The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

Girls and boys, once past infancy and early childhood, received gender-based conditioning. An advertisement in the back of The Busy Hives All Around Us, a book for children, gave a list of some ‘Popular Illustrated Books’. Their titles are revealing. Girls got The Star of Hope and the Staff of Duty: Tales of Women’s Trials and Victories; Women of Worth; Friendly Hands and Kindly Words: Stories Illustrative of the Law of Kindness, the Power of Perseverance, and the Advantages of Little Helps. Boys got Men Who Have Risen; Noble Tales of Kingly Men; Small Beginnings: or, The Way to Get On.68 Even more startlingly at variance, since they were by the same author, Louisa Tuthill, were two books called I Will be a Lady: A Book for Girls and Get Money: A Book for Boys.69 Girls were to read of ‘duty’, ‘trials’, ‘perseverance’, which would make them ‘Women of Worth’. Boys read of ambition, achievement, success – their ‘nobility’ would be in accomplishment, not abnegation.

Boys left home early – they were mostly at school by the age of seven, if school could be afforded. Even a day school ensured that boys spent much of their time with other boys: they became socialized early. The reverse was true of girls: the more prosperous the family, the less likely girls were to leave its shelter. Instead they were encouraged to remain children as long as possible. Boys had their first emotional rupture, their first taste of the outside world, when they went to school, then a bigger rupture if they went to university or when they started work, by which time they were considered adult. Girls who did not need to go out to work had no break to mark their passing from childhood to adolescence: they were often children up until they married. Louise Creighton had barely been out for a walk alone until her marriage in her twenties – if she wanted to go anywhere she had to be accompanied by her governess; if the governess was not available she bribed her young brothers with sweets to go with her.70 In The Way We Live Now (1875) Trollope notes that ‘The young male bird is supposed to fly away from the paternal nest. But the daughter of a house is compelled to adhere to her father till she shall get a husband.’71

Yet women could not be sheltered for ever, although they remained hampered long into adult life by their home-made educations. Gwen Raverat’s mother plagued her family with her dim grip on basic numeracy:

My mother … insisted on keeping accounts down to every halfpenny; but no one, least of all herself, ever understood them … [A]fter my father’s death The Accounts became a constant menace to everyone in the family … It was so hopeless and so useless. It was impossible to add up one page without being dragged into the complications of all the other pages of all the other account books, which were used indiscriminately for everything. The only system was that every item had to be written down somewhere – on any scrap of paper, or any page of any account book; and then, from time to time, everything must be rounded up and added together in one enormous sum. Fortunately no odious deductions were drawn from the resulting total, as quite often the Credits had got mixed up with the Debits, and they had all been added up together.72

Fortunately for Mrs Darwin, she had married into a wealthy family, and the accounts were more form than content. For the much larger number of women who needed to work, a similar lack of basic education meant blighted lives. A pamphlet called A Choice of a Business for Girls, published in 1864, warned:

The power of making out a bill with great rapidity and perfect accuracy is also necessary, and this is the point where women usually fail. A poor half-educated girl keeps a customer waiting while she is trying to add up the bill, or perhaps does it wrong, and in either case excites reasonable displeasure. This displeasure is expressed to the master of the establishment, who dismisses the offender and engages a well-educated man in her place. He pays him double wages … 73

John Ruskin spoke for many of the middle class when he set out his thoughts on the relative educational needs of men and women in his 1865 essay ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’:

[Woman’s] intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision … Her great function is Praise … All such knowledge should be given her as may enable her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men: and yet it should be given, not as knowledge, – not as if it were, or could be, for her an object to know; but only to feel, and to judge … Speaking broadly, a man ought to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly – while a woman ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband’s pleasures, and in those of his best friends.74

His ideas were welcomed, and other reasons for the non-education of women were added. George Gissing, in many of his novels an ardent supporter of education for women, in others drew characters whose education encouraged them to move beyond their natural sphere, so that they committed the cardinal sin of not knowing their place, disrupting the ordered segregation of the world. In New Grub Street Dora and Maud, daughters of a vet, have the grave misfortune to attend a Girls’ High School, which gives them ‘an intellectual training wholly incompatible with the material conditions of their life’.75 Their intellectual station now no longer matches their income, and they therefore remain near-friendless, because their intellectual equals are their economic and social superiors, and they cannot meet on an equal footing.

It was not only the cost of an education that prevented girls from being sent to school. Constance Maynard came from a wealthy family, and her father was happy to spend money on his daughters in other ways, but when she was sixteen he ‘said he didn’t see why he should go on paying for an expensive school when I should do quite well at home with the three sisters above me who had been educated till they were eighteen’ and who could therefore pass along any extra education she needed. When she said she wanted to go to Girton, Cambridge’s newly created women’s college, he ‘offered to get me a new pony if I would give it up.’76 (She did not, and later became the founder of Westfield College.)* Schools were, many thought, breeders of disease, places of dubious, if not downright poor, morals, and, as Gwen Raverat noted, just ‘Bad’.

Even for girls who knew their place, social life imposed requirements which they could not fulfil while undergoing full-time education. Molly Hughes, aware that she was going to have to support herself, rushed with her friend to tell her parents that they had matriculated. She found the friend’s sister had brought her new baby for a visit, and ‘When we burst out with “We’ve passed the matriculation … we’re members of the University,” we received the response, “Yes, dears? … and did it love its granny den!”’ Molly’s brother grudgingly admitted that, as Molly’s fiance was not earning enough for them to marry on, she might as well work for a degree, adding, ‘Don’t work too hard.’77

That was the key. Girls and young women must not give their undivided attention to anything. Florence Nightingale, who certainly broke out of her family’s expectations, wrote an impassioned essay on the subject in 1852, when she was thirty-two. She thought it important enough to revise it seven years later, on her return from the Crimea. On the advice of her friend John Stuart Mill she did not attempt to publish it. A great advocate of women’s equality, he was none the less probably right: the anguish she felt was so nakedly apparent that she might have subsequently found it difficult to get men in power to take her health-care concerns seriously. She wrote:

How should we learn a language if we were to give it an hour a week? A fortnight’s steady application would make more way in it than a year of such patch-work. A ‘lady’ can hardly go to ‘her school’ two days running. She cannot leave the breakfast-table – or she must be fulfilling some little frivolous ‘duty’, which others ought not to exact, or which might just as well be done some other time …

If a man were to follow up his profession or occupation at odd times, how would he do it? Would he become skilful in that profession? It is acknowledged by women themselves that they are inferior in every occupation to men. Is it wonderful? They do everything at ‘odd times’ …

We can never pursue any object for a single two hours, for we can never command any regular leisure or solitude … 78

All study had to give way to other members of the family – Maud Berkeley and her friends found that even practising the piano, that ladylike occupation par excellence, was difficult to achieve: ‘[My father] came in while I was hard at work on my arpeggios, to say he had just started a course of reading Plato and found he was vastly distracted by my music. Very difficult, attempting to be studious when each attempt brings only reproach … Heard from Lillian later that Mr Barnes made a similar protest.’79

Sarah Stickney Ellis, in The Daughters of England, was very firm. There was no point in educating women, because men had done everything before, and done it better. ‘What possible use’, she asked rhetorically, ‘can be the learning of dead languages?’ There were already translations available of all the major works, from which girls would ‘become more intimately acquainted with the spirit of the writer, and the customs of the time’ than they ever could by attempting to read works in the originals. Likewise, a girl need not study science more than superficially. A mere acquaintanceship would render her ‘more companionable to men’, because luckily ‘it should not be necessary for her to talk much, even on his favourite topics, in order to obtain his favour’. Knowledge was important only for a girl to be able ‘to listen attentively’, otherwise she would ‘destroy the satisfaction which most men feel in conversing with really intelligent women’.80

The Daisy Chain was enormously successful, and considered a very sound moral tale, helpful to young girls. Ethel, a bookish, hoydenish girl, is gradually brought to understand that the pinnacle of womanhood is in the renunciation of the use of her intelligence. At first she studies with her brother. He attends school, and passes on to her the gist of his lessons, which she is permitted to indulge herself with after she has performed such essentials as mending her frocks. However, by being clever and untidy and having no aptitude for household work, she will. Miss Winter fears, grow up ‘odd, eccentric and blue’. Soon her family decides that the time has come for her to stop studying Latin and Greek. Her brother, who has been her champion, agrees: ‘I assure you, Ethel, it is really time for you to stop, or you would get into a regular learned lady, and be good for nothing.’ So Ethel gives up all her aspirations, and crowns the sacrifice (which she now thinks of as a triumph) by finding pleasure instead in stitching up her brother’s Newdigate Prize submission in Balliol colours.81

Girls who were not prepared to give up all personal aspirations, as Ethel had done so cheerfully, had other reasons to desist from serious study. Education for adolescent girls was a serious health risk, they were warned. The educator Elizabeth Missing Sewell’s Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation was concerned with the upper classes, but she pointed out universal truths:

[A boy] has been riding, and boating, and playing cricket, and both body and mind have been roused to energy; and so, when he comes to study, he has a sense of power, which acts mentally as well as physically, and enables him to grasp difficulties, and master them. The girl, on the contrary, has been guarded from over fatigue, subject to restrictions with regard to cold and heat, and hours of study, seldom trusted away from home, allowed only a small share of responsibility; – not willingly, with any wish to thwart her inclinations – but simply because, if she is not thus guarded, if she is allowed to run the risks, which, to the boy, are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease, which, if not fatal, will, at any rate, be an injury to her for life.82

Dr James Burnett, in Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children (1895), assured his readers that a girl would, at puberty, always fall behind her brothers in academic achievement: her ‘disordered pelvic life’ guaranteed that she ‘must necessarily be in ill-health more or less [ever after] … Not one exception to this have I ever seen.’*83

Despite this consensus, many popular novelists deplored the lack of female education: Dickens, Thackeray and also Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot painted vivid pictures of the resulting misery of ignorance, for both sexes. Jeannette Marshall’s father, a surgeon and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy, encouraged his daughters to attend lectures at University College. He even hoped they would sit exams. They refused to do the latter, and attended few lectures. It was not surprising. From the schoolroom onwards, girls were never tested, never matched against others, never socialized in any form. Jeannette and her sister Ada managed one term before the requirements of their social life supervened: they had made no friends with any of the other women attending the college; from Jeannette’s diary, it is not clear that they ever learned any of their names. For Jeannette, education was a matter of passing the time – she studied algebra in late adolescence as ‘a cure for boredom’ – or, more importantly, of prestige. She had piano lessons with the well-known pianist (and founder of the English Wagner Society) Edward Dannreuther, and noted of some new acquaintances, ‘I went up 100 per cent in their estimation when they heard Mr. Dannreuther was my [music] master. A good card to play!’84 Jeannette enjoyed her music, and intermittently worked hard at it, while she never became one of those women condemned by the author of Maternal Counsels to a Daughter. ‘Who would wish a wife or a daughter, moving in private society, to have attained such excellence in music as involves a life’s devotion to it?’85

Ignorance was, in many ways, a desirable state. Knowledge was burdensome, and could overwhelm those unable to bear its weight. Mrs Gaskell worried about sending the toddler Marianne to school, where ‘she may meet with children who may teach her the meaning of things of which at present we desire to keep her ignorant’.86 This need to protect girls from knowledge did not grow less when they became adult. Half a century after Mrs Gaskell expressed her anxiety, Gissing depicted his characters arguing about the same subject. Monica, a woman who had been forced to marry for economic security, disagreed with her new husband on whether or not a mutual friend was ‘nice’ for her to know. He responded:

‘… In your ignorance of the world’ –

‘Which you think very proper in a woman,’ she interrupted caustically.

‘Yes, I do! That kind of knowledge is harmful to a woman.’

‘Then, please, how is she to judge her acquaintances?’

‘A married woman must accept her husband’s opinion, at all events about men.’ He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. ‘A man may know with impunity what is injurious if it enters a woman’s mind.’87

Knowledge of a fact could corrupt not because of the fact itself, but because of the gender of the mind it resided in. This was not to say that girls and women were expected to know nothing. It was just that their accomplishments and abilities were important in reactive ways: as Mrs Ellis said earlier, girls needed to know enough about science so that they could look intelligent while men talked. Equally, girls should be able to play the piano, not for the pleasure derived from music, but because it was useful. Mrs Panton thought that girls’ natural reason for learning to play the piano was ‘because they can be useful either to accompany songs and glees or to play dance-music’,88 not love of music. Nearly half a century later the function of a daughter had not altered: ‘it is the daughter’s privilege … to act the part of sympathiser and interested listener in the home circle. No other claim is greater.’89

Girls were only to respond to others, not have thoughts of their own. It took Molly Hughes some time before her place as a reactive rather than an active family member became clear to her:

the family pooled what gossip they had got from school … discussing future plans and telling the latest jokes … I, as the youngest, seldom got a word in and was often snubbed when I did. Thus, after venturing, ‘I did well in French today’, I had the chilling reminder from [her brother] Charles, ‘Self-praise is no recommendation.’ If I related a joke, ‘We’ve heard that before’ would come as a chorus. Once when I confided to Dym [another brother] that we had begun America, he called out, ‘I say, boys, at Molly’s school they’ve just discovered America.’

That kidnap victims take on the ideology of their captors in order to survive is a well-known psychological effect, called the Stockholm Syndrome. Molly Hughes was a prime example. She used the word ‘chilling’ for her brother’s crushing retort, but she little appeared to recognize quite how chilling the scene related above was. She ended, ‘In short, I was wisely neglected’, and confided that ‘I tried to carry out the wishes of these my household gods by being as ordinary and as little conspicuous as I could.’90

Felix and Henrietta Carbury, the brother and sister in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, showed similar characteristics, albeit heightened for fictional purposes. Felix Carbury was a wastrel who had run through his inheritance and was now battening on his mother, who could ill afford to support herself and her daughter. Henrietta, however,

had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance … That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses were curtailed because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was her mother’s, she never complained.91

This deference to men was not a single hierarchical one: fathers at the top of the family pyramid, mothers next by virtue of authority vested in them by their husbands, and children at the bottom. The children were in their own little pyramid too, with boys, of whatever age, above girls. Eleanor Farjeon spelled it out:

Whatever pains and penalties, whatever joys and pleasures, were dispensed to us by the parental powers in the Dining-room and Drawing-room … in the Nursery there was one Law-Giver who made the Laws: our eldest brother Harry.

… he invented rules and codes with Spartan strictness; if they were to be enforced, he enforced them; if relaxed, only he might relax them …

In our Nursery he exemplified Plato’s ‘benevolent despotism’ with so much benignity, entertainment, and impartiality, that we began life by accepting it without question.92

The last sentence implied that Farjeon grew out of her deference. Molly Hughes, when she came to write her autobiography nearly half a century after the events described, still thought her family’s viewpoint was reasonable: ‘I suppose there was a fear on my mother’s part that I should be spoilt, for I was two years younger than the youngest boy. To prevent this danger she proclaimed the rule “Boys first”. I came last in all distribution of food at table, treats of sweets, and so on. I was expected to wait on the boys, run messages, fetch things left upstairs, and never grumble, let alone refuse.’ Yet even after all those years she tried to rationalize their behaviour. ‘All this I thoroughly enjoyed, because I loved running about.’ And surely it must have been all right, because, after all, ‘The boys never failed to smile their thanks, call me “good girl” …’ She was unable to distinguish between herself and her captors: ‘We were given a room to ourselves – all to ourselves.’ In it ‘there were four shelves, and … each [of the four boys] had one to himself.’ It did not even cross her mind that she alone had not got a shelf. Furthermore she was allowed to enter this room that was ‘ours’ only with the permission of her brothers, and for the most part she spent her afternoons alone in her bedroom.93 Laura Forster noted the same isolation: ‘The boys could and did come into the nursery when they liked, but they never played there or stayed long, whilst I had no other room open to me, except by special invitation [from them], until the evening, when we all went down to my parents.’94

The responsibilities for a girl were more onerous too. Laura, as the oldest girl, looked after the younger children in the nursery, staying there longer than was customary because the nursemaid ‘said I could not be spared, and Miss Maber, who taught my three eldest brothers, avowedly cared only for boys and would not accept me in the school-room’.95 It was a given that girls waited on their brothers: Louise Creighton, as a younger sister, only once had the ‘privilege usually reserved to the elder ones of getting up early on the Monday to give the boys their breakfast before they went back to school’.96 Constance Maynard and her sister were also expected to defer to their eldest brother. (As they referred to him as ‘The Fatted Calf’, it appeared that they had perhaps not accepted their subordinate role in quite the way they were expected to.)97

These were mostly girls from upper-middle-class families with no shortage of money. They were expected to perform services for their brothers not because there was no one else to do it, but because that was what girls did. Slightly down the social scale, as Molly Hughes’s experiences showed, things were no different. Helena Sickert, the sister of the artist Walter Sickert, went to day school, as did her brothers. In the afternoons, after homework was finished, the boys were allowed to play, while she ‘very often had to mend their clothes; sort their linen, and wash their brushes and combs’.98 And the lower-middle-class girl had more responsibilities yet. Hertha Ayrton was born Sarah Marks, the daughter of a clockmaker and a sempstress.* Sarah/Hertha made all of her younger brothers’ clothes and took care of the boys so that her mother could take in needlework to support them after the death of her husband.99 Alice Wichelo, known as Lily, was the eldest of ten children (and later the mother of E. M. Forster); her father was a drawing master who had died young. By 1872, when she was seventeen, Lily had taken her youngest brother to Tunbridge Wells alone, finding a childminder to look after him and settling him in lodgings.†100

It was not that all experiences of all girls were the same, but rather that the received ideas bred an attitude that many aspired to: to be the comfort-giver, whose primary function was to ensure the smooth running of the home, for the benefit of he who financed it. The engine room of this comfortable ship was the kitchen.

* No one, however, can trump Augustus Hare’s parents, but as an upper-class child he can only (just) be accommodated in a footnote. Hare’s uncle, also an Augustus Hare, died shortly before his godson-to-be was born; his widow, Maria, stood god-mother instead, and she tentatively asked his parents if she could perhaps have the child to stay for a while. The answer to her letter was immediate: ‘My dear Maria, how very kind of you! Yes, certainly, the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.’ Maria Hare cared for him for the rest of her life, and he called her his mother.11

* Not, please note, the mother. The wicked or incompetent servant loomed large in the minds of the middle classes. Mrs Warren told of a nursemaid who caused a child’s death by taking the child out when she was told not to. Mrs Beeton warned that the mother should learn to distinguish the different cries of her child, ‘that she may be able to guard her child from the nefarious practices of unprincipled nurses, who, while calming the mother’s mind with false statements as to the character of the baby’s cries, rather than lose their rest, or devote that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours’. See a larger discussion on servants and their employers’ fears on pp. 111ff., 115–17.39