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Food and the Master-Servant Relationship in Eighteenth And FOOD AND THE MASTER-SERVANT RELATIONSHIP IN EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Victoria A. Weiss, B.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2017 APPROVED: Marilyn Morris, Major Professor Nancy Stockdale, Committee Member Laura Stern, Committee Member Harold M. Tanner, Chair of the Department of History David Holdeman, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Victor Prybutok, Vice Provost of the Toulouse Graduate School Weiss, Victoria A. Food and the Master-Servant Relationship in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Master of Arts (History), May 2017, 93 pp., bibliography, 78 titles. This thesis serves to highlight the significance of food and diet in the servant problem narrative of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and the role of food in master-servant relationships as a source of conflict. The study also shows how attitudes towards servant labor, wages, and perquisites resulted in food-related theft. Employers customarily provided regular meals, food, drink, or board wages and tea money to their domestic servants in addition to an annual salary, yet food and meals often resulted in contention as evidenced by contemporary criticism and increased calls for legislative wage regulation. Differing expectations of wage components, including food and other perquisites, resulted in ongoing conflict between masters and servants. Existing historical scholarship on the relationship between British domestic servants and their masters or mistresses in context of the servant problem often tends to place focus on themes of gender and sexuality. Considering the role of food as a fundamental necessity in the lives of servants provides a new approach to understanding the servant problem and reveals sources of mistrust and resentment in the master-servant relationship. Victor Prybutok, Vice Provost of the Toulouse Graduate School iii Copyright 2017 by Victoria A. Weiss ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Marilyn Morris, Dr. Nancy Stockdale, and Dr. Laura Stern for their guidance and support throughout my academic career. My most sincere thanks to my major professor Dr. Morris for her advice, encouragement, and patience during the research, writing, and editing stages of this work. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................... iii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2. SERVANT CONDUCT MANUALS, CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUES, AND PRESCRIPTIVE LITERATURE ................................................................................................................................... 11 CHAPTER 3. LEGISLATION, CRIME, AND PUNISHMENT ................................................................ 38 CHAPTER 4. SERVANT DIET, KITCHEN MANUALS, AND COOKBOOKS .......................................... 59 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 83 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................. 88 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The domestic servant class boomed in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with an estimation that around forty percent of households in eighteenth-century English society included servants, and domestic servants constituted the largest occupational category by mid-century.1 Domestic servant conduct manuals and prescriptive literature of early modern England addressed concerns about servant wages, behavior, and theft. Differing expectations of wage components, including food and other perquisites, resulted in the conflict between masters and servants embodied in what became to be known as the “servant problem.” The everyday diets of domestic servants, in comparison to their masters, were significantly more impacted by external forces, such as food shortages and changing costs of staple items, the employing household’s financial state, the extent to which their overall wages were regulated, as well as the servants’ own independent actions. In her advice manual, A Present for a Servant-Maid, Eliza Haywood appealed to her audience of domestic servants to practice “temperance in eating and drinking,” and advised that, “you do not live to eat, but eat to live.”2 Employers customarily provided regular meals, food, drink, or board wages and tea money to domestic servants in addition to an annual salary, yet food and meals often resulted in contention as evidenced by contemporary criticism and increased calls for legislative wage regulation. 1 Carolyn Steedman, "Servants and Their Relationship to the Unconscious," Journal of British Studies 42, no. 3 (2003): 324. 2 Eliza Haywood, A Present for a Servant-Maid, or, the Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1744), 10. 1 A preface in the 1840 periodical publication The Servants’ Magazine acknowledged outright to its readers, “there are so many ill-natured things said about servants.” Much of the conflict found in the master-servant relationship and despaired of by contemporary critics of the servant problem stemmed not only from a lack of shared goals and the tension inherent in the nature of the living situation—contributing factors frequently addressed by scholars—but from a great divide between the personal expectations of master and servant in regard to components of work and wages. Servant theft, found in detailed court proceedings of the Old Bailey, was a frequent occurrence, and a proliferation of contemporary literature addressed domestic servant transgressions of theft, disobedience, and dishonesty. A London conduct manual from the eighteenth century typical of this genre encouraged honesty “above all things” in servants, and entreated them to “let no temptation whatsoever” lead them into dishonesty.3 This criticism and advice indicates a disparity between how servants expected to be compensated for their services and with what they were actually provided. Servant conduct manuals and household guides published throughout the 1700s and 1800s aimed to clearly outline the expectations of both master and servant in the areas of work and wages. While the nature of the master-servant relationship inevitably led to tension and controversy, the failure of both parties to meet high expectations in the areas of compensation and behavior resulted in contractual misunderstandings, servant theft, and subsequent legal proceedings. An article in an 1866 issue of Bow Bells magazine pointed out the gap between employer standards and servant wages, stating, “for the compensation of twelve or fourteen 3 Ann Barker, The Compleat Servant Maid: Or Young Woman’s Best Companion (London: Printed for J. Cooke, 1770), 8. 2 pounds a year, a mistress generally expects servants to be perfection.”4 As accounts of employer criticism and servant experiences prove, this ideal of perfection was hardly attainable. The examination of inconsistencies in expectations versus reality regarding the areas of food, work, and wages is significant in understanding both the relationship between masters and servants and nature of the servant problem in contemporary literature, specifically the image of the dishonest and insubordinate servant. Legally, employers maintained the ability to decide how much food—or board wages to use for food purchase—servants received and how often they received it. This component of the master-servant relationship existed as means of exercising control over a basic need of a large class of individuals, which in turn enforced the power the upper class held over the working classes they employed. Considering the essential nature of food in the lives of domestic servants and examining its role in the servant problem provides an understanding of the connection of food to conflict in the master- servant relationship. Prescriptive literature on the servant problem written by the upper classes displayed a condescending, hierarchical attitude towards servants that enforced common stereotypes of the lazy, dishonest servant. An anonymous essay-writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine, a popular eighteenth-century London periodical, addressed the concerns of the upper classes about their domestic staff by stating that there was “no grievance more universally complained of than bad servants,” and attributed this condition to “depravation of manners,” noting that many of the known remedies for this problem were not easy to put into practice, as servants 4 “Mistresses and Servants,” Bow Bells: A Magazine of General Literature and Art for Family Reading 5, no. 120 (November 14, 1866), 379. 3 had no regard for their moral conduct.5 As a large percentage of the urban population employed domestic service, anywhere from having a single servant per smaller household to a reported one hundred on the payroll of the Earl of Leicester, there was no shortage of documentation on what historians termed the “servant problem.”6 Contemporary debate on the subject included various points of contention that stemmed from wages, disobedience, education, appearance, and conduct, and illustrated the complexities involved in the working relationships between servants and their employers. Bridget Hill, in English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century, classifies the servant problem as an eighteenth-century precursor
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