What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (17 page)

A sure sign that Lady Denham in
Sanditon
is (as the heroine thinks) ‘very, very mean’ is her pride in not paying her servants more (Ch. 7). Other Austen characters like to be above the economic system that binds their servants to them. Lady Bertram is amazed and relieved to find that, in her husband’s absence, Edmund is capable of ‘settling with the servants’ (I. iv). We are left to imagine how irksome such everyday negotiations would be for her. In contrast, her sister Mrs Norris loves to talk about talking to servants. Her excuse for sending Fanny on endless errands in the heat of the day is that she has been doing just this. ‘I was talking to Mr. Green at that very time about your mother’s dairymaid, by
her
desire, and had promised John Groom to write to Mrs. Jefferies about his son, and the poor fellow was waiting for me half an hour’ (I. vii) She is too busy bossing the servants to get a servant to do the errands. This is officiousness and the mere exercise of power, of course. When Sir Thomas returns unexpectedly from Antigua, she pesters him to eat something, for if he asked for food ‘she might have gone to the house-keeper with troublesome directions, and insulted the footmen with injunctions of despatch’ (II. i).

Austen’s monsters are invariably attentive to the lower orders, for thus they exercise their self-importance.

There are plenty of servants in
Mansfield
Park and, hardly noticed by the other characters but noticed by the attentive reader, Mrs Norris is invariably in among them. The very fact that she is keen to call servants by name is a sign of her interfering bent. When bustling over the arrival of tea she suggests that Lady Bertram ‘hurry Baddeley a little, he seems behind hand to-night’ (I. i). She refers to the inferior coachmen as Stephen and Charles (II. ii). She has a special interest in servants. On the visit to Sotherton we find that she has ‘fallen in with the housekeeper’ (I. ix) and on the return journey she talks of how ‘good old Mrs. Whitaker’ has well nigh forced a cream cheese upon her (I. x). She later calls her ‘a treasure’, apparently on the grounds that she never allows wine at the servants’ table and has sacked two housemaids ‘for wearing white gowns’. (White was the most fashionably elegant colour for a woman’s dress, and therefore presumptuous in a mere servant.
³
) A woman after her own heart. In her company she meets the benighted Sotherton gardener, and has soon ‘set him right as to his grandson’s illness, convinced him it was an ague, and presented him a charm for it’ (I. x). She has never, of course, seen the ailing grandson. That ‘convinced him’ is the perfect touch, letting you imagine the force of Mrs Norris’s assertion and the helpless need of the elderly retainer to concur. And what about the charm? Does Mrs Norris carry a supply of these? Naturally she gets a plant out of him, for he must see the kind of person that she is. Although this man never speaks and is never named, you glimpse how his life must be spent falling in with the inclinations of his betters.

Mrs Norris’s professed solicitousness for the servants should encourage a contrary reading. Back at Mansfield, where she is ‘cross because the house-keeper would have her own way with the supper’, she is, in reality, in a war for power with the senior servants (II. ix).Vaunting herself to her brother-in-law for her encouragement of the connection with the Rushworths, she narrates the sufferings of the ‘poor old coachman’, who has been afflicted with ‘the rheumatism which I had been doctoring him for, ever since Michaelmas’ (II. ii). And then, decisively, ‘I cured him at last.’ Leaving the dinner at the Parsonage, she chivvies Fanny, ‘Quick, quick. I cannot bear to keep good old Wilcox waiting. You should always remember the coachman and horses’ (II. vii). In fact she is only interested in bullying her niece. All the small examples of her talk about servants are there to let you imagine the quotidian meddling and bullying that these servants must endure. They are not her servants, of course. Mansfield Park has a large retinue of retainers who dine in their own Hall. They are not paid by Mrs Norris, they are just her potential victims. Christopher Jackson is favoured by Sir Thomas, so it is no suprise when Mrs Norris tells us that ‘the Jacksons are very encroaching, I have always said so’ (I. xv). She is boasting of having intercepted the hapless ten-year-old Dick Jackson on his way to the Servants’ Hall with a couple of pieces of wood for his father. She calls the Jackson parents ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, with a kind of officious familiarity that is her special tone. By her own account, she speaks sharply to their ten-year-old son, ‘a great lubberly fellow’, and sends him off, perhaps in tears (he ‘looked very silly’ in response to her harshness).

Austen’s monsters are invariably attentive to the lower orders, for thus they exercise their self-importance. The Collinses’ housemaids have to suffer the admonishments of Lady Catherine de Bourgh whenever she calls (II. vii). The local cottagers have to suffer her attentions when she arrives to ‘scold them into harmony and plenty’. Mrs Elton brandishes her servants in conversation, unnecessarily telling Emma how Wright (presumably her housekeeper) will always dish up enough to allow Jane Fairfax a portion. Later she offers to have Jane Fairfax’s letters fetched from the post office for her by ‘the man who fetches our letters every morning (one of our men, I forget his name)’ (II. xvi). Her amnesia is itself a boast. Talking of her servants is her way of showing off: ‘it is a kindness to employ our men’. Clearly any intelligent servant would do well to avoid unnecessary encounters with either of these two, but we are expected to notice that even employers who think of themselves as considerate can be oppressive. In the background of
Emma
is the little drama of Mr Woodhouse’s relations with his servants, all the more resonant because this rich and sedentary man imagines himself the kindest of masters. His is an ordinary kind of hypocrisy. He provides his carriage and his coachman James to carry Mrs and Miss Bates and Mrs Goddard back and forth frequently from their homes to Hartfield, though if the trips had been ‘only once a year’, the narrator tells us, he would have worried about his servant and his horses (I. iii). He is serving his own pleasures, naturally, as Miss Bates and Mrs Goddard are his powerless, recruited companions. At the Coles’ party, we find out from Emma that she would like to have the Woodhouse coach used sometimes by friends like the Bateses, but she cannot think of it because of Mr Woodhouse’s concerns for James. Mr Knightley concurs (II. viii). As soon as Mr Woodhouse’s own gentle selfishness is not being indulged, he starts worrying about his servant. He is always mentioning James – ‘James will take you very safely’ – as if being coachman in the lanes of Surrey were a dangerous posting (II. vii). He worries away about James, though when it snows it is Mr Knightley who goes out to talk to both coachmen to find out their opinions of the ease of a return journey (I. xv).

Austen slyly lets you glimpse the irksomeness of life as one of Mr Woodhouse’s servants in his very praise of their virtues. Discovering that Emma has sent the Bateses a hind-quarter of pork, Mr Woodhouse discourses on the dangers of eating this meat, unless ‘very thoroughly boiled, just as Serle boils our’s’ (II. iii). Serle, the invisible Hartfield cook, features in Mr Woodhouse’s conversation as a prodigy of culinary skill. ‘Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else’ (I. iii). This fragment of dialogue is a little miracle of absurdity, suggesting something of Serle’s skills at managing her employer’s expectations (Serle’s gender is never specified, but only peculiarly grand or fashionable households usually employed expensive male cooks). We know that life in the Hartfield kitchen must be determined by Mr Woodhouse’s endless fussiness, but perhaps that Serle has simply become skilled at pretending to pander to her master’s nervous demands. The subtext of all Mr Woodhouse’s kind remarks about his servants is that they have to put up with all his fussing. We have to infer this from his own comments, as when he delivers his ‘great opinion’ of James’s daughter Hannah, recently appointed as a maid to the Westons (I. i). ‘Whenever I see her, she always curtseys and asks me how I do, in a very pretty manner; and when you have had her here to do needlework, I observe she always turns the lock of the door the right way and never bangs it. I am sure she will be an excellent servant.’ His praise manages to be both weak-minded and imperious. In his implied dealings with servants we can imagine what Austen calls his ‘gentle selfishness’ – a choice oxymoron for his self-pleasing exhibition of consideration for others. His ordinary expectations are probably high. Austen allows us the little detail of his ordering Emma’s maid, the cook and the butler to wait up for her when she goes out to the Coles’.

There are plenty of servants to go round at Hartfield. Mr Woodhouse must have at least six or seven: a butler, a cook, a coachman, at least one gardener, a lady’s maid, a kitchen maid, another general maid, perhaps another manservant who doubles as an extra coachman – and all for himself and his daughter. The number of servants you employ is a sign of your status, as when we hear in
Emma
of the rise of the Coles, resented by our heroine. ‘With their wealth, their views increased; their want of a larger house, their inclination for more company. They added to their house, to their number of servants, to their expenses of every sort’ (II. vii). Further down the social scale, the Martins ‘have no indoors man’, Harriet Smith tells Emma, though ‘Mrs. Martin talks of taking a boy another year’ (I. iv). This is Harriet awkwardly trying to puff the Martins’ social standing and succeeding in doing the opposite. When Mr and Mrs John Dashwood stage a London dinner in
Sense and Sensibility
, the servants are part of the show. ‘The dinner was a grand one, the servants were numerous, and everything bespoke the Mistress’s inclination for shew, and the Master’s ability to support it’ (II. xii). In Bath, the Elliots rent a house in Camden Place, out of the fashionable swim. They can just manage a flourish of servants. When Mr Elliot visits on Anne’s first evening in Bath, he is admitted ‘with all the state which a butler and foot-boy could give’ (II. ii). But when Elizabeth contemplates inviting the Musgrove party for dinner, she cannot bear their witnessing ‘the difference of style, the reduction of servants, which a dinner must betray’ (II. x). So instead she asks them ‘for an evening’, avoiding the need for serving and waiting at table that would reveal the small numbers of their servants.

Austen’s readers would have known what a modest number of servants was. When the Dashwoods move to Devon, Elinor’s wisdom ‘limited’ them to three servants, who are duly whistled off from Sussex (I. v). These three are presumed to have some loyalty to the Dashwoods, being ‘speedily provided from amongst those who had formed their establishment at Norland’ (‘speedily’ implying ready volunteers). Talking to Elinor, Mrs Jennings later begins to imagine a modestly happy existence for Edward and Lucy, on perhaps five hundred a year, in ‘such another cottage as yours—or a little bigger—with two maids and two men’ (III. i). And she begins to allot her own maid Betty’s ‘out of place’ sister to them. When she hears that Edward has been disinherited she rapidly alters her calculations. ‘Two maids and two men indeed!—as I talked of t’other day.—No, no, they must get a stout girl of all works.—Betty’s sister would never do for them
no
w
’ (III. ii). At the end of the eighteenth century, it would have been normal for a member of the country gentry of modest means to employ four or five servants. The Rev. William Gilpin, on £700 per year, had four permanent servants.
⁴
As the Austens planned their move to Bath in January 1801, Jane told her sister, ‘My Mother looks forward with as much certainty as you can do, to our keeping two Maids—my father is the only one not in the secret’ (
Letters
, 29). This would have meant having four servants in total. But several households in Austen have many more. At Mansfield Park there seem to be hordes. Fanny is saved from the advances of Mr Crawford one evening by the appearance of Baddely (the butler) with tea, heading a ‘procession’ of ‘cake-bearers’ and those carrying the tea-board and the urn. The Bennets have a housekeeper (Hill), a butler (III. vii), a cook and two housemaids (III. viii). There are probably more: a manservant, a gardener, a kitchen maid. Northanger Abbey is full of servants (remember that the General is proud of his ‘offices’). Catherine Morland, having sneaked into Mrs Tilney’s room, hears footsteps. ‘To be found there, even by a servant, would be unpleasant . . .’ (II. ix). Later, upset by the letter in which her brother tells her how Isabella has jilted him, she cannot retreat to her own room because ‘the house-maids were busy in it’ (II. x). Surely the ubiquitous servants are the ‘voluntary spies’ Henry invokes (II. ix).

We can imagine how they talk about what they see and hear. Only occasionally are their voices recorded: the old coachman in
Mansfield Park
, praising Mary Crawford’s ‘good heart for riding’ and remembering Fanny’s fearfulness (I. vii); the butler Baddeley politely contradicting Mrs Norris, with ‘a half-smile’ that speaks his delight in having to do so (III. i). We should, however, guess at the talk of servants. In
Persuasion
, one clue as to the identity of the unknown ‘gentleman’ at the inn in Lyme is the fact that his servant has been chatting to the waiter about his master’s prospects: ‘he did not mention no particular family; but he said his master was a very rich gentleman, and would be a baronight some day’ (II. xii). The fortunes of servants depend on those of their masters and mistresses – and the waiter’s blissful mispronunciation turns the rank of which Sir Walter is so vain into the slurred calculation of one of the lower orders. Baronet – Knight – some such thing: only the promise of increased wages and better premises is likely to matter.