Religion, morals, and temper, should be specially studied, and the essays of Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Hannah More, Barrow’s Questions, his School Bible, and School Sermons, with Blair’s or Enfield’s Sermons, are suitable auxiliaries. Bad habits should be watched and corrected, and graceful ones, cleanliness and neatness of person, be stimulated. Blair’s Governess’s Register of Study and Conduct, will prove an excellent auxiliary. Superstitions, and vulgar faith in dreams, signs, omens, fortune-telling, and other weaknesses of mind, should be constantly exposed.
A governess, influenced by these practices and principles, will entitle herself to live on a footing with a family, when there are no special parties; and she must possess good sense enough not to intrude on that domestic privacy, and personal independence, which, without offence, is often desirable. Her own apartment, or that of her pupils, ought to be at once the scene of her pleasure and amusement, and if she mingles with the parties of the families, she must, of course, not make herself too familiar with the domestic servants.
Thus conducting herself with propriety, and identifying herself with the growing minds and affections of her pupils, she may secure their personal friendship to the end of their mutual lives, and if their moral feelings are not blunted, she may calculate on their gratitude in her old age, or if she survive them, in their last will.
THE UPPER HOUSE MAID.
In large families, where there is much work, two or more house maids are kept, but as the Upper House Maid has generally the superintendence and responsibility of all, we shall include their principal labours under one general head.
The Upper House Maid should be fully competent to undertake the management of all the household business of a gentleman’s family; and to be perfectly qualified for her situation, she ought to have been previously initiated in the capacity of Under House Maid.
In most families she has the care of all the household linen, bed and table linen, napkins, towels, &c. which she also makes and keeps in repair, and besides cleaning the house and furniture, and making the beds, she washes her own clothes, and has sometimes to assist the laundry-maid in getting up the fine linen, washing silk stockings, &c. instead of the lady’s maid; but these latter are considered as rather extra labours, and are not, in all families, deemed a necessary part of the house maid’s business. She also cleans all the coal skuttles in use above stairs, and all the kettles used for warming water in the dressing-rooms, &c. When there are dinner parties the house-maid washes up the plate and china.
The house-maid, in a regular family, will find it necessary to rise about five o’clock, and her first business will be to open the shutters of the usual family sitting-rooms; as the breakfast-room and library, whence she clears away all the superfluous articles that may have been left there, and prepares for cleaning the stoves, fire-places, and hearths, by rolling up the hearth rugs, carefully carrying them out to be shaken, and then laying down a piece of canvas, or coarse cloth, to keep the place clean, while she rakes out the ashes, takes them up, and brushes up the fire-place. She then rubs the bright bars of the stoves, and the fire-irons, first with oil, and afterwards with emery-paper, No. 3, or with brick-dust, till clean and bright—and, finally, with scouring-paper; and this should be done in the summer time, particularly when the stoves may have acquired spots for want of constant use.
The backs and sides of the fire-places are next to be brushed over with black-lead, and then rubbed dry and bright with a hard brush kept for the purpose.
The fires are next lighted, and the marble hearths washed with flannel, dipped in a strong hot lather of soap and water, which must be cleaned off and wiped dry with a linen cloth;—the marble chimney pieces need not be thus cleaned above once or twice a week.