The Gentleman's Daughter (25 page)

Had women not recorded the details of management as instructed, then much of the evidence for this chapter on the nuts and bolts of genteel housekeeping would not exist. Take Elizabeth Shackleton's domestic memoranda. From the early 1770s her pocket diaries were roughly divided into ‘Letters to Friends and Upon Business’, ‘Remarkable Occurrences’ and ‘Ordinary Occurrences, Memorandums & Accounts’. They were cross-referenced to each other, older diaries, letters, accounts and receipts and were often subsequently annotated. Some contained printed marketing tables and guides to casting-up wages, expenses and taxes; all of which demonstrates that the diaries were designed to be consulted on a regular basis. It is the evidence of systematic use combined with rich commentary on the organization of provisions, property and personnel within the household, which together indicates that the diaries functioned as a set of personal reference manuals on the mechanics of keeping house.
They catalogue the regime of the mistress housekeeper. At the core of genteel housekeeping in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century was vigilant administration. ‘She bringeth in with her Eye, for, She overseeth the
Ways of her Household
.’ A lady's work was managerial.

An inevitable component of genteel administration was the management of servants. Yet to look to the leading authority on eighteenth-century servants for a sense of the mistress's responsibility might be misleading. J. J. Hecht's national study of 1956 takes as its paradigm the noble household, an elaborate structure which could incorporate over thirty distinct male posts and about ten female positions. This platonic hierarchy assumed an executive division of upper servants, who oversaw the minutiae of management: a house steward who hired and disciplined the servants, a housekeeper who kept the household accounts, a clerk of the kitchen who bought provisions and served as guardian of supplies, a butler who administered the distribution of wine and plate, a groom of the chambers who was responsible for the maintenance of furniture, and so on.
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Together these household generals might make it possible at least, for a noblewoman to personify Lord Halifax's apparition of ‘an empty airy thing’ who sails ‘up and down the House to no kind of purpose’, looking ‘as if she came thither only to make a visit’.
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However, the aristocratic household with its formal ceremonies, ancient retainers and exalted female figurehead, cannot be expected to mirror the power relations and division of labour in the modest mansions of the genteel. Noble households represented only the very tip of the iceberg of servant employment. A steward's list for Lord Rockingham's mansion at Wentworth Woodhouse, for instance, registers a veritable army of eighty-one servants.
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By contrast, genteel families often managed with less than ten. In fact, the tax on male servants of 1780 reveals that numerous genteel households were too unassuming to attract the attention of the enumerators, while those grander northern establishments which drew the taxman's eye still boasted only between five and eight male servants. Elizabeth Shackleton's own commentary suggests an ideal complement of about seven live-in servants – a number favoured by modest landowners nationwide, such as Francis Sitwell in the 1730s, Henry Purefoy between 1735 and 1753, Sanderson Miller in 1748 and George Betts in 1784. The rich and upwardly mobile Gossips of Skelton employed only six servants and a boy in the 1730s, though they added a butler and postillion in the 1750s, when William became Deputy-Lieutenanant for the county. When a friend of Mrs Shackleton's considered retiring from the world, he contemplated living ‘humbly with a small Establishment of two Women & one Man Servant’. So while a staff of seven might seem enormous by
modern standards, by contemporary standards it was respectably genteel though still unpretentious.
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Genteel households were too small to sustain an executive division of upper servants who marshalled the lower ranks, so the genteel housekeeper had to lead from the front. Few senior female servants stayed long enough to liberate the elite mistress from the pressing demands of day-to-day supervision. Indeed, to say that female servants constituted a supremely unreliable workforce is to offer a fatuous understatement. Servant numbers, particularly female servant numbers, giddily fluctuated. Given the poor rewards and the considerable demands and humiliations of service a tendency to abscond is hardly surprising. However, looking at it from an employer's perspective, hardly a week went by when a mistress might not be reeling from a servant's flight, arranging emergency relief, procuring replacements or training new applicants. In fact, in the time-consuming co-ordination of the endeavours of permanent staff, emergency staff and day labourers, the mistress-housekeeper was less the gracious chatelaine than she was an impresario of staffing. Yet even in periods of relative stability, genteel mistresses felt compelled to undertake the constant surveillance of their property and provisions, and the minute supervision of the work and behaviour of their live-in staff. Characterized by stark inequalities of rank and power, combined with mutual dependence, which sometimes fostered affinity but often nurtured antagonism, the mistress–servant relationship was hardly an unalloyed pleasure for either party. Elite women had to work harder to bolster their authority than one might expect; as they ailed and aged some felt mastery slip from their grasp and found their dependence on insubordinate and flighty girls to be their aching Achilles heel. Bitterness in the face of apparent ingratitude is a testament to the evaporation of the ideal of a well-ordered hierarchy of loyal, deferential servants who cheerfully did their bidding. The government of servants was a full-time job.

Of all the mundane trials a gentlewoman faced, by far the most tedious was the acquisition and retention of honest, loyal and efficient servants. These could be acquired through placing advertisements in the press, attending hiring fairs, or applying to metropolitan register offices, but over whelmingly the most popular means was personal recommendation. Employers devoted quantities of ink to the free exchange of relevant information. In the case of Alkincoats, servants were drawn from up to a sixteen-mile radius of home. In the 1760s Mrs Shackleton had fruitlessly extended her enquiries to London, but was told ‘yr
VIRGINS
are as scarce a commodity here as in the country’.
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Appendix 5 details the letters Elizabeth Shackleton recorded sending or receiving in pursuit of servants in the
1770s. Most striking is the predominance of women among her informants: seventeen women, as opposed to four men and one family. The male informants (a miller, steward, innkeeper and a purveyor of medicine) all had experience of employing servants and met a wide spectrum of working people. Her female informants comprised both genteel ladies of her acquaintance and tradeswomen. Shopkeepers, mantua-makers and milliners are revealed as important intermediaries between two worlds of women. The absence of even a single landed gentleman is revealing about the division of labour in polite households. Co-operation between women was the basic mechanism of this informal employment agency. Letters devoted to gathering and exchanging information about the local labour market abound in the manuscripts of genteel women.
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The search for domestic servants was a characteristically female quest which they had to pursue for a working lifetime.

The servant hierarchy in the genteel household bore little resemblance to the exact and elaborate model sustained by the nobility. Elizabeth Shackleton may well have cherished a vision of a finely graded domestic hierarchy wherein qualified servants performed distinct roles. The system she had managed at Browsholme incorporated under-cooks, gamekeepers, stewards and so on, but in a more modest establishment and faced with chronic staff shortages, she was sentenced to perpetual compromise. In her efforts to procure women servants, she referred to the posts of cook-housekeeper, kitchen maid, dairymaid, housemaid and chambermaid. However, in practice, she used the titles of ‘chambermaid’ and ‘house-maid’ interchangeably, and servants were known to offer themselves as cook, housekeeper and chambermaid. Moreover although a cook-housekeeper was preoccupied with the preparation of food, she was also expected to clean and sew. In practice, the labour of the kitchen maids, chambermaids and dairymaids overlapped. Mrs Shackleton's report of September 1770 on the brief career of an inadequate servant illuminates the versatility expected of an ‘upper maid’: ‘She set off from here on Thursday morning September ye 13th on her feet in a hurry. She co'd neither sew, wash, Iron or get meat. She has left behind her as a specimen of her work a shirt part done of Will's which Was her Employment nine days.’
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Evidently, female servants were expected to be maids of all work. Male appointees lacked specific titles. There is no reference, for instance, to an Alkincoats groom, coachman, valet or footman, though her men-servants doubtless performed some of these services. Under ideal circumstances, the Shackleton household was serviced by four maids and probably three menservants.

Of course ideals do not translate into reality without unremitting exertion.
Detailed analysis of servant employment in a single year reveals an everflowing river of unpredictable women servants pouring through the household. In the year 1772, twenty-nine women servants worked in some capacity at Alkincoats. Of this number, the length of employment can be calculated with some confidence for twenty-five women.
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Close analysis of their careers reveal three distinct forms of service: live-in servants hired on a permanent basis, live-in servants hired on a temporary basis, and day servants who came to perform a particular service or to top up a reduced workforce. Of the twenty-five women cited above, fourteen were theoretically employed on a permanent live-in basis. Yet ten of them worked for less than thirty days and, of the remaining four, Hannah Atkinson, dairy-maid, stayed for six weeks, Ellin Platt for nineteen weeks, and Molly Vivers the housekeeper for twenty-four weeks. The only permanent presence was that of the twelve-year-old Nanny Nutter, who worked in a general capacity at Alkincoats for over three years. But even Nanny ran away in September 1772 and had to be brought back by her father. Was this an unusual state of affairs? Was Mrs Shackleton a particularly unrewarding or difficult employer? After all, as Chapone averred, ‘those who continually change their servants and complain of perpetual ill-usage, have good reason to believe that the fault is in themselves, and that they do not know how to govern’.
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Be that as it may, Mrs Shackleton was an altogether unexceptional employer when it came to financial remuneration. Between 1762 and the mid-1770s, her cook-housekeepers received five pounds a year in wages, all other maidservants were paid four guineas a year. Such wages were slightly lower than those offered by the substantial northern gentry, but they were on a par with those dispensed in many genteel households, and substantially more generous than those offered by some local manufacturers, such as the Heatons of nearby Ponden Hall.
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Her servants could not complain that their wages were exceptionally meagre. More likely, the volatility of Mrs Shackleton's servants is a reflection of the rich local opportunities for less demeaning work in textile manufactures. Nevertheless, the absence of continuity in the servants' hall was certainly not unique to east Lancashire. Jane Scrimshire condoled with her friend on the loss of servants, ‘I know what it is to lose one that is used to one's ways’, and complained herself of tiresome disruption: ‘this Transition in my Family has disconcerted me greatly as I have a prodigious dislike to Strange Faces …’ The Gossips saw a stream of cooks pass through their household, and Mrs Gossip ‘would not willingly have [a maidservant] under four and twenty, for she has already found the inconvenience of young giddy girls’. The Lancaster widow Jane Pedder was too busy to
write to her son in June 1780 because of the aggravation of changing and training servants. Meanwhile, in Preston in the 1810s Jane Horrocks had to cancel her holiday on account of her father's disintegrating staff: ‘The house I am ashamed to say is in a filthy State & likely to remain so till we get a fresh supply of servants.’
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Further afield, Earle finds that well over half his sample of female domestic servants in London between 1695 and 1725 had served twelve months or less in one place, and reminds us that Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys engaged at least thirty-eight servants between 1660 and 1669. Hecht also emphasizes that instances of lengthy service were exceptional. He cites the Purefoys who employed at least thirty servants in ten years, and identifies a similar turnover in the households of Anthony Stapley a Sussex gentleman, John Baker a lawyer and Parson Woodforde in Norfolk. Meanwhile, back in the north, at Wentworth Woodhouse, Jane Holmes finds that though the upper servants might have borne a resemblance to the lifelong retainers of patriarchal fantasy (four servants served over twenty years), a rapid turnover of lower servants was the norm.
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As the eighteenth century progressed, servants' wages steadily climbed and opportunities multiplied. The labour market worked to the advantage and independence of female servants. Unusually lucky was the employer who did not have to improvise strategies for dealing with transient personnel.

How did Elizabeth Shackleton cope with her ever-shifting labour force? When staff shortages loomed, she immediately sent off batches of letters in pursuit of permanent replacements. Yet young women servants tended to abscond rather than giving and working out notice, and re-employment could take up to a month while references were gathered and terms negotiated. Something had to be done in the interim. The available employment data for 1772 reveals that Mrs Shackleton bridged the inevitable gaps in her permanent workforce by employing emergency labour. Seven women were engaged on a temporary basis in 1772 to live and work at Alkincoats for a designated brief period. Looking at servant employment across all her diaries from 1762 to 1781 uncovers the existence of a pool of local women upon which Elizabeth Shackleton drew
in extremis
. Take two local examples. Lucy Smith of nearby Priestfield was employed on an intermittent basis from 1767 to 1778; in 1772 she worked at Alkincoats for eight short periods (on average eleven days) and six individual days. Although Susy Smith was considered an extravagant cook-housekeeper when in permanent employ in 1771, she was employed intermittently until 1777; in 1772, she came in twice overnight and worked for two periods of eight and nineteen days. Through her correspondence and by word of mouth, Mrs Shackleton kept her finger on the pulse of the provincial
labour market against the day when she was servantless. She managed to procure ‘the good cook’ Molly Hargreaves from Hellifield (eleven miles away) for two short periods in the autumn of 1772, because she heard that Molly was between jobs. On occasion, she even poached or leased servants from other employers for the emergency period. For example, Betty Platt arrived on 11 May 1772, promising to ‘help us till I can meet with a servant in the upper place’. She left twelve days later as her employer could spare her no longer. Chance remarks indicate that Elizabeth herself was also prepared to loan out her female servants for an afternoon.
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Obviously she was not alone in the need to improvise.