Dorothy Doar came to work for the family in 1818: one year before the first steamship crossed the Atlantic; two years before the death of mad King George III; a decade before the first passenger railway. We don’t know her place of birth or where she came from; the first census was not until 1841. She was probably in her late twenties when she arrived.
It was not unusual for girls to go into service at the age of eight; some started work at the neighbouring Stoke-on-Trent potteries and pits aged five. But Mrs Doar had a more fortunate start in life. Recruited from the preferred, steady ranks of the lower middle classes or from among the better of the working classes, she ‘had her letters’: she could write in a strong, slanting hand, she could keep an account book and she could spell, after a fashion.
The manual of the day–The Complete Servant, written by retired butler and housekeeper Samuel and Sarah Adams in 1825–advised that the housekeeper ‘ought to be a steady middle-aged woman, of great experience in her profession, and a tolerable knowledge of the world. In her conduct, she should be moral, exemplary, and assiduous, as the harmony, comfort, and economy of the family will greatly depend on her example.’10
James Loch agreed that the ideal housekeeper should be an older woman. In 1819 he wrote to a colleague about finding one for a Scottish cousin. ‘She must be able to undertake the management of the kitchen when he has company and be a good Cook, but know how to pickle, preserve etc, be able to instruct the servants in baking and brewing and to keep monthly accounts, to take charge of the House & Linen.’ His cousin would be willing to pay from 30 to 35 guineas a year (£1,300 to £1,500 today), throwing in the perks of coal, vegetables and milk. As for her type, ‘he would prefer a woman who has served the most of her time in the country and she must always have been in a good gentleman’s family…her age not under 30 nor above 45’.11 Life expectancy at this time was 46; in Stoke-on-Trent’s pits and potteries, just 37.
Did Dorothy Doar fit the bill, in Loch’s eyes? She was on the young side, so might have worked her way up the ladder, moving on from cook, nurse or lady’s maid. But she was also unusual in her air of maturity. She had indeed a ‘tolerable knowledge of the world’ beyond that of most servants. For Mrs Doar was a rare thing among female domestics: she was married.
This was unusual. For butlers, it was perfectly acceptable to be married. Employers liked it; it stabilised a man, as long as wife and children lived off site and out of sight. But it was an accepted certainty in nineteenth-century domestic service that marriage marked a definitive end to a female servant’s career. A woman might return to service on the death of her husband, but for the most part it was premarital employment, a chance to save some money and learn domestic skills.
The downstairs world of the country house was something of a marriage market, what with so many visiting servants, and although flirtations were routinely sniffed out and quenched (one of Mrs Doar’s particular responsibilities), things happened. At greatest risk were the teenage maids, giggling with the strapping footmen who lurked around the servants’ hall and still room, hair pasted down, calf muscles nicely visible through white stockings.
‘Avoid as much as possible being alone with the other sex, as the greatest mischiefs happen from small circumstances,’ wrote Samuel and Sarah Adams, forefingers wagging. ‘A reserved modesty is the best safeguard of virtue.’
Did Mrs Doar meet Mr Doar through her job, flouting the common ‘No Followers’ rule, or did she arrive already married and simply endured the separation? When did she manage to see her husband, with no formalised holidays and little time off? Was she the first Leveson-Gower housekeeper to be truly a ‘Mrs’, rather than taking up the courtesy title as other housekeepers did? Did her status as a married woman trouble or reassure the Marchioness of Stafford? Elizabeth Leveson-Gower was by birth and instinct a Georgian–and in this pre-Victorian era, the servants’ rulebook was less rigidly codified and prescriptive. Identical uniforms for maids had not yet become the norm; upper servants might wear cast-offs from their master and mistress’s wardrobes. Moral attitudes towards domestic staff were far less censorious in the eighteenth century than they were later to become.
Sometime into her employment Mrs Doar bucked the trend again. She gave birth to a baby girl. When, we do not know, or what her job title was at the time, or how she handled the disruption to her work and the probable censure or irritation of her employers. What we do know is that Dorothy was fiercely and unusually ambitious for her child. Her ‘unfortunate’ husband Mr Doar (as she wrote to agent James Loch) was unable to work, so it was down to Dorothy to fund her daughter’s future. The girl was sent to school, which took ‘every shilling we have’.12 Very few children attended school at the time, and certainly not the offspring of servants. The lives of most children in this industrious part of the Midlands were unremittingly bleak.
Hundreds were employed in the printing rooms of the nearby potteries, cutting out decorative designs and sticking them onto ceramics. ‘The printing room is indeed a bad school for children,’ reported Dr Samuel Scriven to the House of Commons in 1841.13 ‘Their language is indecent and profane.’ He found, in his research, ‘mouldrunners’ running back and forth with ware ‘labouring like little slaves’, and was troubled by the sight of so many ‘dull and cadaverous countenances’–children suffering from lead poisoning.
Dorothy Doar’s daughter was lucky: her mother’s position meant she would not be gobbled up by Britain’s Industrial Revolution. But there was little precedent at this time for putting a servant’s daughter through full-time education. Not until 1833 would the Factory Act insist on just two hours’ schooling a day for the over-fives. If you wanted to educate your child in the 1820s, you were usually middle class, your child was probably male and you paid heftily for the privilege.
Mrs Doar did not earn much. The richest family in Britain did not pay their female servants highly–perhaps even less than was normal at that time. By 1840 the Sutherland housekeepers were earning between £31.10 and £63 a year (£1,400 to £2,800 in today’s money) depending on experience, according to old leather-bound wage ledgers kept in the Sutherland archive.14 The London house steward, butler and upholsterer, all men, earned twice as much. The various lowly maids got between £12 and £16 a year (£500 and £700), while the still-room maid (the housekeeper’s personal assistant; three arriving and leaving within one year at Stafford House, which cannot have pleased housekeeper Mrs Harriet Galleazie) earned £14.14 (£650).
Bed and board was free, of course, and upper servants’ perks were bumped up by gifts from employers and tradespeople. But still, William Lewis (agent for Trentham and Lilleshall) wrote to James Loch in 1832 that he considered ‘Mrs Doar’s wages too small for the faithful discharge of such a trust’. If you did not pay her enough, it was thought that the housekeeper might fall prey to temptation. At this stage of our story, Mrs Doar was held to be loyal, conscientious and above suspicion–but her low wage might have been a thorn in her side; the result of staying put for so very long. Yet once you found your place in a noble family, once you rose to their notice and approval, Mrs Doar was probably of the opinion that you’d be a fool to walk away.
Her young daughter was at school and her needy husband was lodging in the estate village of Handford, a mile from Trentham’s gates. She was an absent wife, an absent mother; a housekeeper for an absent mistress. Mrs Doar had her share of anxieties, but she was required to sink herself into the minutiae of her work.