Hidden lives and ladies’ maids: Margaret Forster's Elizabeth Barrett Brownings

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Notes

Only on the back of an economic surplus can you float a full-time intelligentsia; before that point, the thinkers have to pitch in with the hunters. ‘I think, therefore somebody has been doing the donkeywork’ might be the anti-Cartesian motto of this vein of inquiry (Eagleton 2001:57–8).

Hirsch herself is quoting from Probyn 1993:2.

Part of the explanation for this mode of address, Margaret Forster suggests, is that the shared forename Elizabeth might have led to confusion; that is, however, a very charitable construction on the naming of servants. Precedence in the ownership of names is yet one more marker of class. As Liz Stanley's edition of the diaries of Hannah Cullwick makes clear, servants might be addressed in a variety of ways, including by forename or by surname alone; and it was not unusual for their individual identities to be subsumed into generic names for servants such as ‘Mary’ (Stanley 1984:32).

‘It is not news that dominant Western feminist thought has taken the experiences of white middle-class women to be representative of, indeed normative for, the experiences of all women. Much of such thought, it is now common to say, expresses and reinforces the privilege of white middle-class women: their lives and works, their griefs and joys constitute the norm in relation to which other women's lives—if they are mentioned at all—are described as “different”’ (Spelman 1990:ix).

Forster must have read Hannah Cullwick's diaries in constructing her lady's maid. Hannah has a similar problem with words expressing affection. Describing her relationship with a fellow servant, Clara, in January 1872, Hannah wrote: ‘C[lara] calls me “Hannah dear”, & will sleep with me, & is so winning … that it's no use my talking to her. Only I do tell her of her faults … as if she was a sister, but without any loving words, for I can only say them to a child, or in a letter to anyone I do love’ (Stanley 1984:189, emphasis in original). Similarly, love between parents and children exists but is not outwardly expressed. Thinking about her mother, she writes: ‘I hardly remember ever seeing her pet us much, & it was rare to see her kiss us after we got big. But she never forced me to work’ (168), implying that not being forced to work is the nearest one can get to the expression of affection when one lives in straitened circumstances.

Hannah Cullwick's diaries corroborate this description of a servant's life. They are a fascinating, though depressingly repetitive, record of the labours of the day. Numerous entries attest to the sheer physical labour required to keep the Victorian middle-class home clean and serviced. Leisure time was sadly lacking, as Hannah comments in her entry for 1 January 1871: ‘I've two days & two nights’ holiday since last October twelve months, & bin to no theatres of Crystal Palace … And I've read nothing but a book call'd Adam Bede, excepting my Bible’ (Stanley 1984:153).

This point is related to the concepts of orality and literacy described by Walter J. Ong, who establishes that the kinds of thoughts one can think are heavily dependent on the cultures of either literacy or orality that one inhabits (Ong 1982).