The Lowly Maid of All Work
Even the poorest gentry did not expect to do their own dirty work in the Regency era. If your annual income was £100-200 (approx. $9,000 - 18,000 spending power in today’s money), you could afford “help” in the person of a maid of all work.This luckless dogsbody would work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for the price of her keep and wages of £8-12 ($720-1080) a year; perhaps a kind employer would grant her one or two days off each month. Even the impoverished Dashwood ladies in Jane Austen’s Sense [...]
Regency Servants’ Hierarchy
Regency Servants' Hierarchy: During the Regency era, anyone with pretensions to gentility hired domestic help. There was no electricity or modern plumbing, so running a middle-class home involved a workload we can barely imagine these days. As for the town houses and country piles of the haut ton, an army of servants was needed to operate those grand status symbols. Fortunately for the upper classes, servants were a dime a dozen and an early 19th century one-percenter typically earned 250-1000 times more than a footman. The gender gap in wages also provided the wealthy with [...]
Other Interesting Posts
Outsiders Within – Romani in the Regency
By the time 'Gypsies' appeared on the pages of Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, Romani people had been in England for centuries. Sidebar: Believing the copper-skinned migrants to hail from Egypt, the Europeans had coined the term "Gypsies" for these migrants. Some consider [...]
