Inquiring readers, I despise housework. As I lugged my vacuum cleaner from room to room I thought: ‘It could be worse. I would only have a broom or mop had I lived in 1810.’
And so I should be grateful to clean my house in the 21st century. But what were the duties a typical maid of all work or housemaid during this era, and what cleaning supplies did they use?
The Housemaid c.1782-6 Thomas Gainsborough, Tate Gallery, Public Domain
Dusting & Sweeping:
A Georgian/Regency household experienced a daily fight with dust, one that was usually lost. A wealthy family could afford more than one housemaid, but ordinary housewives most likely only had a maid of all work to help her. The poor were left to their own devices. Most roads and lanes in cities and towns were made of dirt that turned into mud on rainy days. Animal droppings from horses and cattle driven through town by drovers dried into dust if not swept from the street. Brisk winds would sweep dirt and flakes and dried droppings through cracks and crevices around windows and under doors. On mild days, windows were cracked open to admit fresh air, allowing the detritus to drift in a constant invasion.
Front entrances (indoors and outdoors), floors, and rugs also required constant maintenance. The job to clean them was unceasing.
In 1776, Susannah Whatman wrote the following in The Housekeeping Book for her housemaids:
“In cleaning floors…use as little soap as possible (if any) in ‘scouring’ rooms. Fuller’s earth and fine sand preserves the colour of the boards, and does not leave a white appearance as soap does.[Note that this job was performed on hands and knees.] All the rooms to be dry scrubbed with white sand.”
Susannah also wanted her maids to use a painters brush on ledges, furniture, and window frames – then follow up with feather dusters. Under no circumstances were they to dust pictures “nor the frames of anything that had a gilt edge.” They were never to dust black busts.
[Other mistresses expected housemaids to dust daily with clean linen cloths. After cleaning spots on wood furniture, they rubbed the wood with linseed oil until shiny.]
Daily chores:
- Rise early to prepare the ground floor for the family. (more about this below)
- Sweep the hall and staircase, and the “banister occasionally rubbed with very little oil and every day with a dry cloth.”
- “To keep a small mop in the cupboard of the WC (water closet), and use water everyday to keep the inside clean.” The maid also had instructions to use only warm water during frosty weather.
- Sweep the steps in front of the house
- Force back all the window shutters so they will not get warped. Regarding shutters and drapes, they must be regulated according to the movement of the sun to prevent the sun from shining in full on carpets, painted furniture, pictures, and furniture with mahogany wood. For north facing windows, “the rooms must be aired, and the flies and flygokdubgs destroyed in time.”
- Work in the Storeroom after her housework is finished, except on Saturday
Weekly housekeeping duties:
- Tuesdays wash her own things and the dusters in the morning, and help wash stockings. In the evening iron her own things.
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A Woman Doing Laundry, Henry Robert Morland, 18th C., Denver Art Museum, public domain
- Wednesdays fold with the Laundrymaid
- Saturdays whisk the window curtains, and shake mats and carpets.
Her list goes on and on, which makes one wonder when and if the housemaid in Mrs Whatman’s house had any spare time
Daniel Pool in What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew states that housemaids were the women who kept the house running. I’d like to add that the housekeeper (or mistress of the house) made sure the people she supervised stuck to their daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly schedules in the performance of their duties.
Her First Place, George Dunlop Leslie, 19th c.?, Wikimedia, public domain work.
The reasons for the housemaids’ early rising was to make sure to lay & light the fires so that the family arose to a warm room. They then emptied grates of ash and cleaned them. For morning ablutions they hauled clean and heavy buckets of warm water up to the family’s rooms, sometimes as much as four times per day. After the family had bathed and washed and started their day, the maids took away dirty water and emptied chamber pots. They opened or closed curtains, then made beds in the morning and turned them down at night.
Two Maid-Servants at a Brook, 1779, Pehr Hilleström, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In the evening housemaids ironed or mended clothes, or tended to their own needs. Their day was never ending.
As the 19th century progressed, however, housework became less onerous. This was due to new inventions. Rumford fireplaces were more efficient and smaller than traditional fireplaces, and emitted more heat due to their design. Indoor plumbing was slowly introduced and by the end of the 19th century had become common even in middle class houses. Kitchen stoves with flat tops and doors that opened to an oven were invented and were sold by 1790. Their design encouraged the production of new flat-bottomed pots and pans. Insulated ice boxes kept an ice block from melting, keeping foods like milk and meats fresh. By 1809, methods of preserving food through sterilized glass containers or hermetically sealed cans reduced daily food preparation.
These inventions eased the intensive labor of maintaining and keeping a clean and smooth working household, allowing for fewer servants to perform the same chores or dividing the tasks in a different, more efficient way. Still, I thank my lucky stars for today’s automatic can openers, reusable storage containers, electric vacuum cleaners, freezers, water heaters, and sanitizers.
Regardless of our modern improvements, I still hate to do housework.
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More About Female Servants:
- Every Day Chores of Laundry and Scullery Maids and Washer Women, Jane Austen’s World
- Regency Servants: Maid of All Work, Jane Austen’s World
- Life below stairs – the duties of a Georgian housemaid, All Things Georgian
- Lady’s Maids and their Upward Career Path to Housekeeper, Jane Austen’s World
Additional Sources:
Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From fox hunting to whist — the facts of daily life in 19th-century England (1993). NY, Touchstone, published by Simon & Schuster.
Whatman, Susanna. The Housekeeping Book of Susanna Whatman. (Foreword by Christina Hardyment, afterword by Thomas Balston.) First published in 1776, published 1987. London, National Trust Classics.
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