Nooks and Corners / being the companion volume to 'From Kitchen to Garret'

by J. E. Panton

I have had lately a great deal to do with women who have to earn their own living, and I have never found one who really could and would work at anything that turned up who could not add in an appreciable manner to her income; but I have also found hundreds who would not even try to do what I could offer them, but who preferred to dabble with paint, to embroider hideous cushions no one wants, and which cost pounds to make, to undertaking the ‘smocking,’ the upholstery, and, above all, the dressmaking and cooking with which any sensible woman, who is honest and hard-working, can keep herself and manage to get along comfortably. No; if they can’t get just the work they want, they will not take any; or, if they take it, they grumble; don’t return it at the time they promise; and, finally, are so unbusinesslike that their employers are in despair, and vow that, come what may, they will never employ a so-called lady again.

And it is also astonishing to me how the mere fact of being gently born seems to these poor things to excuse all their failings. Rickety screens, impossible pictures, frightful woollies—all must be sold at a higher rate for them than for anyone else, because they are made by ladies. And so it should be if ladies understood that, because they are ladies, they should be more punctual and better workers than the poorer classes, if their ladyhood were a hall-mark instead of a screen for their misdemeanours. But they will not see this, and in consequence they bring discredit on their order, and make the very words ‘Poor lady!’ synonymous with everything that is bad and absolutely unsaleable.

To be a successful worker one must take the work which comes before one, and one must be trained to work, to punctuality, and to business habits; therefore, if there be one of the families of daughters no other nation produces in the reckless way our own does, it is imperative that the training to work begins in the nursery, and that the defenceless girls are given this equipment at least, even if the parents can do no more for them.

The boys are born to work; they are carefully trained and brought up for this end, but there are hundreds of cases where the fathers have either been suddenly ruined or become poor through illness or their own selfishness, and who turn the girls out in their turn, and are much astonished when the poor things flounder hopelessly about and cannot keep themselves, because they have had absolutely no training which shall fit them for work.

I feel, in writing this chapter, which concerns the girls of the household, that I cannot say too much about the subject of some provision being made for them, and that they should be relieved not only from the necessity of having to find a market for unskilled labour, but also from the trial of marrying if they do not want to do so, or if they do not see anyone they really love, because their parents are continually telling them it is their duty to marry in order to make room for their younger sisters.

Now, incredible as it may sound to male ears, there are very many women to whom marriage and the obligations and responsibilities entailed thereby are absolutely distasteful and disagreeable. As a rule, these women make the best wives and house-mothers, but they are not the happiest people in the world, and would probably have been both happier and better had they followed out their own inclinations and lived their own lives in their own way, without the constant presence of a man and the unceasing cares of a household on their shoulders. They do not understand Love with a big L, and passion and they are strangers for ever, and always would be, but they marry at their parents’ request, to clear out the nest, and they certainly miss the higher happiness which, perchance, might have come had they waited, either from their work or from meeting the one individual who might have roused their sleeping souls and shown them a glimpse of the paradise that exists, I believe, for those lucky natures who understand what we may call the ‘Ouidaesque’ aspect of the case; albeit I also think they use up rapidly in that short sojourn in Paradise, which serves more sober-minded folk for the whole of life’s journey. For myself I cannot speak. I am a prosaic, unsentimental individual, and so far have got on without sentiment very well indeed; but other people may not be as I am, and may endure misery by marrying the first man who asks them because they see plainly how desperately they are grudged the room in the house which should have been theirs for ever, and from which they should have been allowed to go reluctantly to the husband, who appreciates his wife a thousandfold if he understands he is only allowed possession on sufferance, and that she was wanted by her own people quite as badly as ever he could want her himself.

And this brings me round to the question of giving the girls their own room in the house, where they can do just what they please, and where they can ask their own friends to tea should they desire to do so; not, however, in the American way, which empowers the young people to have festivals whenever they like, and to ask whom they like to them, but in a mitigated form, which compels them to ask permission to entertain, and furthermore to produce a list of names, so that full knowledge may be the mother’s portion, and that she may know exactly who is coming, and, moreover, what is going on. If the girls have their own sitting-room, they feel their residence under the paternal roof is meant to last as long as the roof itself, and they have not that hurried, disagreeable feeling some unfortunate girls must be given by the parents who make no provision for their permanent comfort, and who openly speak of what they shall do when So-and-so gets married; poor So-and-so, who has never had an offer in her life, and shrinks away from every man she sees, as she cannot help regarding him as the monster who carries off a damsel whether she wishes it or not, because the fetish of home has to be appeased, and the fabric kept together by the quick sacrifice of those who are old enough to be chained to the rock to await his advances.

The home—of the making and the decorating, the management, and the keeping together of which I feel I can never say too much—cannot possibly be made too happy, too pleasant for the younger members of it; but they in their turn must understand that they, too, have their part in the whole to perform. The grown-up daughter in such a home is a most precious possession; she can save her mother endless trouble, she can and does take the burden of most of the detail on her shoulders, and for her, therefore, should be arranged some place, no matter how small, that she can call her own, and where she can in some measure do much as she likes, for she is sure to have some pet occupation—friends to write to, work to do, all sorts of things to see about, and which she can only attend to in a room set apart for her and her belongings.

In many cases the schoolroom makes an admirable girls’ room, but should this room be occupied by the younger children when the elder daughter is ‘out’ and requires a room to herself, a capital arrangement could be made for her by copying the French fashion of a boudoir-bedroom, an arrangement for which is illustrated here, and which my artist has adapted from a room I used to have in my Dorsetshire house, where space was a great object, and where the downstairs rooms were so badly managed that it was impossible to have a morning-room in which I could sit, although there were two tiny rooms beside the dining-and drawing-rooms, which we turned into bachelors’ bedrooms, and which constituted our only spare rooms for some time. These rooms were larger than need be bestowed on the eldest girl of a house, and were made by removing the partition between a bed-and dressing-room; the bed and dressing-table, which also served as a washhand-stand, were completely screened off by a long and very tall Japanese screen; the cabinet, which stands by the side of the bed, held a quantity of linen, &c., and always looked very decorative, and not in the least like the humble chest of drawers that it undoubtedly was; while the couch in the first window served as a sofa, and, furthermore, held any quantity of dresses, supplemented as it was by the cupboard, the doors of which are panelled with Japanese leather, put in nearly twenty years ago, and verily, I do believe, the very first doors in England that were ever treated in this manner. I never saw any elsewhere, though, of course, now to find a door with undecorated panels is rather an impossibility,