Mrs Wells clung to small routines and predictabilities to ward off those ‘unsettled’ feelings brought on by change. There is a sense that the very act of diary keeping soothed her with its repetitive nature; that every mundane entry had an incantatory effect. She had her rhythms, her routines and gripes. Staffing problems aside, there are, by and large, four types of entry. First, paying off the tradesmen who supply Uppark. She would walk or ride down Harting Hill every Monday and take a glass of sherry with each: ‘Went to Harting and paid folks’.
Second, her sons. Sarah lived for letters and visits, and fretted in their absence: ‘Bertie letter only a few words.’
Frank came to tea. I fear he never goes to Church. How altered. Sadly grieved about him.
Bertie exam–I trust my dearest one has got on well.
My poor old birthday. Not a word from my Boys.
Sent Bertie by Rail Brace of Pheasants. Wrote to Frank sent Leg of Mutton.
Third, church: ‘What a comfort the blessed Sabbath day.’ The South Harting Parish Church of St Mary and St Gabriel is an antique-feeling place of Elizabethan timber, narrow windows and sparsely spaced lamps. It was made darker still at the death of Lady Mary Ann Fetherstonhaugh in 1874 with a bequest of three piously illustrated stained-glass windows at the western end (Attending the Sick; Visiting the Prisoner, and so on), where light once streamed in to touch the far altar. Servants sat at the back, behind the gentry and village folk, and Mrs Wells kept a sharp eye on her maids during the lengthy sermons.
South Harting lies at the foot of Uppark’s steep beech-wood territory: a vertiginous mile-long walk down a rough track, the maids’ heavy skirts trailing in the mud. The walk back up to the big house would have made Mrs Wells’s lungs wheeze in protest. When her mistress was in residence, and in a generous mood, she shared the carriage with her. The days Mrs Wells did not make it down Harting Hill to church (bad weather, ill health) were spent in glum resentment. Church was her respite. ‘So thankful got to Church’, notes more than one entry.
Finally, and most interestingly, she writes regularly on the weather, and getting out. For someone who spent most of her life in the basement Mrs Wells was acutely sensitive to her environment, to the passing of the seasons and fine gradations of the weather. In just a line she economically–poetically, even–conjures the raw outdoors.
Boisterous winds did not go out.
Snow on the ground–came in the night but melting in the sun.
Rough day. Busy with elder wine.
Walked the garden. Cold winds.
Primroses.
Every day is weighed by whether she manages to breathe fresh air or not.
Showery day did not go out. Busy cleaning.
Feel very worn out. Tired. Busy all day. Showed house to servants. Longing to get out.
Her mood lifts as spring and summer come round; there is palpable joy as Mrs Wells feels the sun on her face, if only for half an hour.
Sat in the shrubbery read papers.
I walked after dinner yew tree field got primroses they are now lovely.
Short walk shrubbery. Sun shining all day, quite warm, such lovely spring days, how thankful I am my loved ones all well.
Got a few bluebells. Sent them to Bertie.
What were the consequences of confining servants to dark basement quarters, where the only windows were high and barred, the only exit through a long, dank tunnel?
In 1845 the Government commissioned a report on the condition of mental institutions throughout England, and its findings resonated with the below-stairs world of servants. Older asylums, which resembled dreary ‘prisons or dungeons’, were compared with the more ‘modern establishments’, designed with the well-being and comfort of patients as a priority. ‘The patients ought to have the benefit of a cheerful lookout on a pleasing prospect’, argued the Commissioners, concluding that the older asylums were not suitable for Victorian patients. Newly constructed asylums should ‘avoid everything which might give to the patient the impression he is in prison’.16
Uppark was designed in the early eighteenth century in the old style: servants in the dark, gentry in the light. The kitchen was moved upstairs as entertaining got more lavish, but the rest of the staff remained below ground.
In the latter years of Queen Victoria’s reign, drastic improvements were being made around Britain to the standards of living for servants. Enlightened country-house design did not favour troglodyte conditions, bringing them up instead into fresh air and daylight. Lanhydrock in Cornwall, a Jacobean mansion devastated by fire in 1881, was rebuilt according to the latest ideas in service design. Visitors today can see the ground-floor housekeeper’s room with its large, light-flooded windows facing in two directions, while the next-door housemaids’ sitting room is an airy, bright room where the girls would have entertained their friends.
In 1905 an article in the medical journal The Lancet claimed that the ‘eminently depressing’ living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements, where ‘diffused light is but a matter of a few hours daily even in midsummer’, accounted for the anaemic appearance of so many employed in affluent homes.17 The body’s need for Vitamin D made through exposure to sunlight was not known about at this time, though the health benefits of cod liver oil had been discovered. (H. G. Wells writes about his mother’s ‘fanatical belief’ in the stuff to prevent the ‘vitamin insufficiency that gave my brother a pigeon breast and a retarded growth’.) Mrs Wells recorded her bouts of ill health and self-medication in her diary: ‘Very poorly took oil.’ She noted this on 23 August of her last year at Uppark, twelve years of a largely underground existence. When the young Sarah Wells was lady’s maid at Uppark, she spent her time mostly above stairs–stitching, dressing and hairdressing, helping Miss Frances with her ablutions in beautifully proportioned Georgian rooms looking out towards the South Downs. It was a house made for sunlight: all those windows facing east, south and west; all those tall, giltwood pier-glasses reflecting yet more light back into the rooms. From her mistress’s quarters she could see the gardens, and perhaps imagine Joe at work down there in the fresh air. Now, as housekeeper, she was like a mole–‘busy all day in those vaulted passages’, as she wrote with resentment. Mrs Wells’s mood darkened as summer passed. She dreaded the short days ahead.
18 July: ‘Days already drawing in.’ (Underlined three times.)
14 October: ‘Rain & wind, dark dull day, winter coming on.’
27 October: ‘Dull day foggy and wet, not so cold. No walk–how dark in these underground rooms.’
Seasonal Affective Disorder, or ‘SAD’, is a modern diagnosis of the suffering that can be brought on by shorter days and less sunlight. It is held that SAD sufferers are more likely to be women, and that they commonly start craving sugary foods: cakes, biscuits, chocolate. ‘Fat little mother’, wrote H. G. Wells in a letter, under a sketch of a rotund little lady in a lace cap. The still room was a dangerous place for sugar addicts: all those cakes and scones, jellies and jams. More gravely, lack of exposure to natural sunlight is now known to induce depression, osteoporosis and breast cancer–even schizophrenia.
Victorians could only hypothesise at this time about the relationship between mind and body. It was understood that depression afflicted all classes–though the connection between lack of sunlight and symptoms of severe depression among the working classes had not properly been made. The terminology was still imprecise. Phrases such as ‘nervous exhaustion’ and ‘nervous collapse’ were used loosely for feelings of dullness, inertia, pessimism and deep unhappiness, where the victim was still able to function.18 A nervous breakdown was vaguely described as ‘shattered nerves’ or ‘broken health’, and a new label–‘neurasthenia’–was brandished towards the end of the century. Melancholy was another much-used term; or, more severe, ‘falling into melancholia’, which could be brought on by a trauma. Hysteria was thought to be particularly the curse of women–and especially idle women.
But what about those under-stimulated, or frustrated, working women? Mrs Wells was the opposite of idle, but her vitality had been blunted and her mind shut down by the dull, repetitive nature of her job. Victorian psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne, who devoted his life to the study of mental health, wrote in 1883 of the ‘dreary, aimless vacuity of mind that is hysteria’s favourite soil’.19 As for the connection between mind and environment, this had barely been made. In 1885 Alexander Bain published his groundbreaking study The Senses and the Intellect, in which he argued that a new method of studying the mind was needed: one that took into account experience, the environment and physical actions. It was the advent of modern psychology.
Mrs Wells carried her personal tragedies closely within her: it wasn’t done to rail against fate, and it was, after all, the Lord’s will. But she had had more than her dose of sorrow. At the age of 26, she lost her sister. At 30, both her mother and father died within weeks of each other. Her black moods are recorded in her diary. ‘Dull day spirits sadly depressed’, she writes, with frequency. ‘What a dream I seem in!!!’ In 1864 her beloved nine-year-old daughter died suddenly. She recorded the anniversary of Fanny’s death in every diary thereafter, along with her daughter’s birthday (and burial) a few days later.
As a young mother, Sarah Wells visited relatives on a Sussex farm for a short summer holiday with babies Fanny and Frank. Her diary sings briefly with joy, against its more usual monotonous litany, for the green fields and wild flowers, the fresh air and sunshine. For most of her adult life this woman, so keenly alert to the natural world, was shut up in a dark basement. Eventually, her body and mind started to disintegrate.