Servants were not supposed to have children. It was an almost exclusively celibate occupation. With the reign of Queen Victoria, public censure of maids falling pregnant became ever more strident. Mistresses were neurotic in their determination to control not just their servants’ souls, but their bodies too. The Countess of Carlisle would make a head housemaid in the 1880s report back that the under-maids were regularly washing their monthly napkins at Castle Howard because it ‘proved they were not having a baby’.22 Jane Carlyle’s cook defiled the sanctity of her mistress’s home by giving birth in the house–‘While Mr C was still reading in the Drawingroom! ’23 No matter what the circumstances–betrothed, seduced, raped–getting pregnant was grounds for immediate dismissal without reference.
As her mistress’s eyes and ears, it fell to the housekeeper to keep these girls on the straight and narrow. The layout of country houses became ever more obsessed with creating barriers to intimacy. At Kelmarsh in Northamptonshire, tunnels were built to stop the laundry maids passing through the stable yard. At Lanhydrock in Cornwall, the housekeeper’s bedroom guarded the entrance to the maids’ dormitory. She was the sentinel. But who was watching her?
Of all the babies accepted by London’s Foundling Hospital, Bloomsbury between 1821 and 1830, two-thirds came from servants. Of these, a disproportionate third are in the higher ranks of service (housekeepers, cooks, governesses, nurses, lady’s maids): older women with better social backgrounds and greater literacy skills than the servant population at large.24
How did they become pregnant? Not through promiscuity–there was little opportunity for the upper servant isolated through her position. More often it happened through misfortune: when a longstanding courtship failed to end in marriage as expected. These women did not want to abandon their newborns, but they had no choice. Small, poignant mementos–bracelets, buttons, necklaces–were left with their babies at the Foundling Hospital. These children would, at least, have some kind of a future. Another way out was infanticide.
In 1849 the nation was gripped by a case of unusual horror in which a London cook-housekeeper was accused of a double infanticide: twice over seven years she throttled her child (one newborn, one two years old), boxed up the body and sent it to relatives in the country. ‘The Child Murder in Harley-Street’, as reported, paints 36-year-old Sarah Drake as ‘inhuman’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘unnatural’. Celebrated Scotland Yard detective Sergeant Whicher investigated, and the trial was ‘thronged with eager lovers of the horrible and mysterious’, including many ‘well-dressed females’.25
To public outrage, Drake was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity. She did not hang. Instead she was sent–a ‘criminal lunatic’–to Bedlam. ‘She did not shed any tears’, reported the Bucks Herald. ‘But notwithstanding that, she was evidently suffering most acutely.’
Housekeepers were not supposed to bear children–but nor were they supposed to have husbands. Dorothy Doar was an anomaly in every way. One baby girl had already been born and put out to nurse. She knew that this pregnancy spelt bad news, both for her job and for her family’s precarious finances. She did not inform the Marchioness of Stafford until she was seven months gone.
Perhaps, first, she waited to see if the pregnancy would hold (by now Mrs Doar was probably around forty years old). Perhaps she vowed to do it in the new year, but then was reluctant to trouble her mistress just then when the family was doubly preoccupied by the prospect of a London cholera epidemic and the long-anticipated Reform Bill.
I can see her walking the two miles round Trentham’s long, island-studded lake, hands fretting inside her shawl, as she turns her situation over and over. It is winter, though unusually mild. In nearby Severn Stoke there are reports of an apple tree that has produced a miraculous, unseasonal crop of fruit. But down by the lake the wind comes from the north, biting the back of her neck as she makes the mile-long descent through woodland and birdsong, then comes again like a blade at her face as she rounds the tip and heads towards the house.
Who is her confidante? Can a woman in this position unburden herself without losing her authority?
That winter everyone was distracted. The whole house was on edge. This was a revolutionary time for England. Early in February, rioting was narrowly averted thirty miles to the north in Manchester by the police with ‘a liberal use of their sticks’, breaking up a mass meeting of the Political Union of the Working Classes.26 The people had taken to the streets, agitating for parliamentary reform. It was thirteen years since Peterloo, but the memory of how viciously that demonstration was dealt with by the cavalry, sabres drawn, was still raw. The people of Manchester still wanted change. The previous October, Bristol had burned for two days, put under siege by enraged rioters looting, ripping up gas pipes and smashing windows. The enfranchisement of the working man was their goal. They wanted the vote. ‘This is our time! Go it, go it, my lads!’ was the cry of the mob.27
Then in mid-February came terrifying news from London. Mrs Galleazie, housekeeper at Stafford House, reported that the first case of cholera morbus has reached the East End. This was a new and sinister disease, known variously as ‘Asiatic’, ‘spasmodic’, ‘malignant’, ‘contagious’ and ‘blue’ (for the sufferer’s corpse-like face and tongue). It had spread from India to Russia, from Russia to Hamburg and now by ships to London and the northern ports of Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. It was ‘a disease which baffles human skill’, lamented one MP at the passing of the Cholera Prevention Bill on 18 February, ‘and therefore it must be considered an infliction of Providence.’
At Stafford House the Marquis reacted with patrician authority (and not a little horror at this working-class pestilence carried in the air, as the ‘miasmatists’ insisted, from the unthinkable slums of the East End). ‘The Marquis of Stafford has adopted the greatest precaution to prevent the cholera morbus amongst his establishment’, reported The Times on 3 March 1832.
All the servants have received the strictest orders that on no pretence whatever they go further eastward than Charing-cross, on pain of immediate dismissal, and that they are not to mix with any of the trades people. The post man now throws the letters into the house, and the newsmen, when they deliver the newspapers in the morning and evening, have to throw them over a wall, so great is the fear of contagion on the family of the noble Marquis.
Mrs Doar has heard of her boss’s draconian measures via Mrs Galleazie, so when a newspaper finds its way to her sitting room she reads of ‘The Cholera Panic’ with knowing shakes of her head, although she has never been to London. Is Charing Cross far enough to be safe, she wonders?
A short stroll to the east took the then 21-year-old reporter Charles Dickens to the squalid streets and slums surrounding Drury Lane: theatreland. ‘The filthy and miserable appearance of this part of London can hardly be imagined by those (and there are many such) who have not witnessed it’, he wrote in Sketches by Boz. ‘Filth’, he noted:
filth everywhere–a gutter before the houses and a drain behind–clothes drying and slops emptying, from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.28
By the end of March the cholera was in Paris; 7,000 died in the first two weeks. Its savage spread made London look positively safe. The British papers kept pace, publishing lists of high-born Parisian victims; lists anxiously scanned by the Marchioness. There were ghastly echoes of the Terror as she saw her old social milieu picked off one by one. All this is noted in Trentham’s servants’ hall, The Staffordshire Advertiser spread out on the scrubbed table after dinner. Mrs Doar recognises some of the foreign names; names often glimpsed on her mistress’s prolific correspondence. Can contamination travel by post?
The Midlands sits between London and the northern ports. How long could it be, she asks herself, before the epidemic arrives? By now the nation is decidedly twitchy, any mild bowel problem suspected to be cholera. Mrs Doar is the first at Trentham to become ill. Usually so vigorous, the housekeeper’s limbs feel weak, she sweats all day and has a nausea wholly unconnected to her secret condition. For the first time in many months she is forced to retreat to her bedroom. Then news comes from Lilleshall that housekeeper Mrs Kirke is ill–‘dangerously ill’.
In such a febrile atmosphere, Dorothy Doar does not willingly let go of the reins. She knows she should be overseeing her girls, but once she takes the weight off her feet she feels as if a great hand is pressing down on her, preventing her from moving. The Trentham maids have surely noticed her rounded figure. The house steward William Lewis, her close colleague, remains unaccountably unaware of her new shape, hidden as it is by stiff silk skirts, billowing sleeves and biting stays. As she lies sick and sweating in bed, she knows she must write to Her Ladyship. There is no more concealing it.