servants – Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

American Girls

Meet Samantha by Susan S. Adler, 1986.

This is the first book in the Samantha, An American Girl series.

Samantha Parkington is a nine-year-old orphan. She belongs to a wealthy family and lives with her grandmother, called Grandmary, in the Hudson Valley in New York. Grandmary is often strict with Samantha, trying to teach her to be a proper young lady, but Samantha finds it difficult. Samantha’s grandmother loves her, but she has very old-fashioned ideas about how girls should behave. When Samantha wants to try making and selling boomerangs in order to earn money to buy a doll, using instructions from The Boys’ Handy Book, her grandmother stops her, saying that young ladies do not earn money. She would rather that Samantha earn the doll as a reward for doing what she is told and practicing her piano lessons. Samantha also has an uncle, Uncle Gard, who has a girlfriend named Cornelia. Cornelia is a more modern woman, who would see nothing wrong with Samantha wanting to earn some money.

One of her grandmother’s servants, a black woman named Jessie, is kind and motherly to Samantha. Jessie often patches Samantha up after her various escapades and mishaps. Jessie’s husband, Lincoln, is a train porter, and Jessie tells Samantha exciting stories about the places that Lincoln has seen in his work, like New Orleans. Sometimes, Lincoln brings Samantha post cards from these places.

Samantha soon learns that a new girl her age is coming to a neighbor’s house. She has been wanting a playmate, so she goes over to the neighbor’s house to introduce herself. The new girl’s name is Nellie, but she has come to be a servant for the neighbors, the Rylands. Nellie’s family is poor, so Nellie needs to work as a maid help her parents earn money and support her younger sisters. Samantha is surprised when Nellie describes her family’s circumstances in New York City. Samantha has never been poor, and she doesn’t know what it’s like to be cold and hungry. Nellie says that the air in the countryside is better for her, and she gets better food working for the Rylands. Nellie tells Samantha that she has never been to school, and Samantha offers to teach her.

Then, Jessie suddenly announces that she is leaving her job at Grandmary’s house. Grandmary doesn’t seem surprised, but Samantha is. Jessie offers no explanation for leaving, and when Samantha tries to ask, Grandmary and the other servants do not want to talk about it. Samantha tells Nellie about Jessie leaving, coming up with fanciful reasons why she might leave her job, but Nellie offers the practical explanation that Jessie might be having a baby. Nellie knows more about it than Samantha because she has younger sisters, but she acknowledges that adults of this time period do not like to talk about people having babies, particularly in front of children. Neither Nellie nor Samantha entirely knows why.

However, Samantha is still concerned about Jessie. Samantha doesn’t know where Jessie lives, but Nellie does. The two girls sneak out one evening to visit Jessie and learn for themselves what the matter is. This is the first time that Samantha has been to the part of her town where black people live, further opening her eyes to the lives of people from lower classes of society. Nellie is a little surprised at how Samantha, who is more educated, sometimes knows so little about the ways that other people live.

It turns out that Jessie does have a new baby. Jessie reassures Samantha that she and the baby are fine, but since her husband needs to travel because of his job as a train porter, she needs to stay at home with her baby now. Samantha thinks of a way to help Jessie keep her job and care for her baby at the same time, persuading her grandmother to let Jessie come back. Unfortunately, Nellie soon has to leave because Mrs. Ryland doesn’t think that she’s strong enough to work as a maid and decides to send her back to her family in New York City. Samantha gives Nellie her new doll as a going-away present, and she is very concerned about how Nellie and her family will manage.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how wealthy people and their servants lived during the early 1900s.

Something that occurred to me later is that Jessie is about the right age to be Addy‘s daughter, from another American Girls series. I don’t think that there’s a real connection between Jessie and Addy because the Samantha books were written before the Addy series. However, when I stopped to think about their relative ages (Addy would be about 49 years old in 1904, and Jessie is probably in her 20s), it occurred to me that if Addy had a daughter, she would probably be an adult at this time, and she might be doing something very similar to what Jessie is doing, working as a seamstress.

The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Daily Life in a Victorian House by Laura Wilson, 1993.

The book begins by giving some background on the Victorian era, which lasted from 1838, when Victoria became Queen of England, to Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. It was a time of expansion and colonization for the British Empire. Society was becoming increasingly industrialized and urban, although there was still great inequality about who had voting rights, and there were great gaps between rich and poor people.

To explain what a typical day might be like for people living in the Victorian era, the book introduces a fictional upper middle class family, the Smiths. It explains some of the background of the Smith family and the members of the Smith household. Mr. George Smith, the head of the household, is a lawyer. His wife, Florence, does not need to work, so she spends her time overseeing the household servants, managing the household accounts (how much money is needed for household expenses such as food, clothes, and supplies), visiting friends, and shopping. Mr. Smith’s income is good enough to afford for the family to have a cook, two maids, and a nurse to look after the youngest children in the family.

The Smiths have three living children. One of their daughters died in infancy, which was sadly common for that era. The eldest boy in the family, Albert, spends most of his time away at boarding school. The two youngest children, Alice and John, are cared for by their nurse. When John is old enough, he will go away to boarding school, like Albert, but Alice will probably be tutored at home. Their parents spend surprisingly little time with them, even in the general course of a day.

There is a map of the Smiths’ house, and then the book begins explaining what each of the members of the house do at different times of the day. Each day, the servants are the first to get up because they need to light the fires to heat the house and start cleaning and making breakfast, which would be a large meal.

Something that I thought was interesting was that the cook typically purchased food from tradesmen who sold their goods door-to-door. This was also important to the maids, who are in their teens, because they worked such long hours that they really wouldn’t have had time to get away and met young men in any other way. Their suitors would likely be the young tradesmen. Of course, the young tradesmen would have met many young female servants at all of the households they visited during their daily rounds.

The maids would have spent their days cleaning, tasks that would have been more time-consuming without more modern inventions. Vacuum cleaners were invented toward the end of the era, in 1899. Cooking was also a time-consuming job, although the book does explain some innovations for the Victorian kitchen. Because Mrs. Smith had servants to do all of her cooking and cleaning for her, she never even went into her own kitchen at all. It was considered improper for a lady with servants to handle menial tasks herself, and the servants wouldn’t have welcomed her interference in their work.

I liked the sections of the book that explained about the lives of children in the Victorian era the best, although I was surprised at how little time children from well-off families would have spent with their parents. Generally, young children would see their parents in the morning for prayers and spend about an hour with their mother in the late afternoon. Other than that, they would spend most of their time in the nursery with their nurse, who would take care of them and didn’t welcome much parental interference any more than the cook would welcome the lady of the house supervising her work.

I also liked the sections about toys and games and entertainment as well as the description of what young Albert’s life would have been like at boarding school. The book also explains what life and childhood were like for less fortunate people during the Victorian era.

Overall, I really liked this book. It’s a good introduction to Victorian history and life, and it does one of the things that I really wish adult books would do more often: have pictures. Pictures really are worth a thousand words, and actually showing the objects that people of this time would have used in their daily lives is far more effective than pages of lengthy descriptions of them in words only.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

American Girls

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