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

[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.