You have to look rather far behind you for the time when `the servant question,’ as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants collectively `knowing their place,’ as the phrase (not is, but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria’s reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the London parks to announce that `Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and Servants are commanded’ not to do this and that.
But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not requests, and were not `obliging’ but obedient.
As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidlyincreasing middle class, were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal.
And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of them had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment’s more leisure than was needed to preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all households, `followers’ were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time, after giving a month’s notice; and she did not work for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour from the second or third generation of her owners. As in Ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. `Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people’s wills, not her own.’ Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father’s. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word.
But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.
Even in the ‘sixties there were many dark and cumulose clouds. It was believed, however, that these would pass. `Punch,’ our ever-quick interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano! `Punch’ and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her soul. Poor misguided girl!—why was she flying in the face of Nature? Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It is unlikely that no English ladies were so in the ‘sixties.
Pity, after all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the `some’ a measure of the gulf between themselves and the `others.’ Those others had now begun to show signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.
Anthony Trollope was not, like `Punch,’ a mere interpreter of what was upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries.
For sheer conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given `Orley Farm’? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? `As she slowly made her way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us—I trust but of few—when with the silent inner voice of suffering’—and here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be plain, ask you not to skip a word—`we call on the mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in—when with an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must,’ etc., etc.
You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn’t any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn’t any in 1862, when `Orley Farm’ was published. Servants really were `most desolate’ in those days, and `their sufferings’ were less acute only than those of gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the ‘sixties. Trust Trollope.
Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this melioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused; nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist’s privilege of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb’s `History of Trade Unionism’ the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servants’ campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they glide—long before the War they had begun gliding—away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to read and write, but—There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief. Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in 1872— But there is no use in repining. What’s done can’t be undone.