The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 | Page 3

other hand, it is
difficult to persuade a young girl to accept domestic service; she
requires what she imagines to be something higher, or--to use her own
word--more 'genteel.' If she be a dressmaker, or a shop girl, or a

barmaid, she assumes the title of 'young lady,' and advertises--to the
disgust of all sensible people--as such. This monstrous notion, which
strikes at the root of all social comfort, and a great deal of social
respectability, is on the increase among us. It is not quite so rampant as
it is in America, but it is tending in the same direction. In fact, our
household prospects are not promising. Since we feel that home
cookery is far from rivalling that of the clubs, restaurants are being
established in the city equal to those of Paris, and the cartoon of Punch
is daily fulfilled with a terrible accuracy. 'What has your mistress for
dinner to-day?' says the master of the house, on the doorstep, his face
toward the city. 'Cold mutton, sir.' 'Cold mutton! Ah! very nice; very
nice. By the by, Mary, you may just mention to your mistress that I
may perhaps be detained rather later than usual to-day, and she is not to
wait dinner for me.' With these things before our eyes, we cannot but
feel grateful to any one who will bona fide undertake to teach a little
plain cookery. The want of this is the cause of more waste than any
other deficiency. The laboring man marries; but he marries a woman
who can add nothing to the comfort of his home; she supplies him with
more mouths to feed, and she spoils that which is to be put into them;
she becomes slatternly, feels her own incapacity, and, finding that she
can do but little of her duty, soon leaves off trying to do it at all. As her
family increases the discomforts of her home increase, and the end is
frequently--drunkenness, violence, and appeals to the police
magistrate.'
The writer of the present article pretends to no peculiar fitness for the
investigation of this important subject, and to no more varied and
profound experience than that which has fallen to the lot of tens of
thousands of others; but much observation leads to the conviction that
the experience of any single family extending through a series of years
of housekeeping, may be taken as a type of that of all families who
have to employ servants; and if what shall be advanced in these pages
shall have the effect of stimulating others more competent to thought
upon the subject, with a view to practical suggestions for the
amelioration of the universal difficulty, much will have been gained.
The chief evils we have to consider on the part of servants are, briefly,

ignorance, wastefulness, untidiness, pertness, or downright impudence,
and what is called 'independence,' a term which all housekeepers
thoroughly understand. I leave out of the category the vices of
intemperance and dishonesty, which, although lamentably prevalent
among the class to which we are accustomed to look for our main
supply of domestics, yet do not belong, as do the other faults I have
named, to the entire class, and I gladly set them down as moral
obliquities, as likely to be exceptional in the class under consideration
as in any other. With regard to the other specified failings, every
housekeeper will allow that it is so much the rule for a servant to be
afflicted with the whole catalogue, that the mistress who discovers her
hired girl to be possessed of a single good quality, the reverse of any I
have named, as for example, economy, neatness, or a conscientious
devotion to the interests of her employers, although she may utterly
lack any other, fears to dismiss her, for fear that the next may prove an
average 'help,' and have not a solitary good point. A girl who combines
all the above-named good qualities is a rare treasure indeed, and the
possessor of the prize is an object of envy, wide and hopeless.
In commenting upon the causes which produce bad servants, I shall
confine myself more especially to those which develop in them the
faults of wastefulness, impudence, and 'independence,' both because
every housekeeper will allow that they are the most common as well as
trying of all, and because it is only for them, I confess freely, I have
any hope of suggesting a remedy. Ignorance of their duties is chronic in
all Irish and German girls when they first go out to service, and their
acquirement of the requisite knowledge depends very much upon the
amount of such knowledge possessed by the housekeeper who has the
privilege of initiating them. Untidiness is almost equally universal
among the same classes, and, being a