Kate Williams Read online

  The men breakfasted at four in summer and five in winter. Sarah and Mary were up half an hour or so before to fetch water for cooking, supplementing the rainwater they gathered in a barrel. Men’s work began and ended at set hours and it gave them time for leisure. Women’s chores were never finished. At least twice a day, Sarah or Mary walked through the rain or cold to stand in the long queue at the pump. If it was functioning, they worked the stiff handle until there was a gallon or so in the bucket and then carried it back. They also had to find fuel for the fire. Sarah probably did not risk pocketing more than a few pieces of coal from the sacks she carried to Chester, for if her neighbors spotted a different type of smoke from the chimney, they could report her. Wood was not an option, for Glynne and other landowners owned the surrounding forests. Most poor families used gorse, sticks, or furze, but Sarah had no time to scour the hills. Luckily, however, she had privileged access to one of the most efficient domestic fuels: horse dung. Sarah, like most carters, would have collected the hods of manure in a bucket, mixed them with pieces of straw, kneaded them into lumps, and left them in the sun to dry (or inside if the weather was stormy) before storing them in a bucket by the fire. The Kidd cottage was filled with horse dung in various stages of assemblage, and the hods released an acrid, meaty smell as they burned. As it was necessary for heat, light, cooking, water heating, and rubbish disposal, the fire would be continually lit when the family was awake. Emma grew up in a house so dependent on dung that her clothes, hair, and even skin carried the stench of manure.

  In the eighteenth century, a house was considered hygienic if there were no lice or insects visible in its eating and sleeping areas. People washed their bodies infrequently and then usually only in the milder summer months. Even the genteel rarely bathed more than their faces and hands. There was no toilet, and newfangled inventions such as piped water were a novelty for the adventurous urban rich. At night, the family used an indoor chamber pot, usually kept in the kitchen area (which it was Mary’s task, as the family’s domestic worker, to empty). Otherwise, they may have used a rudimentary privy—a hole in a wooden bench over the ground shared between three or four houses—or relieved themselves behind hedges or in fields. They ate and drank off wooden trenchers and basins, and it was the woman’s job to wash the dirty dishes with grit in the local stream, along with the family’s clothes and linen. As the stream was the main place for bathing, and an occasional toilet for the village as well as the animals grazing upstream, typhoid and diphtheria were rampant, inevitably killing the weakest children.

  Everything Emma ate was cold or boiled. Meat, potatoes, and even puddings were dropped into a smoke-blackened iron pot suspended over the fire. Her staple diet consisted of bread, lard, and potatoes (which were cheaper than bread), eked out with the water in which meat had been cooked, and varied with a little oatcake or porridge. When the family felt rich she might enjoy a breakfast of oat bread and Cheshire cheese, bacon and potatoes for lunch, and a Sunday meal of beef and stewing vegetables followed by a dumpling or boiled roly-poly pudding. Ovens were the preserves of the wealthy, and the Kidds could not afford to pay the baker the few pennies he charged to cook pies or meat. In times of real hardship, every meal might be cold potatoes and dripping, and some country families sank to eating horse bran or even straw. Rural poverty was so terrible that young people ran away to the city, hoping to find more food by foraging in the busy alleyways or in the piles of waste from the great houses. The only way to supplement a diet was to grow vegetables or rear a pig. In the days before freezers, it was customary to retain about half the meat and share out the rest among the neighbors, who would do the same in return when they killed their animal. But the Kidds were too chaotic to rear a pig.

  Although Sarah was the earner, meat would be given first to the men and then the boys. As the most expendable member of the family, the youngest girl was last in line for food. As hostilities with Spain and America increased the price of wheat, Emma, like thousands of little girls across Britain, would have felt the pinch. One-third of girls died by the age of five, and the more siblings a young girl had, the more likely she was to die. Malnourished from childhood, only one in seven girls who survived till five reached twenty-five, and these rates were worse in poor villages. If Emma had playmates, they probably changed from summer to summer as the other girls weakened and died.

  Emma was not the dying kind. Her spirit was irrepressible. In a rare reference to her childhood, later in life she described herself as “wild and thoughtless” as a little girl. She was so incompetent as a servant that it seems unlikely that she grew up habituated to domestic work. The dilapidated, insecure life of the Kidds left Emma comparatively unburdened by hours of cleaning, carrying, washing, and cooking; free to dream of a different life.

  There is an apocryphal tale of the young Emma, at about the age of nine or ten, selling coal by the side of the Chester road. It would have been very dangerous if she had done so. Any woman standing beside the road— particularly a young one—would be considered a prostitute. Women sold their goods at market or in the village and never walked alone. Moreover, Sarah was not authorized to sell coal, only deliver it to middlemen. If the story is true, Emma had stolen the coal and was endangering herself. It is more likely that she simply liked to stand by the road in the village to watch the glamorous coaches calling at Broad Lane Hall. Hardly old enough to go out alone, she was already intent on escape.

  The only highlights in her year were the three annual fairs. After the morning sale of livestock, the fields were taken over by stalls selling trinkets, posies, wine, and gingerbread for a few pennies, as well as puppet plays, musicians, and performers of all kinds. Every feast ended in dancing and drinking, and many young couples crept behind hedges (the records show most women fell pregnant on a holiday). Other parties occurred on St. Deniol’s Day, the saint’s day of the local church, and there was usually a week of celebration beginning on the Sunday following Holy Cross Day in September. On Christmas Day, John Glynne would invite all the laborers and their families to a heavy Christmas meal of beef or turkey and plum pudding. The May Fair crowned a queen, who was carried around the village in a cart decorated with ribbons; the harvest festival feted a queen adorned with corn dollies.

  Festivals and fairs were scant consolation for Mary, miserable at being seemingly stuck in Hawarden for good. Her neighbors relished the opportunity to gloat, and the young widow was lonely. She was pretty, but no young man wanted a wife without a dowry who was the subject of salacious gossip and saddled with a child. Despite this, circumstances suggest Mary found a protector—and a powerful one.

  Stories abound that Mary was mistress to Sir John Glynne or even grand Lord Halifax at nearby Stansted Hall. This is romantic fiction: Halifax would never have pursued a long affair with such a lowborn woman. Although Mary might have caught John Glynne’s eye in between the death of his first wife in 1769 and his marriage to his daughters’ governess in 1772, it seems unlikely. The records show that Glynne attended Parliament less punctiliously after 1764, even though he had previously been conscientious about showing his face and volunteering for committees. He was surely, however, flirting with the governess, not Mary. Notions that Mary was a mistress to Glynne betray a misunderstanding of rural life: the squire and his sons spent summers hosting hunting parties and passed their winters in town. They ignored their tenants, and Mary could not have met Sir John unless she worked as an upper servant for him (and she was never a lady’s maid). As we may see from Sir John’s letters and diaries now in the Hawarden record office and the National Library of Wales, he paid scant attention to the dull minutiae of land rents, yields, and the wages of footmen.1 In Hawarden, the real controllers of patronage, favor, and money were the squire’s steward or land agent, who managed Glynne’s estate, his workers, and also the servants at the hall. If Mary was having an affair with a wealthy man, it was most likely with a senior servant at Broad Lane Hall or assistant steward of Glynne’s estate, who wou
ld be able to slip her extra food and money.

  Mary was surely lover to a man with money for a sustained period of time, perhaps throughout Emma’s childhood. It is unlikely that Emma survived on the potatoes and old cheese that made up the diet of her neighbors. Like all country people, Hawarden villagers were stunted and sunken-eyed through malnutrition. They suffered from rickets, and their hair, teeth, and skin betrayed their lack of protein. Emma grew tall, strong, and beautiful, with a thick mane of hair and strong white teeth. She had sparkling eyes, clear skin, voluptuous good health, and bounding energy. In the late 1760s and 1770s, England was racked with famines, a smallpox epidemic, and sweeping influenza, but Emma appears to have suffered no severe childhood illnesses. Thomas Pettigrew, one of Lord Nelson’s early biographers, who knew Emma’s London employer, Dr. Budd, noted that when she worked as a servant she had no “means to cultivate her intellectual faculties,” so she must have learned to read, write, and do simple addition as a child. Somehow, Mary found money that protected Emma from the worst of village hardship and helped her grow into a beauty.

  It seems likely that Mary’s lover was connected to Broad Lane Hall. Emma’s fortunes appear to be in some degree dependent on Glynne’s. Soon after Sir John’s death on June 1,1777, Emma’s childhood came to an abrupt end. Mary traveled to London, maybe to follow her lover, and Sarah, at nearly sixty, decided to rid herself of her hungry granddaughter. Emma began work for Dr. Honoratus Leigh Thomas, a Chester surgeon. He lived in Hawarden because his much younger wife, Marie, was sister to Glynne’s land agent, Boydell. Emma’s choice of employers is a clue that Mary’s protector may have been an assistant to Boydell who perhaps lost his position on his master’s death. However she came by the position, Emma was now on her own. She was, after all, twelve, the average age for girls to begin in service.

  Emma’s poverty-stricken youth left her desperate for love, dogged by terrible insecurity, and determined to steal the limelight. Resentful of her treatment and dissatisfied with Hawarden, she so dreaded the future of a laborer’s wife that she would do anything to escape. Emma was ambitious, and she craved sensation. She was not the type of girl to become a meek and deferential domestic servant.

  CHAPTER 4

  Scrubbing the Stairs

  Twelve years old and already beautiful, Emma began work for Dr. and Mrs. Thomas. With her mother in London and her grandmother’s interest in her at an end, Emma might have felt sufficiently worried to devote herself to work. Instead, she hated her newjob and tried her hardest to fail.

  As a maid of all work, Emma was at the very bottom of a household of seven or so servants. Forty-eight-year-old Dr. Thomas was an important man: he had had the honor of witnessing Glynne’s marriage to his children’s governess, Augusta, in 1772.1 Emma’s contact with such a distinguished family would have been minimal: her orders came from the cook and the housemaids. As an adult, she romanticized her early life by claiming that she was a nursemaid, and biographers have continued to perpetrate the myth, but there was no such division of labor in the lower ranks of an eighteenth-century household. Moreover, the parish registers show that there were no babies in the house: Josiah Thomas was born in 1773, and no more children appeared until Sophia in 1780, after Emma had left. Like many thousands of girls across Britain between the ages of about eleven and sixteen, Emma was an unpaid child laborer carrying out the most physically demanding work in the household. Since female servants under sixteen were unsalaried and paid only with bed and board, families employed as many young maids as possible to cut costs. By the age of twenty-one, most had fallen ill from the round of heavy manual labor, become pregnant, married, or turned to prostitution. A tax had been introduced on male servants in 1767, and so in all but the richest families, girls such as Emma took on the jobs that we would consider the preserve of men: hauling coal, moving furniture, carrying and splitting firewood, and caring for the family’s pigs.

  When the twelve-year-old Emma was not carrying fuel, she was scrubbing or fetching water. The newest servant was given the most-detested tasks, such as scouring pans, dealing with the slops, and cleaning the chamber pots. Having grown up with the Kidds, anything else was probably beyond her. As one mistress complained, young girls could wash up, carry buckets, and scour floors but were incapable of dusting or washing delicate clothes and tea things, and they were hopeless at ironing. Most mistresses gave their servants negligible training because they expected to lose them within a year, and Mrs. Thomas was probably no different. She probably resented having to employ a wild, untrained young girl as a favor to her brother.

  Emma’s bed would have been a few blankets and a pillow in a cupboard or shared room, but most probably on the landing or kitchen floor, where she was vulnerable to the attentions of other servants, visitors, or family members. Servants were expected to sleep wherever they could, even with the family pigs or in the coal hole. Junior servants tended to curl up by the hearth, partly for warmth and also because their job was to stoke the fires in the morning. Wherever she slept, Emma would have been up before dawn. As there was probably no running water (even if there was, it would be cold, restricted to the scullery, and available only for a few hours a day), her first job was to fetch water at the pump and heat it for washing and cooking. Within a few months, the hands of most young maids were scarred with burns, and the most common cause of death for eighteenth-century girls was burns or scalds. Emma would have broken for her main meal at around eleven, eaten supper at four or five, and spent her evenings scraping the pots or perhaps carrying out basic mending.

  Keeping a house clean was an enormous undertaking. Families such as the Thomases burned over a ton of coal every six weeks, and the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture needed regular scrubbing to remove the black dust. It could take a whole day to clean a room properly. The open range in the kitchen needed scouring daily, and one of Emma’s least pleasant tasks would have been scraping off its grease and grime. The chimney needed to be swept as far as she could reach twice a week. Laundry consumed three or four days every fortnight. City maids commonly emptied commodes down the sides of buildings, but a country maid had to carry the chamber pot down the steep back stairs and throw the contents into the garden.

  There was an impassable gulf between the upper and lower servants. Ladies’ maids and companions were middle-class girls who could embroider, write neatly, play music, and often speak French. A very hardworking and lucky maid of all work in a miserly family might possibly be trained as a cook, but the others could look forward only to a future of the most tedious domestic labor. Worst of all, like all girls in her position, Emma had to feign servility and respectful admiration for her employers. One author of a manual for servants declared that since a maid’s life was “one continued round of activity,” “no girl ought to undertake, or can be qualified for such a situation, who had not been thus bred up.” A servant should be from a “sober, well disposed family” and “of a tractable disposition.“2 Emma was nothing of the kind.

  Masters saw their young servants as easy prey. Since most, like Emma, spent much of their day cleaning isolated rooms alone, they were easy to trap and grope. At night, there was even more opportunity, for they slept in unlocked rooms or on the floor. The master usually beat the servants (women were not legally permitted to punish them) and often backed up his physical violence with harassment—thinking it a good way to keep the girls in check. One man, Arthur Munby, even forced his maid, Hannah Cullwick, to wash his feet, lick his boots, and wear a collar with a padlock to which only he had the key (he later married her). Despite the harsh treatment meted out to them, girls often fell in love with their masters. The bestselling novel of the age was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, in which a pretty, clever servant resisted her master’s advances and then charmed him into marrying her. Bored and overworked, servants longed to be the fine lady wife, or even the kept mistress living in luxury. However, it tended to be only elderly widowers who married their staff. The typical eighteenth-centur
y man simply seduced his servants and fired them when he was bored of them.

  Emma had been working for the Thomas family for only a few months before she found herself unemployed again. Mrs. Thomas probably dismissed her, no doubt weary of the inefficient, untidy, party-mad twelve-year-old she had taken on as a favor.3 Although Emma was aggrieved to lose her position, her head was stuffed with romantic dreams and she was, as she later said, “wild and thoughtless when a little girl.” Emma needed to move to a place where she could be a new person: free from the stigma of the scandal of her parents’ marriage, her father’s strange death, and the disgrace of being a Kidd. She joined the hundreds of girls from across the country heading to London each year to seek money and sensation. As the Carlton House Magazine noted, “What lass, in the rural village, that hears the name of London, but wishes to be there?“4

  CHAPTER 5

  Traveling to London

  Emma’s journey to London by coach would have been the most daunting experience of her young life. She left no record of her feelings about it, so we can only piece together her experiences from the reports of other coach travelers of the time. Wearing her best dress to save it from thieves, carrying a few belongings and some cheese and bread, she set off early in the morning for an inn on the outskirts of Chester. Unable to afford the stagecoach, she probably took the stage wagon, a goods vehicle that took poorer passengers. Parked at the back of the yard, behind the crowds of hawkers, passengers, and beggars, the stage wagon was a twelve-foot-long frame over four thick wooden wheels, covered only by a torn, dirty sheet. It would be pulled along the 180-mile journey south to London by six or eight horses in pairs. Old and worn out from years of dragging other carriages, they were less than half a year away from the slaughterhouse.