I have had the pleasure of helping with tours at my local historical society. The society owns a lovely Victorian house, filled with beautiful things from an era gone by. Very often people ask if the family who owned the house had live-in help, and sometimes people inquire if they can see areas of the house that are not on the regular tour, like the basement and the attic. It is clear people are intrigued with the inner workings of a Victorian home.
These questions spurred me on to researching how Victorian homes were run. Although I had a pretty good idea, as my grandmother lived in a home her grandfather built, (she still cooked on a coal stove because she never liked those new fangled electric ones!). Both my mother and my grandmother told me stories about how my great-great-grandmother ran her home.
When one thinks of a grand Victorian house, one must consider how the house was laid out: there were public reception spaces, private family spaces and working spaces. My grandmother’s house and the historical society’s house were no different. Each had a formal staircase and a back staircase for the servants to use. Butler’s pantries were for storing table linens, dishes, glassware, and silverware, and it was also a space for servants to prepare before serving food. In the historical society’s house the door to the butler’s pantry from the dining room, when closed, blends into the paneling and cannot been seen. The way this house is laid out, the kitchen is the hub for all behind the scenes work. It has five doorways leading to the various working areas of the home, making those who worked there as invisible as the butler’s pantry door.
According to census records, the family who originally owned the historical society’s house, usually had two domestic servants living in the home. This gave me names of some of the people the family relied on to help run the home over a period of seventy years. The genealogist in me just had to research these people! I wanted to write little biographies of some of these workers to tell their stories….and all I could come up with was little biographies. Yes I know, there is a dearth of information out there about working class people. I had a much easier time writing about the owners of the home.
Next I researched the kind of people who were willing to do the jobs most were not interested in, what were the jobs, and the tasks involved in performing each job. I learned the working class people hired to perform these jobs tended to be recent immigrants and after the Civil War ex-enslaved people. A small home, may have had a cook, a maid, a gardener, and nanny, while larger estates may have had several people to perform one job. For instance, the cook in a large home would need two or three people to help prepare a meal, and a scullery maid to wash the dishes, and several butlers to serve the food versus the cook in a small home would perform all of those tasks.
I already had a working knowledge of how a Victorian home operated. I knew fresh food was kept in an icebox and ice delivery occurred when an “Ice” sign was put in a window for the iceman to see. Coal was delivered, probably on a schedule, through a chute to the basement. Laundry was an all day process and before there was indoor plumbing people used an out house, and someone had to empty the chamber pots in the morning, not to mention heating was a room by room project, as someone had to lay a fire in the fireplace in the rooms which were to be occupied. As one can image, days were long for domestic servants. They often rose before the sun, as the coal stove had to be heated up enough to do the morning baking. They would have gone to bed, up the back staircase, to bedrooms in the attic, after the evening chores were done and most likely the mistress of the home had gone to bed.
This was actually a fun little research project to do, as it required a little genealogy, and little bit of knowledge about the workings of a Victorian homes, and I enjoy doing a historical research too!
Sources:
- Daniel A. Graff, “Domestic Work and Workers,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, (encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/386: accessed March 20, 2020)
- “The Backstairs at Brucemore: Life as Servants in Early 20th Century America,” Teaching With Historic Places, The National Park Service; U. S. Department of the Interior (nps.gov: accessed March 20, 2020)
Laurie L. Kearney 