by Price, Leah
A servant passing at the moment, Peter seized upon a single cup of coffee that remained on the tray, and was going to drink it, when Hugh snatched it from his hand, declaring that his brother had already had two cups, while he had had none. Peter attempted to regain his coffee, but Hugh jerking it away, the cup was overturned, and a great part of the contents spilled on Claude’s beautiful prints. In a moment Hugh closed the book, and hastened to another part of the room, wholly indifferent to the fate of the engravings, and only anxious to escape detection. (Adams, Boys at Home 182)
In the remainder of the chapter, defacing the book leads to telling a lie: to lose respect for books is to lose the self-respect that underpins virtue.
In Little Servant Maids, however, bodily traces are linked more specifically with secrecy. The echoes of Bluebeard (with ink replacing blood as a mistress replaces a husband) reflect not only the SPCK’s ambivalent stance toward chapbook fairy tales, but also the oddly sexual register in which servants’ contact with written matter is represented. (Again, what makes the book sexual is not any pornographic content, but simply the fact that Becky hides it under her pillow.) Becky’s successor is ordered to “look at the chairs—the backs all covered with dust, so that you might write ‘slut’ with your finger on every one of them” (Adams, Little Servant Maids 375). A few years later, Punch would picture a mistress who complains that she can write her name in the dust being answered, “Lor, mum, so you can! Now I never had no edgercation myself!”10 The joke appears less funny if you remember how many American slave narratives represent their narrators learning to write by scratching their letters in the dirt.
Cleaning is the only form of inscription permitted to servants—a negative of the marks left on the white note by Becky’s sooty fingers. And where ashes take the place of artist’s charcoal, reciprocally ink becomes dirt as soon as a servant touches it:
When Becky had done so, having nothing else to do, or rather, not choosing to do anything which she was not immediately bid, she pulled the inkstand towards her, and, leaning over the table, began to mark the first letters of her name on the window-seat. She could write but very little, and only on a slate, so that being unused to a pen, she filled it too full of ink, and made large blots on the clean white paint; these she from time to time removed by wiping her hand over them, and then cleaned her hand by rubbing it down her pincloth. (Adams, Little Servant Maids 219)
“Dirty books” are no metaphor. When Paget’s antiquixotic novel Lucretia attacks “novels which some straitlaced folk would call the dirtiest in every sense, as being the loosest in their morals, and the most greasily thumbed by a discerning public,” “dirt” joins “inflammatory” and “volume” as words whose literal sense Paget substitutes for a more common figurative meaning (Paget 104). The traditional fear that the book’s content will inflame a servant’s desires is crowded out by the fear that the book’s binding will tempt her to disobey. Just as Greenwood imagines Jack Sheppard inspiring apprentices to steal goods that they can use to pay for a copy of Jack Sheppard, so what Caroline steals is the book itself, not (as in so many accounts where reading makes servants covetous) some ribbon or bonnet described within its covers. Little Servant Maids stops short, too, of imagining Becky peeking into her mistress’s correspondence: no worse fault than the dirtying of paint and cloth. The servant’s grimy hand becomes a leitmotif linking the turned-down corners of a book with the graffiti scratched on the wall: the white page has more in common with white cloth and white walls than with the whitey-brown paper that wraps food. In an inversion of the it-narratives that make handling books gently a predictor of kindness to women, children, animals, and slaves, here respect for books predicts respect for masters; the maid who inscribes her response to the text is also the one who answers back to her mistress.
Figure 6.2. “A Soft Answer,” Punch, 30 November 1895, 258.
Taken cumulatively, these scenes conflate an emerging anxiety about the proper relation of reading to marking (do marginalia betray caring too much about the text or being too careless of the book?) with an older debate about whether servants’ literacy should be passive or active. The internal discussion in the early years of the SPCK about whether poor children should be taught to write or only to read gives way here to a plot that positions writing where we would have expected reading to appear—marking the outside of the letter in place of prying into its contents. At some moments, that is, a servant’s meddling with her mistress’s books looks similar to eavesdropping on conversations; at others, it bears more resemblance to breaking a china plate.11 Or maybe a better analogy would be taking a swig from your master’s glass or trying on your mistress’s bonnet behind her back. The image of a servant leaning on her broom figures alike in “One Thing at a Time,” where the other hand holds a book, and in and “My mistress’s bonnet,” where the other hand is trying out a muff.12 Sometimes, in contrast, what seems to be being stolen is not an object at all, but the user’s time or attention. In engaging in what Walmart now dubs “time theft,” maids like Hannah or Caroline go back on the tradition in which (as we saw in chapter 3) an industrious apprentice like Richardson could boast of reading on his own time, by the light of his own candles. And when the mistress in a different tract tells the servant, “Never spend your time for work in looking into books,” she reminds us that the same activity at which middle-class children are praised as “working hard” takes servants the same age away from their legitimate labor (Charlesworth, The Old Looking-Glass 90).
The phenomena known as “Sunday reading” and “airplane reading” remind us that books take on different functions depending on when and where they’re read. Any scholar knows that a bible means something different in a library (even a Gothic one like Sterling Memorial, whose vaulted reading rooms helped me begin this project) than in a church. And religious tracts taught their readers that a bible does something different when read by a maidservant perched on a ladder with a duster in her other hand, than it does when read by the same maidservant in her own room in a plainer binding.
In suggesting that Little Servant Maids represents books being handled in ways different from those that it invites itself, I don’t mean to gloss over the inconsistencies in its own cues about who is expected to buy and who to read. The age of its implied readers remains in doubt, and, with it, the question of whether the book is made to be given in the school or in the home which is also a workplace. (Remember Yonge’s reference to books from which “children and servants” will benefit.) As often as the text addresses servants, some narratorial asides suggest that this role lies in its readers’ future:
If servants generally would follow this good rule, how much of what is disagreeable and inconvenient would be spared to their masters and mistresses, and from how much temptation, and often misery, they would save themselves. Many children who read this tale will be too young or too inexperienced to feel the full importance of this observation, but let them bear it in mind and act upon it, and some day or other they will be aware of its value. (Adams, Little Servant Maids 49)
On the other hand, any such speculations about the implied reader (and by extension, the implied giver) are complicated by the confusion of age with social class diagnosed by Charlotte Yonge, echoing the bricklayer in Bleak House.
The Leisure Hour’s assumption that the influence of “parents” is interchangeable with that of “employers” nostalgically invokes the early modern model in which (as Lawrence Stone and Bruce Robbins have described) families treated their own children as sources of labor and hired servants as objects of paternalistic care: how-to manuals for servants, in fact, were known as “babies’ books” (Robbins 150). In exhortations of “children should remember” and references to “the children who read her history,” the referent sometimes seems to be a young girl already in service, as when the text acknowledges that, by definition, anyone whose hands it reaches is likely to differ from its untaught protagonist:
Jessy had had few advantages of
education; probably much fewer than any of the children who read her history. They most of them have been taught “to do their duty in the state to which it has pleased God to call them”; and such conduct as this untaught girl’s would in them be inexcusable. They all know and feel that it would be very wrong to leave a place without giving notice; but let such children ask themselves if they have not been guilty of conduct which was as wrong in them as Jessy’s was in her. (Adams, Little Servant Maids 86–87)
The reference to “the advantages of education” reveals the ambivalence at the heart of Little Servant Maids: the saintly old servant who is taught to read by her mistress’s kind son is first impressed when a charity-schoolgirl entering her service arrives bearing a bible and prayer book that have been given to her as a school-leaving present, but then dismayed when the girl glosses her possession of these fine objects as a “right” rather than a gift (Adams, Little Servant Maids 185).
Here as in The Story of a Pocket Bible, the content of the text tugs in the opposite direction from its material form. Reading a bible or tract under the wrong circumstances can cancel out its message, as when The Pawnbrokers’ Gazette reports that “one of the very poorest and most wretched class of prostitutes” tries to pawn “a very large and handsome illustrated Book of Common Prayer”; suspecting it was “improperly come by,” the pawnbroker refuses to advance money on the volume and reports the prostitute to the police, but she testifies that when “a perfect gentleman” in a “house of ill repute” discovered that he had no money on him, “he said that sooner than be dishonorable, he would give her the book in question, which was worth two guineas, and no doubt some pawnbroker would lend her 10s. on it.”13
When tracts represent the reading of characters from the same social class as their own implied reader, it’s often hedged with qualifications about the exact circumstances under which that reading is acceptable. Just as the decision of the servant in The Story of a Pocket Bible to buy her own cheaper bible cancels out her earlier sin of reading the book she’s supposed to dust, so Hannah More makes clear that her working-class characters don’t steal their reading time from working hours: “As her mother hated the sight of a book, Hester was forced to learn out of sight. It was no disobedience to do this, as long as she wasted no part of that time which it was her duty to spend in useful labour . . . Hester would not neglect the washing-tub or the spinning-wheel, even to get on with her catechism, but she thought it fair to think over her questions while she was washing and spinning” (More, Tales 104).14
More makes what we now call “multitasking” exemplify the housewifely virtue of efficiency. Yet the dangers of that activity are illustrated in a later tract where “Jane has left off her business of sweeping and dusting the room, and is looking at the books which were placed on the table. Very likely it may be some good book which will do her no harm. Perhaps it has pictures in it of pleasant places far off; but whatever it may be, it would seem better if Jane finished her work first, for if her mistress finds the room not ready, she will see that the maid has been idling. Perhaps Jane has never heard the rhyme: ‘One thing at a time, and that done well / Is a very good rule as many may tell’” (“One Thing at a Time” 194). The illustration shows a broom stuck through the back of a chair and a duster thrown carelessly down upon the seat, while Jane stands absorbed in the book she is holding.
For male servants as much as for middle-class girls, reading is stigmatized when it occasions oblivion to others, especially to superiors: we know that the eponymous pageboy in Adams’s tract John Hartley, and How He Got on in Life has gone to the bad when “he often suffered [the cook] to call to him before he would stir, and then he would look up from a newspaper he might perhaps be reading, cast his eyes over it again before laying it leisurely down” (128). Conversely, reading is praised when it involves interpersonal exchanges, whether in the form of giving books to others or reading aloud to them, as when the same tract describes John burning his fellow servant Alice’s licentious books and offering instead to read his sister’s school-leaving prize aloud to the other servants:
Figure 6.3. “One Thing at a Time,” Making the Best of It, n.d.
Little Wide-Awake: an Anthology of Victorian Children’s Books and Periodicals in the Collection of Anne and Fernand G. Renier (Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1967), 194.
The tale was a very interesting one, well and powerfully written. It was the history of the work, trials, and temptations of a young woman in service . . . The time allotted for reading only allowed of half the tale being gone through, and Alice, contrary to her expectation, became so deeply interested in it that she begged John to go on with it after family prayers were over. He, however, said that . . . it was against rules to sit up after their master and mistress had dismissed them for the night. She then begged him to let her have the book to finish to herself upstairs in her room.
“No, Alice,” said the cook; “even you, I think, would not be guilty of such misconduct. Call to mind the order mistress gave you on first coming, ‘never to burn a light in your room longer than was necessary for getting to bed.’”
“Very well,” said Alice, “I give in; I must try and be like good Jane in John’s book, and obey orders.”
. . . The story was finished by John, but it was not once hearing it that satisfied Alice. Again and again she begged him to read to her parts or the whole. (118–20)
Good books crowd out bad, just as the fire into which the latter are cast to burn doubles the candle not used to read the former by. Here as in conduct books and it-narratives, the lesson learned from hearing the good book read aloud is precisely not to read (or, at least, not to read to oneself)—to be able to bear interruption and suspense. But unlike in those middle-class books, what’s set up for imitation is not only a certain rhythm of reading, but also a certain modality of acquiring: what makes the book good is not just its contents, but the fact of its having been given as a school prize. More specifically, given to John’s sister: in a boy’s acceptance of a feminized book, the logic of Molly Hughes’s brother scornfully handing his reward books down to her is reversed.
The immorality of reading at the wrong place and time is limited neither to servants nor even to working-class characters. Hannah’s crime of reading books when she should be dusting them is anticipated by an 1850 didactic fiction in which a middle-class girl’s absorption in a book causes a servant to catch her forgetting her own light housework:
Once or twice she became so interested in the books which she found in the book-case, that the servant came in to set the table for breakfast before she had finished. She found Sally with one knee resting on the book-case, the dusting-cloth on the floor, and she so deeply absorbed in a tale as to have forgotten every thing else. Her father came into the room, walked quietly towards her, and laying his hand on her shoulder, asked what she was reading. She replied, “I have commenced a story which so much interests me, that I am sorry I shall have to stop.” Her father asked her if she would not enjoy it more after her work was finished, advised her to defer reading it till evening, and let him partake with her of the enjoyment. The anticipation of reading this to her beloved parent was enough for Sally. The book was soon replaced, and the more commonplace business of life reverted to. (The Useful and the Beautiful 60–61)
A knee on the bookcase instead of a duster on the books, a dust cloth on the floor instead of a body kneeling: the topsy-turvy logic of the scene is corrected only once the book is put back into the proper place (a shelf), the proper time (the evening), and the proper operation (reading aloud).
When the fear that a book will distract women from their domestic tasks extends beyond servants, it comes to reflect a tension between the self and the social, as much as between work and leisure. Think back to the middle-class women whose novel handling distracts them from cleaning their houses or acknowledging their husbands. A different Jane’s daydreams of “pleasant places far off” are prompted by her idling with books that John Reed reminds her
belong to someone else: “You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says . . . I’ll teach you to rummage in my book-shelves” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre 17). In fact, the same pastiche of Jane Eyre that asked just how a persecuted dependent would lay her hands on the books needed to furnish her imagination also noticed that language enough to repeat it for a third time, making a daughter of her employer’s family say of the governess: “she has not the run of the house, to go about it as she likes; she has no business in the library” (Wood 100).
No less than the middle-class secular fiction that we saw in chapters 1 and 2, religious tracts equate picking up a book with asserting a self. The difference is that Little Servant Maids makes the narrator, rather than an unsympathetic character like John Reed, the source for the comment that Caroline “had no business to open these books.” Once “having business to take” or “no business to open” books (note that neither text speaks of whether the servant has “business to read” them) becomes a synecdoche for membership in the middle class, the opening scene of Jane Eyre comes to look like less like a psychological meditation on readerly interiority than like a prefiguration of the narrower social questions that critics like Elizabeth Rigby responded to: the application of John’s claim that dependents have no right to pick up books to subcategories like “orphan,” “servant,” “governess,” and “village schoolmistress.”15 Yet whether that individualism is attacked (in the conversion narrative) or endorsed (in the bildungsroman), both genres pit reader against family. The only difference is that as tracts continue to define “family” as an economic unit joining masters with servants, novels place that in tension with the modern sense of a nuclear household where gender and age replace class as sources of difference.
SOCIOLOGICAL REVOLUTIONS
