Eavesdropping (26 page)

Exhibit 28
What’s in a Name
?, 1892. Mistress: “Didn’t the gentleman leave his name?” Maid: “Yes, ma’am; he said it was Immaterial.”

Exhibit 29
The Private Letter Drawer
, photogravure by Attilia Simonetti

The motive behind a great deal of eavesdropping was to store up information for possible profit later. By the latter half of the eighteenth century most of the higher servants were literate, and a number of them made careful written notes of the times, days, and places when they saw or heard anything suspicious. They clearly kept these notes either for possible use when testifying in court some time in the future when the scandal broke, or else for money in return for withholding the evidence. It was possible that the mistress might be willing to give servants as much as a year’s wages to buy their silence, and that the master might be willing to pay even more if they testified to the things that they had seen.

One tends to think of eavesdropping as a process that is applied to people, but as we have seen previously, the Asmodean impulse also leads people to search places where others have been. Intimate behavior left a trail of clues, and the servants were very alert to them. Indeed, their job included putting rooms back in good order after each use, or abuse. It is hardly surprising that servants would have noticed rumpled sofas, stained beds, and other telltale signs of love-making.

In 1771 three menservants to Lord Ligonier of Cobham, a village south of London, went to their master’s bedroom to inspect the scene. The carpet at the foot of the bed was found to be “much rumpled,” and there were “two large dints at the bottom of the bed, as if two persons had been sitting on it, and the bed in the middle appeared as if somebody had been laying on it, and a little above the middle of the bed, was a round place, about the size of a person’s head, covered with powder.”
²⁶

The next day, two servants inspected the house gardens to see if they could find any additional evidence. Reminiscent of the Mehinacu tribesmen, who identified each other’s activities from their foot- (and other) prints in the forest floor, Lord Ligonier’s menservants inspected the sandy paths, which had been recently swept. There, according to court testimony, they found “prints of the feet, as well of the lady as of the man, at the garden-gate that opens from the lawn to the road.”
²⁷

Sometimes the servants, working with the master of the house, set a trap for the mistress and her lover. In March of 1770, Richard Grosvenor, of Halkin, North Wales, sued his wife, Henrietta, for adultery. A key witness was Matthew Stevens, thirty-six. He was likely to have felt some loyalty to Lord Grosvenor, having served as his butler for sixteen years. The two conspired that Matthew should catch his master’s wife
in flagrante delicto
.

In court, Matthew described how he had gone to the White Hart Inn in St. Albans and taken a room adjacent to where Lady Grosvenor was entertaining the Duke of Cumberland. It was a quarter to eleven in the evening. Matthew intended to monitor the activities in Lady Grosvenor’s room.

He began by boring two holes in the door when Lady Grosvenor was out dining. Later, when she had returned, Matthew and his brother John were able to make out the “murmuring” tones of the suspected adulterers, which came from the direction of the bed. Though the bed could not be seen, Matthew could see all other places in the room, and they were not in any of those. Matthew drew the conclusion, and would later offer it in his testimony, that Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland were “in or upon the bed.”

After listening for an hour or more, the Stephens brothers decided that it was time for more invasive action. With the help of other servants, they attempted to break in. First they rammed the door, but when this failed they decided to pry it open with a poker. By the time Matthew and John had finally crashed into the room, the lovers had collected themselves and moved away from
the bed. Having lost the chance to catch them in the highest degree of criminality possible, Matthew shifted his attention to the bed. It appeared to be “very much flatted, as if persons had lain upon it, and the sheet that turned down upon the bed was very much tumbled.” He also “observed a dent in the further part of the bed” which, he surmised, had been caused by “the pressure occasioned by the back part of the head.” To buttress the case, John consulted the chambermaid. She said that she had not left the bed in that condition—would have been ashamed to—and that she, like the Stephens brothers, “thought that some person had lain upon it.”
²⁸

That servants were allowed or encouraged to testify against their employers is an indication of several things. First, and most obviously, it indicates that the courts knew the only way many cases of adultery could be prosecuted would be through servant testimony. But there was a larger and more subtle issue. How, in
societies
that were increasingly privatized, would there ever be any knowledge of—or control over—what went on in homes without someone on the inside representing the public’s interest?

As we know, the domestic walls wrought by sedentism and settlements were resisted in many places, mainly because they blocked perceptual access by outsiders. Over the generations, concerns about secrecy tended to abate, without completely disappearing, but in mansions and great estates the public’s interest in domestic privacy, and the activities it allows, may even have grown. In England, according to Anthea Trodd, the mid-Victorian home was seen as “a private domain unregulated by public opinion.”
²⁹

If anyone was to expose, hence to control, the behavior of wealthy people it would have to be the servants. In a sense, they became
de facto
journalists, shining a light on misbehaviors of the upper crust purely because of their inherent desire to investigate and report, fueled, perhaps, by feelings of resentment at what they
should have to endure on a daily basis. With first-hand knowledge of wrongful things that no one else knew about, some may have felt a responsibility to get the word out, to say nothing of the personal power that would be gained by doing so. Since the masters and mistresses were not visible to anyone else, the servants were actually needed—in an investigative capacity.

We see this in seventeenth-century art. The Dutch, according to Simon Schama, were the first to satirize disruptions of family values.
³⁰
Working in the style of Rembrandt, Nicholas Maes produced six paintings mid-way through the century that depict a servant or family member eavesdropping on an erotic encounter in the home. In each painting the eavesdropper looks directly at the viewer with a look of bemused disapproval.
³¹

Exhibit 30
Die Lauscherin
(The Eavesdropper), Nicholas Maes, 1657

Although Maes used servants to call attention to immoral behaviors through the medium of paint, they also came to play that role
in real life
. Just by being there, the servants’ presence would have suppressed some misbehaviors. But everyone knew that the servants doubled as investigative reporters and gossip columnists. Their material was credible, which added to its inhibiting effect. The eavesdropping of servants was indispensable to societies that sought to maintain some standard of moral behavior. Prosecution of adultery and other domestic crimes was almost impossible without servants’ testimony. That the upper classes would seek relief was predictable enough.

The more that servants were seen as enemies within, the more unnerved their masters and mistresses became, and servant fears were palpable. In
Aurora Floyd
the Victorian home was seen as a war zone. “Your servants listen at your doors,” wrote Mary Braddon, “and repeat your spiteful speeches in the kitchen, and watch you while they wait at table, and understand every sarcasm, every innuendo, every look, as well as those at whom the cruel glances and the stinging words are aimed. They understand your sulky silence, your studied and over-acted politeness. The most polished form your hate and anger can take is as transparent to these household spies as if you threw knives at each other, or pelted your enemy with the side-dishes and vegetables, after the fashion of disputants in a pantomime.”
³²

Eventually, the upper classes found ways to staunch the flow of incriminating information. The solution was not to get rid of the servants, but to isolate them.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, servants occupied rooms that were adjacent to the individuals they served, or lingered outside their doors so as to hear requests for service. This gave them access to things they didn’t need to see and hear. A solution
was to install bells outside of the bedrooms so the servants could be summoned from further away. In the last half of the eighteenth century, this arrangement was further improved by installing wires between family rooms and the servants’ area, which could now be in the basement or other distant part of the house.
³³
No longer would servants need to hover.

Nor would they need to intrude upon intimate dinners. A second invention, the dumb waiter, eliminated constant interruptions by servers of food and drink. In May of 1775, James Boswell wrote to a friend that while dining with his “wife’s dearest friend” they were able to flirt “with unreserved freedom” because a dumb waiter was in use and they “had nothing to fear.” In 1784 Mary Hamilton dined with her cousin at a friend’s house. “We had dumb waiters,” she wrote, “so our conversation was not under any restraint by the servants being in the room.”
³⁴

Exhibit 31 Key escutcheon with swinging cover

These inventions were communications technologies. They made it possible to maintain the pre-existing system of domestic service, and to do so without relinquishing control over personal information. The use of bell ropes and dumb waiters thus marks a major development in the evolution of privacy
within
homes. By the mid-nineteenth century, architects had found additional ways to isolate the servants from the family—and the family from the family—including corridors, stairways, and sound-proofing.

There is one other bit of privatizing technology that, like whispering, seems to have emerged purely in the interest of thwarting eavesdroppers, and it was used in many homes, not just those that had servants. I refer to the key escutcheon, a metal plate that was used on doors that had skeleton key locks, hence keyholes that were large enough for someone to look or listen through. Escutcheons could be quite ornate, but the swinging cover—a tiny piece of metal, often teardrop in shape, used mainly on the inside of escutcheons installed on bedroom doors—was strictly functional. When hanging in place, the cover prevented outsiders from peeking through the keyhole.

So we come to a stand-off. Our not-so-distant ancestors were prepared to do what they could to ensure personal privacy, and the desire to invade it was not about to go away. But there was an alternative, a compromise of sorts. In a species with so rich an imagination as ours, not every experience has to be lived. In precisely the period that domestic technology was appearing, so were other forms of technology, ones that would enable people to acquire some of the same invasive experiences, but to do so virtually.