The Champagne Standard

by Mrs. John Lane

Now for the wages in an English family of the same standing:—Cook thirty-five pounds, parlour-maid twenty-six pounds, housemaid twenty pounds, char-boy eight pounds, and fifty pounds to the laundry for work which is quite disgraceful. The sum total is one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, which does not include the feeding of an additional person, and a servant's board is a greater expense than her wages. Distinctly the economy is on the American side.

That the servant business is a trade was a fact impressed on me for the first time by my very intelligent English cook. Each English servant has her trade which she knows and she declines to meddle with what she does not know, for which reason the dividing lines are rather strictly laid down. It was something I had to learn so as not to call on one servant to do the duties of another. Our American servants are more liberal, but now I realise that a good English servant is not so much an amateur as an American; but unless you wish to be unpleasantly enlightened as mistress, you must learn her line of duty well.

To keep house one must have servants, and in a strange place the first problem is how to get them. Supposing no friend can recommend you one, you are reduced either to advertising or the registry office. Registry offices, through which the majority of sufferers get their "help," riot in ungodly prosperity. They have managers and clerks, like a bank and, like other corporations, they have no souls. If you are a meek lady they snub you, and if you are undecided they give you bad advice. At any rate the unscrupulous ones, and there are plenty of these, take your fee whether you get a servant or not.

It seems as if a certain amount of honesty should obtain even in this business, and I protest against paying five shillings for the mere joy of talking to a stately female, the presiding goddess in the generally ill-ventilated temple, who pockets my money and, as soon as my fee is safe, takes no further earthly interest in me. The methods of English registry offices seem to me the brazenest kind of piracy. Why don't English women rebel? Are they not the daughters and wives of grumblers, and probably the mothers also? However, fate was kind to me, and I got three servants, two of good village families, while the superior cook was the legacy of a brilliant woman, a good deal of whose wisdom I have since had at second-hand.

In the economy of the universe I know that there is a serving class, but we people of New England are not glib in the use of the word "servant." Do we not (in the country) call them "helps" when the expression is base flattery? Here, class distinctions have put the matter on a practical footing—servants are servants and recognise themselves as such, and have that outward and visible sign of well-trained domestics which the Irish girl, direct from her paternal pig-sty, scorns in New York.

"You must not think," said my intelligent cook, "that we don't have our feelings as much as you." There it was, and she put herself as a matter of course on quite a different plane of human beings; the American servant, on the other hand, would consider herself of the same class, but ill-used by circumstances. A clever woman once said to me, "You can't expect all the Christian virtues in the kitchen for five dollars a week!" But we do! Perhaps the most precious gift I received when I left Boston was this advice: "Don't see too much."

Servants are like children; to keep them under control you must impress them. They object to a mistress who is too clever with her hands, but they like her praise. An American servant does not lose respect for a mistress who, if necessary, can "lend a hand," but the English servant sees in such readiness a distinct loss of dignity. Many a time have my American servants seen me on the top of a step-ladder doing something that required more intelligence than strength, and they have respected my power to "do." Here something keeps me from the top of the step-ladder—instinct probably.

An American treats her servants more considerately than an Englishwoman. I am conscious of saving my servants too much; often (I confess it with shame) I run down a flight or two to meet them, and there is no doubt that the more I do the more unwilling and ungrateful they become.

With three English servants, besides a boy (not to speak of the laundry), now doing the work of two American servants, I proceed. I have mentioned a vital and nearly fatal subject—the laundry. In London it is awful but inevitable, and one cannot wonder any more at the stupendous dirt of the lower classes. Are their things ever washed, and if so who pays? After much observation I have decided that they make up by a liberal use of starch what they lack in soap and water and "elbow-grease."

Language fails an American direct from the land of clear skies, sunshine and soap and water, when she contemplates the harrowing results of steam laundries. Really the most expensive of luxuries in London is to keep clean! When on Sunday afternoons one sees in Kensington Gardens a poor infant with a terribly starched and dirty cap on its head (in the form of a muffin), enveloped in an equally dirty and starched cape, and carried by a small girl in fearfully starched and dingy petticoats, one recognises maternal pride which rises superior to London dirt.