The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

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      The last sentence implied that Farjeon grew out of her deference. Molly Hughes, when she came to write her autobiography nearly half a century after the events described, still thought her family’s viewpoint was reasonable: ‘I suppose there was a fear on my mother’s part that I should be spoilt, for I was two years younger than the youngest boy. To prevent this danger she proclaimed the rule “Boys first”. I came last in all distribution of food at table, treats of sweets, and so on. I was expected to wait on the boys, run messages, fetch things left upstairs, and never grumble, let alone refuse.’ Yet even after all those years she tried to rationalize their behaviour. ‘All this I thoroughly enjoyed, because I loved running about.’ And surely it must have been all right, because, after all, ‘The boys never failed to smile their thanks, call me “good girl” …’ She was unable to distinguish between herself and her captors: ‘We were given a room to ourselves – all to ourselves.’ In it ‘there were four shelves, and … each [of the four boys] had one to himself.’ It did not even cross her mind that she alone had not got a shelf. Furthermore she was allowed to enter this room that was ‘ours’ only with the permission of her brothers, and for the most part she spent her afternoons alone in her bedroom.⁹³ Laura Forster noted the same isolation: ‘The boys could and did come into the nursery when they liked, but they never played there or stayed long, whilst I had no other room open to me, except by special invitation [from them], until the evening, when we all went down to my parents.’⁹⁴

      The responsibilities for a girl were more onerous too. Laura, as the oldest girl, looked after the younger children in the nursery, staying there longer than was customary because the nursemaid ‘said I could not be spared, and Miss Maber, who taught my three eldest brothers, avowedly cared only for boys and would not accept me in the school-room’.⁹⁵ It was a given that girls waited on their brothers: Louise Creighton, as a younger sister, only once had the ‘privilege usually reserved to the elder ones of getting up early on the Monday to give the boys their breakfast before they went back to school’.⁹⁶ Constance Maynard and her sister were also expected to defer to their eldest brother. (As they referred to him as ‘The Fatted Calf’, it appeared that they had perhaps not accepted their subordinate role in quite the way they were expected to.)⁹⁷

These were mostly girls from upper-middle-class families with no shortage of money. They were expected to perform services for their brothers not because there was no one else to do it, but because that was what girls did. Slightly down the social scale, as Molly Hughes’s experiences showed, things were no different. Helena Sickert, the sister of the artist Walter Sickert, went to day school, as did her brothers. In the afternoons, after homework was finished, the boys were allowed to play, while she ‘very often had to mend their clothes; sort their linen, and wash their brushes and combs’.⁹⁸ And the lower-middle-class girl had more responsibilities yet. Hertha Ayrton was born Sarah Marks, the daughter of a clockmaker and a sempstress.^* Sarah/Hertha made all of her younger brothers’ clothes and took care of the boys so that her mother could take in needlework to support them after the death of her husband.⁹⁹ Alice Wichelo, known as Lily, was the eldest of ten children (and later the mother of E. M. Forster); her father was a drawing master who had died young. By 1872, when she was seventeen, Lily had taken her youngest brother to Tunbridge Wells alone, finding a childminder to look after him and settling him in lodgings.^†100

      It was not that all experiences of all girls were the same, but rather that the received ideas bred an attitude that many aspired to: to be the comfort-giver, whose primary function was to ensure the smooth running of the home, for the benefit of he who financed it. The engine room of this comfortable ship was the kitchen.

* No one, however, can trump Augustus Hare’s parents, but as an upper-class child he can only (just) be accommodated in a footnote. Hare’s uncle, also an Augustus Hare, died shortly before his godson-to-be was born; his widow, Maria, stood god-mother instead, and she tentatively asked his parents if she could perhaps have the child to stay for a while. The answer to her letter was immediate: ‘My dear Maria, how very kind of you! Yes, certainly, the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.’ Maria Hare cared for him for the rest of her life, and he called her his mother.¹¹

* Not, please note, the mother. The wicked or incompetent servant loomed large in the minds of the middle classes. Mrs Warren told of a nursemaid who caused a child’s death by taking the child out when she was told not to. Mrs Beeton warned that the mother should learn to distinguish the different cries of her child, ‘that she may be able to guard her child from the nefarious practices of unprincipled nurses, who, while calming the mother’s mind with false statements as to the character of the baby’s cries, rather than lose their rest, or devote that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours’. See a larger discussion on servants and their employers’ fears on pp. 111ff., 115–17.³⁹

† Ipecacuanha and calomel were used with ruthless regularity in Victorian households. Ipecac, as it was commonly called, was a powdered root, and functioned as an emetic, causing vomiting. Calomel, made of mercury chloride, was a purgative. Both were used routinely in attempts to ‘expel’ various illnesses.

* Gutta-percha was produced from the sap of the Isonandra gutta tree, native to Indonesia. When vulcanized, it acted as a waterproofing, insulating material, much as we used rubber and now use plastic. It first appeared in Britain in the 1840s, becoming widely used for, among other items, hot-water bottles, golf balls and the insulating cover for the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

* When she did go into detail, it is hard to imagine that some of her ideas could have been considered seriously: her children’s piano lessons consisted of playing only scales and finger exercises, with the occasional ‘sacred piece’ but no other tunes, for seven years. She did admit that this regime was ‘inexpressible weariness’, but its very wearying nature promoted discipline and was therefore to be encouraged. She also taught children drawing by letting them draw only straight lines, and then curved ones, for more than a year. It was lucky for these children that they were merely fictional devices, as real children must surely have ended up running amok.⁶⁰

† Religious education, even in houses a great deal more observant than the Hughes’, was often not much more successful. Mary Jane Bradley, the wife of a clergyman, prayed every morning, first by herself, then with Wa, then with the maids (note the careful segregation). When Wa was two and a half she worried that he did not appear ‘capable of understanding the idea of God and Christ being the same’. A year later he had, she thought, understood the idea of the Resurrection; then he asked her if God would come back as a stuffed rabbit. The three-year-old appeared to understand СКАЧАТЬ