Eavesdropping (25 page)

Exhibit 24
Le Toucher
, Abraham Bosse, 1638

When viewed against prototypical eavesdropping, where psychological and other boundaries separate the viewer and the viewed, the situation in stately homes seems incredible. Everyone was passionately curious about how the rich and famous lived, and a significant minority were there to see, hear, and smell them twenty-four hours a day. They knew how their employers lived, partly because it was
their job
to know. Spending so much of their time under the same roof, these privileged insiders knew what the aristocracy ate and drank, when and with whom they slept, how often they bathed, what clothes they wore at home, and how they spoke to each other. The servants knew what made their master and mistress laugh, what ailments they suffered, and what kinds of music and entertainment they enjoyed. They knew who visited the home, and who their masters’ friends were.

Beyond their natural curiosity, young servants had reasons to soak up all these details. Many were fiercely ambitious. Domestic service was regarded as a transitional career. The young men hoped
that someday they, too, would become important members of society. Domestic service would teach them how to behave like gentlemen.
¹²
Practically everything on display was emulated, from ways of gesturing and speaking to a fondness for tea and snuff, and particular ways of dressing. The servants also embraced their employers’ ideas and moral values. “A new attitude towards church or state,” wrote J. Jean Hecht, “was as likely to be passed on as a new way of cocking a hat.”
¹³
These new behaviors positioned servants for better things and served as an important means of cultural diffusion from the upper classes to the lower ones. For female servants, it is thought, additionally, that household service served as an “apprenticeship” for marriage. In nineteenth-century France about a third of all young women worked as domestics before they married.
¹⁴

Since house servants were physically close to manorial life in all its forms, they were routinely exposed to intimate scenes. But proximity was not the only reason why they saw and heard as much as they did. Their ubiquity caused them to be regarded as household fixtures. It was easy for the family to forget about them. Some masters and mistresses seemed to
look through
the servants. Their disregard could be seen as a form of display, one that would keep servants
in their place
, reminding them of the disparity in social rank that existed. Intentionally exposing the staff to personal intimacies could be seen as granting them a special privilege, wrote Rafaella Sarti, but it could also be seen as a “theatrical representation of power.”
¹⁵

It is astonishing to consider that nearly one in ten English people—and, we may suppose, a much higher ratio in the underclasses—made their living in places where benign forms of eavesdropping were
required
. Without eavesdropping, how would the servants know that more wine was needed, a horse should be saddled up, or a log added to the fire? But there were invisible property lines that domestic workers were not to cross. How were they to respond to subtle requests, or to anticipate familial whims, without witnessing
too much
? What if, while looking for one legitimate thing, they discovered
an illegitimate other? What if they stumbled upon things that were, literally,
too intimate for words
?

Clearly, these situations required maturity, judgment, and discretion. Servants regularly found themselves in possession of highly reliable information about their employers—regionally or nationally important people—that no one, not even other gentry, would have known; and some of those things, if made public, could radically restructure their master’s and mistress’s lives, even affect the larger social or moral climate of their community. How was the typical servant, a young woman or adolescent—or preadolescent—female to know how to evaluate, much less react to, the information she possessed? Should she discuss intimate, possibly sinful, behaviors with her fellow servants? How, in the work and sleeping rooms that she shared with older and more experienced servants, could she
avoid
doing so?

In an attempt to ward off problems—feeble as it was—servants were instructed. In
The Complete Servant
, published in 1825 by Samuel and Sarah Adams, who had over fifty years of domestic service, servants are advised to “Avoid tale-bearing, for that is a vice of a pernicious nature, and generally turns out to the disadvantage of those who practise it.”
¹⁶
In 1873 the Adams’ advice was repeated in
The Parish Magazine.
¹⁷
Knowing that servants went to the market each day, and compared notes with other servants, made the fear of tales real. Gossip, true or false, could travel around a small village in minutes. Worse, perhaps, household secrets would end up in other stately homes, in the hands of the employers’
closest friends
.

There was a massive paradox here. The owners of great estates had countless luxuries, and assistants to anticipate their every need. As major landowners and employers, they held a commanding position in the region, and contributed heavily to the local economy. They were positioned to be heard and respected. If they behaved themselves, and treated people fairly, they were likely to be admired.

Exhibit 25
Curiosity
, 1817

And they lived in constant fear. If their misdeeds came to light, or their dalliances were exposed, they could lose everything.

In
Aurora Floyd
, published in 1863, Mary Braddon asks why servants are so “feverishly inquisitive” about every action and feeling of their employers. She wonders if it is because they “abnegated for themselves all active share in life.”
¹⁸
Long before,
an article in a 1778 issue of
Town & Country Magazine
observed that “servants are domestic spies.” If a woman of fashion “yields to the impulses of her passions,” the article said, she “must live a very
disagreeable life with her waiting-maid … Her fate is determined, her reputation is in her domestic’s hands, and she [the maid] can disposeof itatpleasure.”
¹⁹

Exhibit 26
Madame is Receiving
, Remy Gogghe, 1908

Exhibit 27 The lady’s maid tries to read her mistress’s letter,” from
The Servant’s Magazine

In 1852 Geraldine Jewsbury wrote her friend, Jane Carlyle, with some advice about a curious servant. “I would not keep her if I were you,” she told Jane, “such a development of curiosity will surely be fatal to any mistress under the sun. It will not confine itself to inspecting letters, and all that, but it will show itself in listening to private conversations, and in prying into all your comings and goings.” Geraldine reminded her friend that “servants are so coarse in all their thoughts that they can understand nothing they see, but put the most abominable construction on all that passes.”
²⁰

One hundred and fifty years later, the author of a legal handbook offered a warning. “The testimony of discarded domestics should be received with great caution, and the most sifting,” he wrote,
“otherwise our position is fearful, our tables and beds would be surrounded with snares, and our comforts converted into instruments of terror and alarm.”
²¹

Of course not all situations between masters and servants were antagonistic. In long-term relationships there was often a good deal of empathy, trust, and mutual fondness. Some masters and mistresses formed alliances with their domestic staff. In
The Art of Keeping Wives Faithful
, first published in 1713, members of the upper classes were advised to
buy
the loyalty of their servants. If a husband wanted to find out what was going on in his household when he was away,
The Art
advised him to use the valets and servants to his advantage, for “it is through them that nearly all the intrigues of wives are conducted, or at least they always know about them.”
²²

This particularly applied to house maids, who could be unusually close to the young ladies of the household. In long-term situations the maids may have nursed them and played with them as children. Later they became confidantes.
²³
“When asked by her mistress to conspire to facilitate a sexual liaison,” wrote Lawrence Stone, the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century maid tended “to put her duty to her mistress first and that to her master second.”
²⁴

In cases of adultery, the servants were often faced with a morally ambiguous, personally dangerous, and financially risky choice. “What was the moral obligation of servants who detected their master’s wife in adultery,” asked Stone. “Should they warn her to stop, and themselves keep silent, thus saving the marriage and preserving the household? Or should they tell their master and bring the whole household down in ruins?”
²⁵

As we saw in the life of the courtesan Harriett Wilson, individuals who are fairly low on the social ladder may have a great deal of information that is potentially damaging to others and elevating to themselves. If women had little or no power, but copious quantities of intimate knowledge, the solution to their problem was staring them in the face: publicize, or threaten to publicize, the knowledge. Status could easily be changed with information, particularly the explosive kind that women had.