In the 1851 census, just over a quarter of a million men were of the professional ranks – doctors, barristers and solicitors, and so on. Twenty years later the number had trebled, to more than 800,000. Professionalization, a set of skills to be mastered, was not confined to the outside world: women were expected to acquire the necessary skills to be good managers, administrators, organizers in their own realm. Mrs Beeton put it most famously in the opening sentence of Household Management (1861): ‘As with the COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of the house.’42 Shirley Forster Murphy, in Our Homes twenty years later, used a similarly martial image:
If once we commence a war against dirt, we can never lay down our arms and say, ‘now the enemy is conquered.’ … Women – mistresses of households, domestic servants – are the soldiers who are deputed by society to engage in this war against dirt … As in a campaign each officer is told off to a particular duty, let each servant in a house, and each member of the family who can take a part understand clearly what is the duty for which she is responsible.43
(Note how part of respectability was in allocating each person a separate task, instead of one person performing a multiplicity of roles.)
The mistress of the house was advised to be businesslike:
it will be found a good plan to write down the daily work of each servant in a little book that can hang in her cupboard, and the hours for doing it, as well as the days on which extra cleaning is required. The hours of rising, meals, dressing, shutting up, going to bed, and all matters relating to comfort and order, should also be inscribed in the book, with existent rules, concerning ‘followers’, Sundays out, times for returning, the lists of silver, china, linen, pots and pans, or whatever goods are entrusted to her, the sweep’s days, the dustman’s days, &c., &c.44
Pre-printed account books were sold to simplify the requisite noting of all household expenditure. Their headings and columns for butcher, baker, rent, wages etc. mimicked office ledgers. This was in addition to each of the tradesman’s own books: the housewife wrote her order in the book she kept for each separate supplier when he came to take her daily or weekly order. The tradesman took the book away, filled in the prices, and brought it back with her delivery later in the day. The good housewife then transferred these prices to her own ledger, and every week or month reconciled all the figures. It was, said the journal Publisher’s Weekly, ‘an age of selections and collections, of abstracts and compilations, of anthologies and genealogies, indexes, catalogues, bibliographies, and local histories’.45
These ideas were very much a part of the Zeitgeist. Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, had been the first to propose a system for defining and classifying the animal kingdom by genera and species within an ordered hierarchy, and when his collection was brought to London to form the basis of the Linnean Society in the 1790s, it promoted and upheld the single, static classification system, which was popular by virtue of its clarity and simplicity.
The sheer amount of new information available – new inventions firing the Industrial Revolution, new flora and fauna brought back in the age of Imperial expansion – fed an urge to numerate, to classify. The Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, set up in 1837, was an approach to classifying the population at three major points in their lifespan. The census was instituted in the first attempt to number the population of the British Isles. Much of the classification followed the hierarchical patterns set down by Linnaeus. The British Museum (now the British Library) began to create its massive catalogue; the Great Exhibition of 1851 graded and classified all production into four categories (‘raw materials’, ‘machinery and mechanical inventions’, ‘manufacture’ and ‘sculpture and fine arts’); Peter Roget, a physiologist, separated and categorized the entire English language into five classes (‘abstract relations’, ‘space’, ‘matter’, ‘intellect’, ‘volition’ and ‘emotion, religion and morality’) in his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852).*
Yet the notion of the natural world following a relentless progressive law, of historical progress moving in a linear fashion towards a single future goal, was becoming popular in tandem with this urge to describe what was present in the here and now. The Oxford English Dictionary, conceived in 1857, was the first dictionary that was not a guide to current usage (or not only a guide to current usage), but instead a chronological ordering of the historical development of the language, a completely new approach. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had two themes, progress (evolution) and competition (natural selection). Evolution was generally accepted in a very short time for such a radical thesis; for evolution could be interpreted as progress. Natural selection was at odds with historical progress: it was arbitrary, unclassifiable, and it therefore had to wait until the twentieth century for its turn. Even something as seemingly straightforward and non-scientific as how to display paintings was radically altered by this linear notion: Charles Eastlake rehung the pictures in the National Gallery to take account of school and chronology for the first time.
Women’s preoccupations were not neglected in this urge to classify: Eliza Acton, in her cookery books at the beginning of the century, was the first person to write a recipe more or less as we would recognize it today, by separating out the ingredients from the method, which no one had thought of doing before. No longer was a cook told to take ‘some flour’ or ‘enough milk’, but now quantities and measures were introduced. Department stores were seen as the epitome of this classificatory ideal: Whiteley’s, in Westbourne Grove – one of the earliest department stores, and the biggest – was, said the Paddington Times, ‘the realisation of organisation and order’.46
The expectation was that such organization could (and should) be replicated at home: Houlston’s Industrial Library, which offered would-be servants advice on how to ready themselves for new and better jobs in service, suggested that ladies’ maids keep inventories of all their mistress’s clothes, checking them every few weeks against the clothes and updating them accordingly.47 New householders were advised to make an inventory of their entire household: furniture, furnishings, ornaments, pictures.* Then ‘once a year … the mistress should overlook every single possession she has, comparing them with a list made at the time she entered the house, which she should never let out of her own possession, and which she should alter from time to time, as things are broken or lost or bought’. This must include ‘every glass, tumbler, cup, saucer’. The maid and her employer should go through the list together, after which they should both sign and date it, so that no questions might later occur.49
Supervision extended to every aspect of the relationship between mistress and servant. The usual system, for a woman with one or more servants, was that in the morning the mistress would perform her household functions of overseeing the running of her house: checking that the rooms had been cleaned properly, if there were enough servants, or cleaning the house with her servant if she had only one. Then she would go to the kitchen, to look at the food left from the day (or days) before, and plan and order her meals accordingly. She also gave out stores from the locked storeroom. Some gave out stores once a week, but the paragon found in the advice books was to do it every day, based on the servant’s requirements for that day alone.
The English Housekeeper acknowledged that few houses had storerooms that could meet the requirements of the ideal promoted in advice books, and then went on to outline them anyway: