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Most family
meals were eaten here. The adults and older children sat around
the main table, and younger children at the small table in the
corner.
Victorian
middle-class meals were more elaborate and formal than ours. Three
or four courses for daily dinners were usual and adults wore
formal clothes. More food than could be eaten was served, with the
servants finishing off the remainder later.
Breakfast and
dinner were preceded with family prayers, with family and servants
gathered to hear the head of the household reading from the Bible
on its bible stand.
Breakfast
would have been early. Housemaids would be up at five to lay the
fire and to clean the brass work in the grate.
Up to the end
of the nineteenth century even lower middle-class households (an
office clerk) could afford to employ servants. Church Farm
probably had two or more maidservants in their early teens who
lived in.
The life of a
maid at Church Farm was probably better than that of a maid living
in
London
. The work was hard and living conditions primitive (she slept in
Church Farm's unheated attics). She rarely saw her family and
there was little to do in Hendon. But the food was better and her
surroundings healthier.
By the end of
the nineteenth century more working class women were going into
occupations in industry and trade rather than domestic service.
The jobs were still unpleasant, but were better paid, and allowed
women some independence. Factories controlled their workers'
activities while at work, but could not do the same in leisure
hours. For a living-in servant the control was almost complete, as
this extract from Mrs. Beeton shows:
“In all
families, whatever the habits of the master and mistress, servants
will find it advantageous to rise early; their daily work will
thus come easy to them. If they rise late, there is a struggle to
overtake it, which throws an air of haste and hurry over the whole
establishment.
The housemaid who studies her own ease will certainly be at
work by six o'clock in the summer, and, probably, half-past six or
seven in the winter months, having spent a reasonable time in her
own chamber in dressing. Earlier than this would, probably, be an
unnecessary waste of coals and candle in winter.”
from The
Book of Household Management by Mrs. Isabella Beeton.
London
1861
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