Discussion Post: The Musgrave Ritual

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Musgrave Ritual, and the chosen topic is Servants.

A few facts:

🏠 In 1871 over 4% of the population was employed 'in service', the vast majority of them women… [historyhouse.co.uk] Throughout Britain domestic service was the largest occupation of women in the nineteenth-century. [Helena Wojtczak]

🏠 [Servants’] work was very regimented and hard. Working hours were long and time-off very rare. However, there were rewards, such as good wages compared with other jobs like agriculture, with board and lodging included. [historyhouse.co.uk]

🏠 ...the majority of servant households were… modest middle class establishments, retaining only one or two servants (usually a maid-of-all-work and a cook). The shopkeepers, innkeepers and small traders constituted the typical servant employers of Victorian Britain, accounting for between a quarter and a third of all servants (1851, 1861. 1871 census). [The Victorian Vestibule blog]

🏠 As a family's income rose, so did the number of its servants. A housemaid and cook were the priority. Only wealthy persons employed male domestics since there was a servant tax on them. [Helena Wojtczak] ...in a very wealthy town house there might be up to about twenty servants, and on a country estate up to thirty or forty. [John Burnett]


Some additional information courtesy of garonne. These facts are all from Life in a Victorian Household by Pamela Horn and The Victorian House by Judith Flanders:

🏠 'General servant' was a more genteel term for maid-of-all-work, i.e. a maid in a one-servant household.

🏠 Employers of servants tried to keep themselves as segregated as possible from their servants, even when they themselves weren't so much higher up the social order. Sleeping and eating quarters for employers and servants would be as far away from each other as possible, even if it led to inconvenient and impractical arrangements (like the kitchen being far away from the dining room). Servants often had to sleep where they worked, in the kitchen or scullery.

🏠 Early in the century, most servants didn't wear uniforms, because their clothes were clearly different from their employers anyway: the difference between cheap and good fabric was clearly visible. In the 1850s and 1860s, thanks to new manufacturing methods and cheap cotton imports from India, the difference wasn't so clear any more and so employers started to put their servants in uniform. It was considered that a nice gift for a servant at Christmas was the cloth for her to make herself a new uniform!

🏠 Usually female servants started work between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, sometimes as young as thirteen. In the mid-Victorian period, half of the women in employment were under twenty years old. In 1881 it was 43% and in 1901 only 35%. Towards the end of the century, girls started to prefer seeking jobs in shops, offices and factories, and employers started to find it more and more difficult to find good servants. As soon as a girl started to get more experience, she wanted to move on to a better position with better pay and conditions: maid-of-all-work to scullery maid in a house with other servants, to housemaid and so on. Many only stayed in each position a few years (three years on average) before moving on. Those "faithful family servants" you read about in fiction made up only a tiny fraction of servants.

🏠 Some examples of servants' wages in the 1890s were: 50 pounds per annum for a cook, 18 pounds for a kitchenmaid and 12 pounds for a scullery maid.

🏠 At the end of the Victorian period, servants often got half a day a week free (though they were supposed to get through the same amount of work as on any other day before their free afternoon), plus some time on Sunday, and a week or a fortnight's holiday annually, though this was all at the whim of the employer.

🏠 In 1901, out of a total population of 32.5 million, 1.3 million were domestic servants in private households (of which 1.28 million were female).



Some useful resources:

Servants: A life below stairs by Lucy Wallis on BBC News Magazine

Domestic Servants by Helena Wojtczak on the Victorian Web

What Kind of Staff Would a Victorian Household Have? by John Burnett, Professor of Social History, Brunel University on the Victorian Web

What servants would you find in a Victorian household? on History House

Servants and the Servant Question on avictorian.com

Servants of the House on the Dictionary of Victorian London

Serving the house: The cost of Victorian domestic servants on The Victorian Vestibule blog: Passageway to the British middle-class home, 1837-1901



Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.

Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.

Comments

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Every time I re-watch the Granada version of CHAS, the woman's outrage at her maid selling her letters makes me want to add "...and after all these years of my paying her 3 shillings a week, too!" Looks like I wasn't that far off. You can see why CAM offering the equivalent of 10 years' wages for a few letters would look very tempting to impoverished, overworked maids.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

"...and after all these years of my paying her 3 shillings a week, too!" That does give me a rueful smile ^^"

You can see why CAM offering the equivalent of 10 years' wages for a few letters would look very tempting to impoverished, overworked maids. Absolutely. The "treacherous valets or maids" can't all have been disgruntled employees or simply bad'uns. They were just poor people being taken advantage of - by Milverton and their employers.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Good stuff. I recommend Judith Flanders' books. They are nice snapshots of domestic Victorian life.

I watched the Granada version of this. They made it not a reminiscence, Watson and Holmes go to see Musgrave, but they also made Holmes high, which I thought was a bit gratuitous. There was no point to it, really.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I'll look into Judith Flanders' books - I'm trying to read a bit more about Victorian life, especially now we're doing these discussion posts.

Once again, I haven't seen this episode since it was first broadcast. I remember Holmes and Watson going to visit Musgrave and that's about it ^^" I'll have to rewatch it.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

they also made Holmes high, which I thought was a bit gratuitous. There was no point to it, really.

I think that aspect of the episode makes more sense when viewed as part of the overall Granada series. My recollection is that Jeremy Brett said that he had realized by this time that the show had a younger audience than they had initially expected -- there were kids watching. Brett became concerned about the portrayal of Holmes's drug use. He didn't want it to seem glamorous, or even just innocuous. He wanted to make it clear that it was harmful and very unglamorous and something that needed to stop. The original stories did not particularly dramatize Holmes's drug use in any negative way, though they said through Watson's narration that eventually Holmes weaned himself off cocaine. But there is no scene in Doyle that shows Holmes being high, that I can recall.

In the Granada series, they dramatized Holmes's addiction from time to time when they found opportunity in the story to do so. It all lead up to a scene that they created for the episode "The Devil's Foot," where Brett's Holmes definitively decides to turn his back on his addiction and buries his syringe in the sands off of Cornwall. After that episode, there is no more drug use in the Granada series.

So this was a piece of a longer running subplot.

Personally, I get a big kick out of the Granada version of this episode. I think Holmes' and Watson's bickering at the beginning is delightful -- "Watson, we must behave ourselves!" -- and I really liked the fun spirit in which they filmed the treasure hunt. Plus, that little moment where Watson gets the trigonometry equation wrong -- so cute! :)

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Ah that makes more sense. I don't watch them together, just one by one as they come up in the comm.

[laurose8.livejournal.com]

Mnay thanks to you and garonne for so much info, and so many links. (Only 4%?)

I was going to draw attention to the curious actions of Janet Tregellis, but it occurred to me that she might indeed have been apparent. Watson would have had a scene with a beauty in distress, but Holmes might have felt it added nothing to the case.

Nonetheless, it is possible that the reason no one found Brunton's scarf was that either girl told a search party there was nothing in that cellar, and his treasure hunting with Rachel would certainly make Janet feel she'd been ditched in her turn.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

4% is what History House says. And Garonne's source seems to back it up - 1.3 million out of 32.5 million is also 4%. It does seems at first glance low but I suppose 4% is still a significant percentage of the population.

...the curious actions of Janet Tregellis That she apparently did nothing, you mean? ^^ Well, I suppose as the head gamekeeper's daughter she wouldn't have been living in the house - indeed if she had, Brunton would have asked her to help, instead of risking asking Rachel Howells. But it is odd that she doesn't appear in the story after Brunton goes missing. You'd think that Holmes might want to speak to her.

Nonetheless, it is possible that the reason no one found Brunton's scarf was that either girl told a search party there was nothing in that cellar... Surely Rachel Howells would have been too ill to tell a search party there was nothing in the cellar? And it's possible that Janet Tregellis had nothing to do with the search for Brunton - even if she was desperate to help, Musgrave may have felt it wasn't appropriate. His household servants should deal with it.

...and his treasure hunting with Rachel would certainly make Janet feel she'd been ditched in her turn. But surely Janet wouldn't have known that Brunton had been treasure hunting with Rachel. Holmes only works that out later. All she would have known is that Brunton had abruptly vanished. Though perhaps he had told her he'd been dismissed, and she thought he'd gone without saying goodbye.

[castiron.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of the bit in Gaskell's North and South where the Hales are having trouble finding a servant in their new town because the young women can make more money and get better working hours at the textile factories.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

That is Small Hobbit's fandom rather than mine. But I imagine it must have been a bit of a shock to the middle and upper classes as society started to change - to discover they didn't have some kind of right to servants working long hours for low pay.