The Hidden Life of Victorian Servants

Unseen Souls traces the life of Eliza Turner as she moves from the ironworks of nineteenth-century Dowlais in South Wales to London, where she enters domestic service as a scullery maid. It is a very different world from the one she has left behind, but one in which work, hierarchy and the circumstances of birth continue to determine much of what is possible.

When I began researching Eliza’s life in service, I became interested in the people who made the Victorian household possible while being expected, for much of the time, to remain almost invisible within it.

Domestic service was one of the largest sources of employment in nineteenth-century Britain and, for women in particular, one of relatively few ways of earning a regular wage. By the time of the 1881 Census, more than a million women and girls in England and Wales were recorded in domestic service, ranging from cooks and housekeepers in substantial households to young women working as the sole servant of a modest middle-class family.

For many, particularly those leaving rural communities or industrial towns, service offered regular employment, accommodation and meals, but that security came with restrictions of its own. A servant did not merely work in someone else’s house. She lived there, subject to its routines, hierarchy and expectations.

Below stairs

A large Victorian household was a carefully ordered system in which almost everyone had a defined place. At the top of the domestic hierarchy stood figures such as the butler and housekeeper, followed by cooks, valets, footmen, parlourmaids and housemaids. At or near the bottom stood the scullery maid, often one of the youngest and least experienced members of the household.

Her day might begin before the family upstairs had stirred, with fires to be lit, water fetched and heated, pots and utensils cleaned and the kitchen prepared for the work ahead. Once the household awoke, one task followed another as meals were prepared and cleared, rooms cleaned, fires tended and preparations begun for whatever came next.

By mid-morning the house above stairs might appear calm and orderly, but that appearance depended upon a considerable amount of activity elsewhere. The family was not supposed to notice the fires being laid, the water carried, the floors scrubbed, the food prepared or the cleaning that followed. In some respects, the more successfully a household was run, the less visible the work became.

Nor was all domestic labour unskilled. A good cook needed judgement, organisation and considerable experience, while the housekeeper supervised much of the domestic life of the house and the butler occupied the unusual position of moving between the family and those who served them. For those lower in the hierarchy, however, the work could be relentless. Because servants usually lived in the household, the boundary between working time and personal time was never particularly clear, and even when the formal business of the evening was over there were kitchens to restore, fires to check and preparations to make for another day.

There was another aspect of domestic service that became increasingly important to me as I developed Eliza. To be a good servant was, in many circumstances, to master the art of being present without drawing attention to yourself.

Servants moved through bedrooms, dining rooms and drawing rooms, carrying food, laying fires, cleaning and attending to the intimate details of other people’s lives. They might witness arguments, illnesses, financial worries and the small discrepancies between the respectable face a family presented to the outside world and the reality behind closed doors. They saw things precisely because people became accustomed to their presence, yet what they saw was rarely theirs to comment upon.

That interested me because observation becomes important to Eliza. The habits she develops in service, watching, listening and noticing differences of manner and behaviour while remaining largely unnoticed herself, do not disappear when her circumstances begin to change. They become part of the artist she eventually becomes.

The lives behind the household

It would be too simple to describe domestic service only in terms of exploitation. For many young women it provided regular food, accommodation and wages when the alternatives could be considerably worse, and a respectable position might offer a route away from poverty or insecure employment. Yet opportunity and constraint could exist together. A servant’s time was largely not her own, her behaviour was regulated and her place within the social hierarchy was understood by everyone around her. Even the organisation of substantial Victorian houses reinforced the distinction, with different stairs, rooms and entrances for those who served and those who were served.

That division fascinated me while writing Unseen Souls, because Eliza crosses it. She arrives in London as a young woman from industrial South Wales and enters the Ravensworth household at its lowest domestic level. She is intelligent and observant, with a talent for drawing that has little obvious relevance to the work she is expected to perform, yet the world below stairs gives her something that eventually becomes central to her art: an understanding of lives that are essential to the society around them but seldom attract its attention.

The servant in a Victorian novel can easily become part of the scenery, the person who opens the door, carries the tray or appears briefly to announce a visitor. Historical accounts can do something similar when they concentrate upon the families who occupied great houses rather than the people whose labour made those houses function. Yet those apparently peripheral figures had lives of their own, with ambitions, disappointments, friendships, families and private hopes that continued whether or not anyone upstairs noticed them.

In Unseen Souls, Eliza has already known something of that invisibility in Dowlais, where thousands of individual lives could disappear into the larger history of iron and industry. Domestic service exposes her to another version of the same phenomenon and eventually helps shape the way she looks at the world around her.

Perhaps that is the question beneath both her story and my interest in writing it: what do we fail to see when we look only at the people history has chosen to remember?

For Eliza, learning to look at those who are overlooked becomes part of her purpose as an artist. For me, it became one of the reasons for writing her story.