34. Maids, housework & crinolines

In the years when the family was getting ever larger and there were small children in the house, Alice had the help of three young women to cook, clean and look after the babies.  These three girls lived in the house; we don't know if Alice paid for extra help by the day with the heavy cleaning or for a washerwoman to come in on washdays.  The housework would be divided up according to Alice's wishes.  The cook, for example, would almost certainly be responsible for cleaning her kitchen as well as making the food, and she might be expected to take care of the dining room.  She might serve breakfast if the maid was upstairs doing the bedrooms.  It would depend on how the house was organised and what was needed.  

In a Victorian household, the workload was heavy and all done by hand.  In 1930 Alfred Hopkinson looked back on his childhood and shuddered

In the old days the bed-curtains had to be taken down and put up again, the antimacassars on the chairs had to be regularly washed, practically all baking was done at home in town as well as in the country; and very good it was.  Sending clothes to the laundry was an unknown extravagance, and washing, ironing and starching were all done at home, even in quite small houses in towns.  Jam was almost wholly home-made and this involved really heavy labour for the housewife as well as for the servants .[1]

An antimacassar was the name given to a small cloth draped over the back of a chair to protect it from gentlemen's hair oil.  Alfred knew hair oil too, and only too well

In those early days it was not unusual to add to the miseries of child life by manufacturing at home some stuff which we knew as 'pomatum,' which was smeared on the hair of the unfortunate children, whose dress, compared with the children's dress of to-day, was a model of discomfort, of expense, and of unsuitability for its purpose  [2] 

And the work was to be done while encumbered with heavy clothes.  Alfred thought the change for the better in women's dress over his lifetime was marvellous.  He could remember the "hideousness of the dresses" in the late 1850s and early 1860s.  He had worn a crinoline himself when he was acting in a school play and could say from experience that they made active exercise quite impossible 

there might be half a yard of dress which trailed on the ground, and in the streets mopped up all the filth that lay about and carried it into the drawing-rooms of their acquaintance. [3]  

Later, he remembered, there was some "mysterious arrangement" made of elastic which could pull the dress up for crossing the road, but which sometimes would embarrassingly pull up only one side so that half the skirt was above the knee and the rest dragged on the ground. 

The coffee-pot waist was incompatible with health … As for decency, the less said about the crinoline and the garments of those days, the better.  They were expensive, inconvenient, ugly and so dangerous that women were sometimes burned to death through their dresses catching the flames even when they were standing at a distance from the fire. [4]

The cage crinoline that Alfred remembered had been a blessing for women when it appeared in 1856.  Crinolines had always been the horsehair-stiffened petticoat that was went with other layers of petticoats to create the dome shaped skirt that had been fashionable through the 1840s.  

The steel cage was much lighter to wear and quite cheap, so that all classes of women could be in fashion.  On 3 August 1935 the Sheffield Independent reported the oldest umbrella maker in Sheffield, 98 year old Eliza Riley who started work at the age of seven in a silk mill, remembering how she made her own crinolines from wire bought by the yard from the makers in Pond Street.  

"And I never showed my pantaloons, well not more than that," she added.  "Some girls wore them to the feet." 

Miles and miles of crinoline wire were being turned out by the Sheffield rolling mills alone.  They were usefully adaptable for maternity wear as Alice must often have found, because the hoops could be shifted to make more room and the sheer frilliness and flounciness of the fashions with their yards of fabric could incorporate unobtrusive openings in the bodice for nursing a babe. 

Alfred, who loved the outdoor life, remembered with dismay that

Fresh air at night was regarded with horror.  To prevent the night air entering long sandbags were placed at the foot of the doors and along the windows; the four-post bed was furnished with curtains which were carefully drawn at night; the feather-bed was common, and for fear of a draught on the head the night-cap was worn by both men and women [5]

Coal fires, gas lamps, oil lamps, no bathrooms.  "No one in these days," he wrote

can imagine the appalling sanitary arrangements in what were considered good middle-class houses in the 'fifties and early 'sixties [6]

The change in attitude over his lifetime to fresh water was, he thought, remarkable.  His parents moved in 1849 from 1 York Place (the council put the gross estimated rental value at £55) to a cheaper house, 39 Rumford Street (GER £45), where Alfred, Ellen and Charles were born.  By the time of Mary's birth in 1857 they were back in York Place, this time at Number 12 and in rather more prosperous circumstances – the gross estimated rental value was £50.  These are the houses that Alfred is describing here

Houses of £50, £60, £70 or even higher rents, which meant far more in those days than at present, were without bathrooms; in fact, to have a daily bath would by some estimable people have been thought rather a sensual pampering of the body.  

Young children, of course, had some form of bath; but I remember well staying at a small house in the country where the only chance for us was to be put in a receptacle called a dolly tub, usually used for the washing of clothes, and which we entered with some fear that we should be unable to climb over the high steep sides. [7]

(Dolly tubs were tall wooden or galvanised iron tubs used with a poss stick or posser – the name varied by region – for washday.  Replicas sell nowadays as planters for the garden)

Alice had plenty to occupy her with care of the children.  She breastfed her babies – she comments in a letter of 29 October 1859 that the doctor recommended that she should wean six-month-old Edward, "but I am not at all disposed to do so at present" [8] – and she gave the little ones their early lessons.  Alfred, for example was taught at home until he went to a kindergarten when he was nearly eight [9], while a letter of 19 May 1865 [10] shows that Edward was at school at six.

But with all the work to be done about the house, it is no surprise to find Alice mentioning darning, mending, dusting and spring cleaning in her letters.  We don't know what Alice thought her neighbours and friends expected by way of cleanliness and neatness in the home – but we do know that her friends and family were for years very worried about the way that Alice overburdened herself and her daughter Ellen and finally Ellen's younger sister Mary with household chores. 

Notes

[1] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 306

[2] & [3] ibid., p. 307

[4] ibid., p. 308

[5] ibid., p. 306

[6] ibid., p. 304

[7] ibid., p. 305

[8] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 30

[9] Penultima, p. 233

[10] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 44