Regency Domestics - A Good Life?

During the Regency, all domestic—household—work was labour-intensive. Household servants were commonplace; every home with any claim to gentility had at least one servant. According to Samuel and Sarah Adams (see below) with an income of one hundred pounds per year, ”a widow or other unmarried lady, may keep a Young Maid Servant, at a low salary; say from five to ten guineas a year.” With an income of one thousand pounds per year, expectations increased. Such a household would employ “A Cook, two House-Maids, a Nursery-Maid, or other Female Servant; a Coachman, Footman, and a Man to assist in the Stable and Garden.” Every extra hand lightened the work load, and incidentally increased the prestige of the household—to everyone’s satisfaction.

Guidebooks for domestic servants were available. Elizabeth Hammond’s Modern Domestic Cookery of 1819 contained a section headed “Directions to Servants”. In its introduction, Mrs. Hammond advises “The principal qualification in all servants (but especially in females) is a good disposition, which naturally urges them to anxiously endeavour to give universal satisfaction;...”

For a further three pages, she admonishes and counsels upon the following suggestions:

“Be particularly careful what acquaintance you form;...”

"Invariably speak the truth...”

“Be humble and modest...”

“Never speak lightly of your master and mistress...”

“Carefully avoid quarrels with your companions...”

“Endeavour to acquire the habit...of being contented with their homes.”

Good advice no doubt, but also fostering and reinforcing a certain sort of subservience.

In 1825 after a lifetime of service Samuel Adams, a butler, in cooperation with his wife Sarah, a housekeeper, produced “The Complete Servant”. It was their opinion that such a handbook had never before existed-- “The want of such a manual of duty and practice having often been noticed in servants’ halls,...”. As both Sarah and Samuel had started in service at a young age and ‘risen through the ranks’ as it were, they knew whereof they spoke, and offered all their experience to newcomers.

The Adamses’ in their Dedication “Respectfully Addressed to the Heads of Families in the United Kingdom” go so far as to make suggestions to the master of the house regarding costs and economies of the household, and to the mistress of the house regarding handling of servants.

Nevertheless they too, in their “Advice to Servants in General” lapse into a sort of moral admonishment that sounds patronizing to modern ears. It is sometimes difficult to remember that the Regency was a different time, with a unique world view and ideas now foreign to us. That an employer or a contemporary could advise another with such arrogance is a strange idea to us. Yet the education level and the naivety—the innocence and the ignorance--of many of the servant class must have made these instructions seem necessary and right to their ‘superiors’. As with Elizabeth Hammond, the Adamses' heap advice upon counsel:

“Your wages are the yearly pay for your honesty, and your time;...”

“Dress as becomes your station, if you desire to please your employers,...”

“Be very careful of your reputation for virtue and discretion in regard of the other sex;...”

“Intemperance or excess is a pleasurable evil,--it...enchants and destroys.”

“The virtue of silence is highly commendable,...”

The role of the domestic servant in the English home had a long, long history. During the Regency, no one could have foreseen that in one hundred years the institution of ‘service’ would be threatened, and that in one hundred and fifty years it would all but have disappeared.

Another time we will discuss the individual duties of the various servants. The amount of work they were assigned was as staggering as the moral precepts heaped upon them. The Adamses’ lists of servants’ duties and their instructions on careful and proper fulfilment of the tasks are thorough and complete. In the end analysis, with so much advice, how could a servant ever go wrong?

Til next time,

Lesley-Anne

Regency Faery Bower

I came across a book on my bookshelves the other day that I had not looked at for a while. It is a charming thing titled "A Regency Lady’s Faery Bower" subtitled ‘A Private View of Fairyland: Amelia Jane Murray 1800-1896'. The book was published in 1985 by Holt Rinehart in hardcover, ISBN 0-03-006109-1. It is copyrighted by April Agnew-Somerville who is apparently the current owner of the faery drawings.

Amelia Jane Murray was known as Emily by her family, and a very prestigious family it was. She was the niece of the Duke of Atholl who was at the time the Governor of the Isle of Man. As her father died when she was five, Emily grew up on Man in a privileged position at Mount Murray and later Castle Mona.

Emily was instructed in drawing, sketching and watercolours as was every proper Regency lady, and her work has echoes of Canova, Bewick and Flaxman. She drew these fairies in her twenties in the 1820s before the Victorian vogue for fairies began. There was an interest in fairies during the Regency fostered by Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ and the 1815 Brothers Grimm stories, but certainly Emily was in the vanguard of the fashion for fairies.

Emily Murray’s fairies are certainly perfect little Regency ladies. They have that 'Look' of the Regency which I discussed in my blog of March 26, 2009. Their gowns display classical simplicity, and their diaphanous scarves appeared in fashion plates of the day. She had no text with her paintings; in this book appropriate poems and excerpts have been added to the drawings to add to the reader’s enjoyment. The watercolours were executed on fine pasteboards surrounded by embossed borders, a delicate enhancement produced by a new process of gauffrage.

When she married in 1829 Emily quit fairy painting, and produced little artwork for the rest of her long life. Her album of fairy paintings was a family memento for several generations until its publication. Her drawings are now recognized as important additions to the genre of British fairy painting.

If you love the Regency and delight in fairies, you must seek out this out of print book. It seems to be fairly easily available through on-line out of print book dealers. You won’t regret it, I promise you.

Do you believe in fairies? I do...

Till next time,

Lesley-Anne

"Family Medical Receipts" - Regency Remedies and Cures

In these days of heated discussion about health care, it is interesting to reflect on the limitations of Regency medical knowledge. Surgeons were rough men for the most part, not far from the barber-surgeons of the previous century. Physicians were a step above but limited to such treatments as cupping, bloodletting and leeches. Change was coming but it was slow and it is often resisted.

For most people in most situations, the best health care was to be had in the home. And every recipe book, whether purchased or compiled generation after generation, contained cures and nostrums for every ailment.

The book ‘Modern Domestic Cookery’ published in a third edition in 1819, and written by Elizabeth Hammond, was a receipt book that covered every possible household need. From cookery to wine-making, carving to cleaning, it is full of recipes of all kinds.

Medications, remedies, therapies and treatments are found in the section titled Family Medical Receipts ; they are sobering and really make me appreciate the advances of the past two hundred years.

The first receipt in the list is for camphorated oil—a liniment—and the second recipe is for a wound ointment:

Basilicon
Take of bees-wax, white rosin, and frankincense, four ounces each, melt them well together over a slow fire, then add the same weight of fresh lard, and strain it into your jar while warm; this ointment is of great use in cleansing and healing wounds and ulcers.

Chapped lips were apparently as common in Regency times as in our present day, and so there is a receipt for:
Lip-salve
Put in a jar four ounces of white wax, one ounce of spermaceti, and half a pint of oil of sweet almonds, cover it close, and put it in a saucepan with as much water as will nearly reach the top of the jar, let it boil till the wax is melted (but observe, none of the water must boil over the jar,) then put in a small quantity of alkanet root tied up in a bag; close the jar again, and boil it till it becomes red; remove the alkanet root, and add a little essence of lemon, or bergamot; run it into your pots, and keep it for use.

For headaches, the following recommendation:
This unpleasant pain may be prevented by wearing the hair short, and by washing the head daily with cold water; then rub the hair dry, and expose it to the air.

Inflamed eyes have their own disagreeable remedies:
Leeches should be applied to the temples, and when the bleeding has ceased, a small blister may be applied, and a little opening medicine taken. Shaving the head, and bathing the feet in warm water, will in some cases, be found very beneficial.

A ‘fever drink’ might sound helpful with a rise in body temperature, but the efficacy of a simple fruit beverage seems questionable to contemporary eyes:
Boil three ounces of currants, two of raisins carefully stoned, and an ounce and a half of tamarinds, in three pints of water, till it is reduced to a quart, strain it, throw in a bit of lemon-peel, and let it stand an hour.
Refreshing yes, therapeutic—well, I don’t know.

Barley water, that staple of Regency novels, is I believe still in occasional use, but I was not familiar with its preparation. Here is the 1819 receipt:
Boil a quarter of a pound of pearl-barley in a gallen of water, till it is quite soft and white, then strain off the water, and add to it a little currant jelly, lemon or milk.
Or,
Wash a little common barley, and let it simmer in three or four pints of water with a little lemon-peel. This is prefereable to pearl-barley.

And so it continues--a hopeful panacea for every ailment. After reading the remedies in this two hundred year old book, I am more than content to rely on 21st century science. For once, I don’t at all wish to live during the Regency era.