Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 110, Vol. III, February 6, 1886

No. 110.—Vol. III.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1886.
The cry is everywhere the same—the badness of our modern servants. But who is really to blame—the mistresses or the maids? the masters or the employed? The one class are educated, the other are comparatively ignorant; and influence filters downwards—it does not permeate the social mass from below. We cast longing looks backward to the bygone times when servants were the humble friends of the family, ready to serve for love and bare maintenance if bad times came, and identifying themselves with the fortunes of their masters. But we forget that we ourselves have changed even more than they, since the days when mistresses overlooked the maids in closer companionship than is warranted now by the conditions of society—when daily details were ordered by the lady, and the execution of her orders was personally supervised—when housekeeping was at once an art and a pleasure, a science and a source of pride. Then young servants were trained immediately under the eye of the mistress and by her direct influence; as now they are trained under the head servant of their special department. And in this change of teachers alone, if no other cause were wanting, we could trace the source of the deterioration complained of.
The lady who, two generations ago, taught the still-room maid the mysteries of sirups and confections, of jams and jellies and dainty sweetmeats—who knew the prime joints, and the signs of good meat, tender poultry, and fresh fish, as well as the cook herself—who could go blindfold to her linen press and pick out the best sheets from the ordinary, and knew by place as well as by touch where the finer huckaback towels were to be found and where the coarser—who could check as well as instruct the housemaid at every turn—such a mistress as this, for her own part diligent, refined, truthful, God-fearing, was likely to give a higher tone, infuse a more faithful and dutiful spirit into her servants, than is possible now, when the thing is reduced to a profession like any other, and the teacher is only technically, not morally, in advance of the pupil. It is the mistresses who have let the reins slip from their hands, not the maids who have taken the bit between their teeth; or, rather, the latter has been in consequence of the former; and when we blame our servants for the ‘heartlessness’ of their service—for the ease with which they throw up their situations, on the sole plea of want of change, or of bettering themselves, to the infinite disturbance of things and trouble to the household—we must remember that we ourselves first broke the golden links, and that to expect devotion without giving affection is to expect simply slavishness. The advantage of the present system of mere professional and skilled technicality is to be found in the greater comfort and regularity of the household; in the more finished precision and perfection of the service; in the more complete systemisation of the whole art and practice of attendance. But these gains have been bought with a price—not only in the increased cost of housekeeping, but in the deterioration of the moral character of servants, and in the annihilation of the friendly and quasi-family feeling which once existed between the mistress and her domestics.