The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age for the housekeeper. This was the era of wealth creation for the Victorians: the railway age. The moneyed classes built new houses, refashioned old ones and filled them with the spoils of Empire. To run them they employed many more servants than before. According to the national census, between 1851 and 1871 the number of housekeepers tripled, from 46,648 to 140,836.1 This ranged from women working in middle-class homes to those employed by the great estates. And as houses got bigger and more and more crammed with furniture and ornaments, so the housekeeper’s responsibilities grew.
The male house steward at the head of the household receded into the past. An all-powerful domestic matriarch took his place. The housekeeper commanded more girls–many more girls, each with specialised skills and separate areas of responsibility. A brisk new air of professionalism imbued her team. Maids’ uniforms become absolutely codified (print dresses for the dirty work of the morning; black dress with lace cap and apron for the afternoon); surnames rather than first names were used; salaries rose according to fine gradations laid out in a spate of domestic manuals.
But country houses also resisted change. For every Trentham Hall or Highclere Castle undergoing a fashionable Charles Barry rebuild, there was an Uppark. Change on a country estate usually came about with a new male heir, but Uppark had no new lord of the manor. During Queen Victoria’s reign it languished in a time warp. The outside world was moving swiftly on–gaslighting, central heating, hot-water plumbing, elevators–but Uppark slumbered in its green acres, oblivious to the modern era. It might as well have been situated in the remote Scottish Highlands rather than West Sussex, fifty miles from London on the steam locomotive. While recruitment agencies began to promote a new breed of ‘first class’ professional servant, at Uppark the approach was more arbitrary–and the choice of housekeeper was, arguably, reckless.
According to her son’s autobiography, Sarah Wells was ‘perhaps the worst housekeeper that was ever thought of’.2 This has become the accepted view of Mrs Wells’s tenure at Uppark, which ran from 1880 to 1893. She was bad at accounts, she was bad at managing her girls, she was ill experienced in buying stores and economising–so said her son, the writer H. G. Wells. If you visit the house today, push past the brass-tack-studded red baize door, descend the eighteen steps to the basement and peer into her little sitting room, this is the line that the hovering National Trust guide will give you: here sat Mrs Wells, the very worst of Victorian housekeepers. But is this fair? It seems nobody has really looked at the evidence. We have unquestioningly swallowed the judgement of her son, the famously prolific Edwardian novelist.
Fortunately, there is another source for Mrs Wells’s story: her own version of events. She was a habitual diary keeper, jotting down a few repetitive lines each night before climbing wearily into bed. Unlike so many housekeepers’ personal records, these have survived because of the fame of her son. Today they lie in the university library of Illinois, handled with reverential white gloves by scholars hoping to find insights on H. G. Wells. The diaries have also been photocopied by the West Sussex Record Office, and it was here, in Chichester, not ten miles from Uppark, that I laboriously read through hundreds of pages of her quavering copperplate script.
Using the five unpublished diaries of Sarah Wells, the Uppark archives and her son’s letters, I set out to resurrect her world and reassess her performance. Truthfully she should never have taken the job: she lacked the qualifications. But Mrs Wells was eager to make the best of it, elated at her apparent great change in fortunes. The reality of her daily round, in this twilight world below stairs, turned out to be relentlessly hard for a frail woman in her sixties–and nothing like the Victorian caricature of the housekeeper, haughty in her black bombazine dress and clinking keys, directing work from the comfort of a wing chair in her sitting room.
The story of Mrs Wells is one of unexpected physical labour and of humiliating old age. Women like this had to work to the bitter end; they had no financial cushion or job security. We find her organising the annual spring cleaning at nearly seventy years old, her rheumatic joints so tender she can hardly walk. She spends her working days, up to fifteen hours long, underground in the servants’ quarters at Uppark–sewing, linen checking, jam making, sugar pounding, writing off for replacement maids, bookkeeping. She must also deal with an endlessly quarrelsome tribe of maidservants and a more than usually prickly mistress. Our housekeeper works, most remarkably, for a lady who was born a dairy farmer’s daughter.
In trying to understand the particular nuance of Mrs Wells’s story, we need to consider what preceded it–the extraordinary marriage made by the master of Uppark, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh (pronounced ‘Fanshaw’), to the estate dairymaid Mary Ann Bullock half a century earlier. It was a marriage that jolted everything out of its place, with implications for the mistress–servant relationship ever after.