Housekeepers provided a useful marker to the social arrangements and pretensions of a household. When the maimed Edward Fairfax Rochester is found by Jane Eyre, near the end of the novel, in the insalubrious shooting-box, Ferndean Manor, he has lost the services of the former housekeeper of spacious Thornfield Hall, a clerical widow and distant relative, Mrs Fairfax, who had the authority to hire a governess, and spoke of other employees such as John and his wife, as ‘very decent people, but then you see they are only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality.’9 At Ferndean, Rochester has been reduced to the services of this same John and his housekeeper wife, Mary. Indeed Jane Eyre’s renewed declaration of devotion to Rochester: ‘I will be your neighbour, your nurse, your housekeeper . . . be “eyes” and “hands” to you’,10 could have awakened Mary’s fears for her livelihood and triggered a sequel with curious resemblances to the opening of sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights, a tale partly recounted by a several times displaced housekeeper to Lockwood, another bachelor occupant of an unwelcoming shooting box.
- 11 Jane Eyre, chap. 28.
- 12 Jane Eyre, chap. 29.
16The comparison is instructive. Jane Eyre, however low she sinks—and she slips at one point in her story to the level of a homeless tramp and beggar—is determined to avoid the ultimate Victorian horror of ‘a workhouse coffin and a pauper’s grave’,11 and so she is careful to impress her essential gentility upon any servant she meets. Though she is happy to top and tail gooseberries in the kitchen with Hannah, the nurse turned housekeeper of her cousins’ house, Moor End, Hannah is invited to note the condition of Jane’s hands, unused as they are to servant’s toil, and to recognise the book-learning that will always separate the two of them.12
- 13 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Smith Elder, 1847) chap. 16.
17Emily Brontë’s Nelly Dean, housekeeper by turn of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, as a child might have nursed ambitions of incorporation into the Earnshaw family, until supplanted by that cuckoo in the nest, Heathcliff. ‘Seldom otherwise than happy’,13 as she puts it, to be left alone to tend a death-bed, Nelly sees off one mistress and master after another (the first Mrs and Mr Earnshaw, Mrs Hindley Earnshaw, and Catherine and Edgar Linton all die while Nelly is in attendance) and by the time the narrative opens is sole occupant of the Grange. Similarly Henry James’s Mrs Grose contrives to remain mistress of Bly by killing off the reputations of all contenders.
- 14 Wuthering Heights, chap. 34.
18It is one of Emily Brontë’s best contrived pieces of irony that, Lockwood, guardian of the values of the effete leisured classes of southern England, simply cannot see the difference Nelly Dean sees between herself and her fellow servants. By throwing a sovereign to Joseph and crudely pressing a tip into her hand as he leaves,14 Lockwood aligns himself with Dickens and Thackeray in putting paid to the pretensions of dangerously ambitious housekeepers.
- 15 Henry James, ‘English Vignettes’ (1879). Reprinted in Henry James, English Hours (Oxford and New Yo (...)
- 16 H. G. Wells, Tono Bungay, 1910, chap. 3, Section 8. Wells’s own experience at Up Park, upon which t (...)
19It was in any case easier for a writer with a foothold outside the English upper middle-classes to recognise the exploitation, envy and enmity upon which the English class system rested: the American in James readily recognised that ‘It takes a great many plain people to keep a “perfect” gentleman going.’15 Similarly the results of transporting the 13 year old Francis Hodgson Burnett, from decaying gentility in Manchester to servantless poverty in post Civil War North America, were to show themselves in The Secret Garden (1910) where the young master’s invalid condition owes much to the housekeeper and doctor colluding in an arrangement that leaves them with a comfortable existence, unbothered by the master’s demands. H. G. Wells’s life-long ambivalence about so many aspects and consequences of the English class system, probably stemmed from the inability to reconcile his father’s dislike of ‘service’, his own hatred of suburban squalor, and his grudging recognition that when, during his adolescence, his mother became housekeeper at Up Park he was introduced to all that was ‘spacious, dignified, pretentious and truly conservative in English life.’16
20The luxury of lasciviating over the glamour of the lives of those who occupy English country houses, while at the same time deploring the degeneracy of their politics and social conscience has, of course, long been a cornerstone of popular British entertainment and the tradition continues in such works, as the recent film, Gosford Park, set in 1932, or the popular Sunday evening BBC series, Monarch of the Glen. Perhaps the most compelling tale in this genre of the doomed country house as metaphor for the last travails of a dying way of life, was to be Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, written in Egypt, and published in 1938, so placing it outside the remit of this paper, except in that it again owes debts to those two progenitors, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights while making far more explicit the threat posed by the servant classes. Rebecca’s feckless reign as mistress of Manderley has allowed her housekeeper, Danvers, to progress from doubling to usurping the role of mistress. It is Danvers who becomes the ghostly madwoman in the attic, who will be suspected of producing the conflagration that engulfs Manderley, but, unlike Bertha Mason, who is etched in our memory as consumed in her own funeral pyre, Danvers mysteriously disappears, amidst neighbourhood talk of communist activity, doubtless to continue the class war elsewhere.
21Du Maurier’s political vision may be alarmist, but it serves to render overt another trope found frequently enough in Victorian fiction to suggest how widespread the anxiety was in mid nineteenth-century England about the wisdom of empowering the servant classes: the housekeeper found ‘out of place’ in the master’s library. Nelly Dean had been careful to secure herself an education from the family that took her in. Whether Henry James’s Mrs Grose is the illiterate she claims herself to be is left open to question. Thackeray’s Betsy Horrocks might have been vulgar but she could write: in the illustration Thackeray penned for the episode of her discovery her infamy is confirmed when she is found in the library.
22In theory at least widening literacy promised a larger readership to novelists, but did little to reassure the anxieties of those writers who had been sufficiently successful to need to engage with servants. If performing manual labour at home, left male novelists feeling uncomfortably akin to their servants, women writers were risking their claim to genteel femininity by selling their wares outside the home. Accordingly many female novelists took great pains to stress the ‘hands-on’ nature of their continued involvement in the invisible, unpaid, non-productive, self-abasing, and therefore innately virtuous work of housekeeping.
23Thus Emily Brontë writes, on her 27th birthday (1845):
- 17 C. Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1896) 152.
Anne and I should have picked the black currants if it had been fine and sunshiny. I must hurry off now to my turning and ironing. I have plenty of work on hands (sic), and writing, and am altogether full of business.17
- 18 J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard (eds.) The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester: Manchester Universit (...)
- 19 Mrs H. Coghill (ed.) The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant, 1899, (Leicester: Leic (...)
24Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to her daughter Marianne, ‘I’ve had writing to do without end, till my wrist actually swelled with it’18; and Margaret Oliphant told her publisher, Blackwood, ‘I have worked a hole in my right forefinger—with the pen I suppose!—and can’t get it to heal,—also from the excessive use of that little implement.’19
- 20 E. Jay (ed.) The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant: The Complete Text (Oxford and New York: Oxford (...)
- 21 M. O. W. Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1866) chap. 4.
- 22 3 Jan. 1893, National Library of Scotland MS 23195.
- 23 4 Jan. 1893, National Library of Scotland MS 23195.
- 24 31 Dec. 1892, National Library of Scotland MS 23195.
- 25 Mrs H. Coghill (ed.) The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant viii.
25In turn she would refer to her prodigious literary output of almost 100 novels, fifty short stories, various biographies and several hundred essays and reviews as ‘the boiling of the daily pot’ or the stoking of ‘the cheerful household fire.’20 The cost of her necessary withdrawal from household concerns was glossed over, but cost there was: the cost of keeping a semi-professional double, who in the very act of helping was also threatening to displace and thus deligitimise the author’s own role as housekeeper. At the point when the widowed Oliphant decided to set up a permanent home in the royal borough of Windsor, she devoted a novel to the problems faced by a young woman intent on establishing her role both at home and in her wider milieu: Lucilla Marjoribanks’s campaign begins with the need to subdue her father’s formidable housekeeper, Nancy. As the narrator remarks, ‘For, to be sure, it is no great credit to a woman of nineteen to make a man of any age throw down his arms; but to conquer a woman is a different matter.’21 In her own case Oliphant solved the matter by taking in a distant Canadian cousin, Annie Louisa Walker, as her housekeeper cum secretary. Such an arrangement between relatives was by no means uncommon, but always potentially transgressive of various boundaries. This particular relationship was complicated by Annie’s own aspirations as a writer, and led to resentments between the woman who kept the household afloat and an understudy to whom the more menial writing tasks, were consigned. The conditions were precisely those to fulfil Marx’s definition of self-alienation where creativity is experienced as castration, and activity felt as directed against the self in that its products do not belong to the worker, and in this case the housekeeper’s revenge by way of displacement of her employer and patron was almost perfect. In 1883 Annie married the wealthy press magnate, Sir Harry Coghill, and Oliphant was put through the agony of being a guest at Cogthorne, where she complained of the vulgarity of their ostentatious entertaining, of Sir Harry’s behaving like a ‘tipsy satyr’22 after over-indulgence in the post-prandial port, and of the irony that Annie now considered it her right to ‘retire calmly to the Library’,23 leaving her guest to her own devices. Only one consolation was left to Oliphant: even marriage to a newspaper supremo had not secured Annie the coveted publication of her short stories, which ‘were not bad in their way but never improved’.24 Annie’s marriage brought her the position of mistress of her own table, but the former understudy’s revenge was not, as yet, complete. Like Nelly Dean, Annie could ‘seldom have been more happy’ than to have been left in the chamber of death. As literary executor she finally had her chance to take Oliphant’s life,—to mould and mangle her patron’s autobiographical writings to the shape she chose—and she took it, reducing her acerbic relative from the powerful orchestrator of the family’s fate to a slightly querulous, passive figure in a ‘modest (Victorian) drawing-room’.25
26If unpaid housewifery, with its methodical accountability for the material goods and spiritual well-being of each household, had somehow become elevated to part of a gendered ethical economy, then its counterfeit, or double, the paid role of housekeeper easily became demonized as fraught with the immoral pretensions of hypocrisy, self-centredness and overweening ambition. No wonder that the Brontë girls brought up by a Methodist aunt, were always suspicious of rival housekeepers. Lucy Snowe, heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), instinctively identifies Madame Beck as the weaver of alternative plots, and is only happy when she has her own house to keep; and for all Lockwood’s pretensions as the narrator of Wuthering Heights, it is Nelly Dean who, like a practised novelist, whets his appetite for the tale she has to tell, whilst also persuading him that she is only the passive recorder of a set of events, which she has in fact had a major hand in scripting.
27For Victorian writers then, the housekeeper formed a particularly troubling mirror image, always threatening to destabilise the invisible barrier between genteel employment and paid labour, and always on hand, like an ambitious understudy, threatening to pre-empt the novelist in exposing the intimate secrets of domestic fiction.
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