Household Spies: Servants and Crime

Abstract

These two quotations suggest a perception, common to novelists and architects, of crisis in the relations between householders and domestic staff. The crisis is seen to arise in the householder’s desire to protect his privacy against the alien and hostile group under his roof, and a dramatic architecture of segregation and espionage is established. This sense of crisis with its emphasis on the householder living amid potential spies informs much of the fictional treatment of servants in the Victorian period. Clearly if policemen, as working-class men vested with a certain authority, were viewed as dangerous intruders in the middle-class home, servants were potentially much more dangerous. Although they lacked authority, their opportunities to acquire information were far greater than those of the police. In much Victorian fiction the habitual presence of an alien individual or group within the home is seen as productive of great danger for the household.

Your servants listen at your doors, and repeat your spiteful speeches in the kitchen, and watch you while they wait at table, and understand every sarcasm, every innuendo, every look, as well as those at whom the cruel glances and the stinging words are aimed. They understand your sulky silence, your studies and over-acted politeness. The most polished form your hate and anger can take is as transparent to those household spies as if you threw knives at each other, or pelted your enemy with the side-dishes and vegetables, after the fashion of disputants in a pantomime. Nothing that is done in the parlour is lost upon those quiet, well-behaved watchers from the kitchen.

(Mary Braddon, Aurora Floyd, vol. I, ch. 16)

By the mid-nineteenth century, this demand for privacy had reached its apex, and architects like Robert Kerr were contriving ways physically to separate the two distinct communities — the family and the servants — who co-existed under one roof. The solution was to plan the most rigid segregation of the two groups, each with separate lines of communication by stairways and corridors; by heavy sound-proofing; and by the installation of an elaborate system of bell-pulls, so that the servants need only intrude when summoned to do so. Internal planning focused almost obsessively upon this problem of segregating the two groups from one another.

(L. and J. F. Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880)