And in many—too many instances—what a life of slavery is that of the female servant!—and how little enviable is the lot of the poor maid-of-all-work! Talk of the hard fate of the negress—think of the hard fate of the maid-of-all-work! Excellent saint of Exeter Hall! you need not send your sympathies travelling some thousands of miles across the sea: there is plenty of scope for their exercise at home, if you be really sincere—which we know you are not! Look to the maid-of-all-work—up at five in the winter, and heaven only knows when in the summer,—compelled to keep an entire house neat and decent—to black all the boots and shoes—to run on all the errands—to put herself in awful peril by standing or sitting outside the windows which she is compelled to clean—and very frequently half-starved by those whom she serves so assiduously and so faithfully,—what a life is hers![[39]]
Female servants are treated with much greater kindness in France than in England. In the former country they are considered rather in the light of humble friends of the family than as mere slaves, which is the estimation in which they are usually held, we are sorry to say, in the British Islands. Let them be treated with kindness and forbearance: they have much to try their patience and sour their tempers by the very nature of their condition and the miscellaneous character of their avocations. A man or a woman who is unkind to a servant, is a wretch deserving obloquy and execration. But a master or a mistress who, through petty spite or sheer malignity, refuses to give to a discharged servant the good character which such servant may in reality deserve, is a very fiend, unfit to remain in civilised society.
Before we take leave of this subject, we cannot resist the opportunity of expressing our opinion relative to a practice adopted at Court: we mean the fact of the Queen being waited upon in her private apartments by ladies of high rank and good family, instead of by female servants. Who is Queen Victoria, that a Duchess must select her gown, and a Marchioness hook it? Is she a goddess that a Countess must help her to put on her shoes, and a Baroness tie them? Must not royalty be touched by the hands of a female servant? Alas! we strongly suspect that Queen Victoria is a woman made of the same flesh and blood as the most ordinary mortals: and we feel confident that the practice of attaching ladies of rank and title to her august person is as pernicious to her, as it is degrading to the ladies themselves, and as flagrantly insulting to the entire class of well-conducted ladies'-maids. But royalty in this country must be idolized—deified: no means must be left untried to convince the credulous public that royalty is something very different from commonalty. This delusion shall, however, be dispelled;—the people must be taught to look on Victoria as nothing more than the chief magistrate of the country, deriving her power from the nation at large, and holding it only so long as the majority of the inhabitants of these realms may consider her worthy to retain it. The contemptible farce of firing cannon to announce her movements—of illuminating dwelling-houses on her birth-day—of cheering her whenever she appears in public, just as if she cared two figs for the bawling idlers who gaze on Majesty with awe and astonishment,—all this miserable humbug should be abolished. The more a Sovereign is deified, the more the people are abased. Instead of the nation being obliged to Queen Victoria for ruling over it, Queen Victoria ought to be very much obliged to the nation for allowing her to occupy her high post. For the only real sovereign power is that of the people; and the individual who looks on royalty as something infallible—divine—supernally grand and awe-inspiring, is a drivelling, narrow-minded idiot, unworthy of the enjoyment of political freedom, and fit only to take his place amidst the herds of Russian serfdom.
[38]. This incident is founded on fact. Many of our readers will doubtless recollect the case of J——N——and her mother, who were convicted of robbing ready-furnished lodgings about ten years ago. Miss J——N——had been the mistress of a noble lord who was a Cabinet Minister at the time of the condemnation of her mother and herself, and who is a Cabinet Minister at the present moment. The affair created a great sensation at the time; but the Dispatch and other independent newspapers took it up; not in order to persecute the unhappy women, but on public grounds. The result was that the original sentence passed upon them, and which Ministerial favouritism sought to commute to a much milder penalty, was carried into force. The entire business, so far as the noble lord was concerned, was vile and scandalous in the extreme.
[39]. We avail ourselves of the opportunity afforded us by the glance which we are taking at this subject, to recommend to perusal an admirable little work, written by our esteemed and talented friend, Mr. John Taylor Sinnett, and entitled "The Servant Girl in London." It is published by Hastings, Carey Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields; and is a little book which should be found in all families, as it contains sentiments and precepts useful alike to the employer and the employed.
In a work from which we have frequently quoted in the Notes belonging to the present Series of "The Mysteries of London,"—we allude to "Poverty, Mendicity, and Crime,"—we find an important passage bearing strongly upon the subject of the text. It runs as follows:—"We must now direct attention to the class of female servants, and they form no insignificant number: from these the higher ranks of our prostitutes are recruited. Thirst for dress and finery, which has crept on to such a degree that it is not a very rare sight to behold them waiting on their mistress in the morning, bedecked in silks and ornaments equal to the young ladies themselves, even where the ladies are of the highest class of the community. Great censure is due to ladies, especially those who are mothers, for not restraining their servants from squandering away the whole of their money, loss of place ought to be the consequence of not laying by a small portion of wages to sustain themselves in the event of illness or other unforeseen calamity; the dress of a female servant ought to be good, but perfectly void of ridiculous ornament and frippery. The ladies' maids of our aristocracy are a race the most highly culpable of their sex, aping all the pride and airs of their lady, and desiring to appear abroad with equal éclat, to effect which, the wardrobe of the mistress is not unfrequently resorted to, and the purse not always held sacred, or she becomes a prostitute whilst under the roof of her employer, till descending from one false step to another she at length links her fate to some favourite of the swell mob, to whom she at first listened as a suitor, and ends in her being accessary to robbing the family which had fostered her. It is ascertained, beyond doubt, that most of the houses that are robbed, arises from the connexion and intimacy which the servant has contracted with some of the petty workmen who have been employed about the premises, many of whom are thieves themselves, or connected with some gang of villains who resort to that expedient to learn what property is kept on the premises, and how it is disposed of at night. 'A great deal of crime,' says Mr. Nairn, in his evidence, 'is generated in consequence of the tradesmen who employ journeymen to work for them, in gentlemen's houses, not taking care to inquire into their character: by getting acquainted with servants, they get a knowledge of those parts of the house where anything valuable is kept. A number of men that were in the prison were painters, plasterers, and bricklayers, they were in the practice of communicating with thieves, and it is in that secret manner that they get information where property is kept.'—Vide J. H. Nairn, p. 370, 2nd Report, Lords, on State of Gaols, 1835.
"There is a most infamous conspiracy existing between the purveyors or housekeepers of the aristocracy and their tradespeople, the latter paying the former a large per centage on the bills for the sake of 'gaining their custom.' Twenty per cent. is often given, and it has been known to rise as high as fifty; unfortunately, the nobleman considers it as derogatory to his high rank to look into his pecuniary domestic affairs; but taking it in a moral point of view, it is his duty to do so for the sake of preventing this species of peculation, which is an absolute theft and one of the stepping-stones to crime generally, as the money so attained is mostly as lightly spent, and the servants out of place for a length of time, the difficulty to procure the wherewithal to keep alive their former extravagance makes them not hesitate to become regular thieves, the fine sense of honesty having been destroyed by the transaction with the tradesman, who had not failed, in his turn, to make out a bill more than sufficiently long to cover merely his generosity in bestowing Christmas boxes upon the domestics of his patron. These tradesmen are a rank disgrace to their more honest fellow shopkeeper; they are worse than fences, and it is greatly to be regretted that a complete expose cannot take place, and all such tradesmen dealt with according to their merit.
"Another evil in society that is pregnant with mischief is giving a false character to servants, which ladies are constantly in the practice of doing, to avoid being plagued, or 'perhaps,' as they say, 'insulted by the discarded servant,' whose character, if correctly stated, would not be such as easily to procure a new situation; thus a pilferer having once had the luck to start off in a private family with a good name, is from this shameful habit let loose upon the public to commit his depredations at leisure and convenience, with the chance of blame falling upon an honest individual, through the crafty machination of the wicked. By making servants conscious that they would only procure such a character as they really deserve, great good would accrue to the public generally, and the servants themselves would be taught to curb their temper and other bad propensities, by which they would become infinitely more contented and happy beings, and valuable members of society.