Every great house in New York ran on two staircases. The family used the front one. Everyone who made the family’s life possible used the back.
Society rarely wrote about the people on the back stairs, so we shall.
Who ran a Gilded Age household?
In the largest American houses, three department heads ran the staff. At the Vanderbilt mansion at Hyde Park, the housekeeper, the butler and the chef each supervised their own people. The housekeeper had four chambermaids, a parlor maid and three or four laundresses under her. The butler had two footmen and a houseman. The chef had two cooks and a kitchen maid.
Museums that interpret these houses now often rank the head housekeeper first among the staff. She hired and paid the women servants, kept the household linens under lock and key, managed supplies, and ordered food at the chef’s request.
Who did what?
- The butler ran the dining room, the wine, the front door and the menservants. In a well-run house nothing reached the family without passing him.
- The housekeeper ran the house itself and every woman who cleaned it.
- The chef or cook ran the kitchen. A French chef was a mark of serious money.
- The footmen, sometimes called underbutlers, served at table, carried, fetched and stood in the hall. They answered to the butler.
- The valet dressed the master of the house and kept his clothes.
- The lady’s maid dressed her mistress, did her hair, mended and packed her clothes, handled her correspondence and traveled with her. At Biltmore she wore her mistress’s cast-off dresses in place of a uniform and was called by her surname.
- The parlor maid kept the first-floor rooms and worked alongside the butler.
- The chambermaids did the bedrooms, and the laundresses did the washing.
- The kitchen or scullery maid washed the dishes, cleaned the icebox, polished the copper and set the servants’ own table. She was the bottom of the ladder.
What were servants paid?
Pay followed rank closely. At the Frick house in New York, the upper servants (the housekeeper, butler, secretary, engineer and chef) earned two to five times the monthly pay of the rest of the staff. At Hyde Park a housekeeper earned between $50 and $150 a month, and the houseman $45.
Lower down, the figures fell fast. One period account of a millionaire’s household put the laundresses, chambermaids, parlor maid, lady’s maids and kitchen girls at $15 to $20 a month each. Room and board came on top, which is why service drew so many young women who had nowhere else to live.
Who were the servants?
In New York, very often, they were Irish women. By 1900 more than half of all Irish-born women in the United States worked in domestic service, a share no other immigrant group came close to. Employers called them “Bridgets” whatever their names were. Many of them meant to leave service when they married, and many did.
Where did they live and eat?
American mansions often housed their staff better than English country houses did. Servants’ rooms tended to be furnished new, and the biggest houses had separate dining halls for upper and lower servants, a den for the butler and a sitting room for the housekeeper. The staff of a family with several houses moved with them. The Vanderbilts kept five houses and a yacht, and their servants traveled from one to the next.
When the family was away, a house went quiet. A cottage at Newport out of season ran on a small staff, the drawing rooms under dust sheets and the fires banked.
In The Wreckage Between Us
The prequel opens in exactly that kind of house: Thornfield at Newport in February, the servants kept below stairs, the trays left untouched outside a locked study door. Mr. Stanley, the Ainsleys’ butler, answers the bell. He sees the room and says nothing, then or ever.
The Sidney house on West 54th Street is the other kind. It has an old name, a thin purse and a cook and a maid doing the work of a much larger staff, and everyone in it knows the difference. The Devil’s Asking Price is where it begins. Here is the reading order.
A Caller