In June 1829 Henrietta Carritt of Cheapside wrote to a Mr Creamer asking him to put her case to the poor law committee in Chelmsford. Previous letters from her husband asking for help had outlined the cause and extent of her family's poverty. Her message was that with a little timely help from the committee she might avoid going into the workhouse of which she had a ‘great dread’. On her part, she was prepared to ‘strive all in my power to get Bread – at the wash tub or in any way that may occure’. Mrs Carritt's letter was designed to impress the committee with her determination, ‘I have got the promice of one Lady's washing’.Footnote 1 At the same time, it indicates that washing other people's linen was a task to which poor women might resort when circumstances were desperate and other means of making ends meet had failed.
Historians of domestic service, who have done so much to bring into focus the lives of living-in household servants, have drawn attention to the need to pursue the lives of the small army of part-time, casual workers who have for the most part remained ‘hidden from history’.Footnote 2 Washerwomen were a significant presence in this work force, employed sometimes on a regular basis but often when and where they were needed and at very short notice. From the late eighteenth century, the numbers of these insecure part-timers grew as living-in servants became too expensive to retain due initially to the rise in the cost of food during the wars with France.Footnote 3 Adam Smith, however, categorised domestic servants in general as ‘unproductive’; they could hardly rank in Smith's order of things with the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers whose exchange of goods kept the economy moving.Footnote 4 Washerwomen were clearly no exception. Contemporary observers of the economy travelled widely to discover regional differences in agriculture and manufacturing practice. Others, like William Howitt and Joseph Strutt set out to discover popular sports and pastimes in the belief that these might provide a guide to the nation's morality, an issue which exercised many contemporaries.Footnote 5 Travellers did at times take note of the standard of dress of a district in order to assess the well-being of its people but their interest did not extend to the regional practices or mundane strategies of so marginalised a group as washerwomen.Footnote 6 Scrubbing, pounding, beating and hanging out to dry provided limited scope for such analysis.
This study aims to give new attention to the experience of Georgian washdays and the experiences of non-resident washerwomen who were brought into a wide range of households to fulfil the most arduous washday tasks and those who set up washing services from their own premises. Peter Earle estimates that charring and laundry work together constituted the third most important occupation for women in London in the early eighteenth century.Footnote 7 Only residential domestic service and making and mending clothes ranked above them in numerical terms. Washerwomen themselves left few records having for the most part neither the time, ability nor reason to record the routine of their lives. Early studies of domestic service, notably, that of J. Jean Hecht, drew mainly on the accounts of employers and usually the most affluent.Footnote 8 These are valuable sources: large households and estates employing numerous servants kept detailed records of household management, covering many years. They include information concerning rates of pay, the hiring of servants, the cost of purchased goods and materials, and the work pattern of the year. Of particular interest for this study are the details which may be recorded of the methods of washing which were favoured and the equipment and materials purchased for the event.Footnote 9 The span of years covered by such household accounts allows some analysis of continuity and change over time.
More recently historians of domestic service have sought, in R.C. Richardson's words, ‘to enter into servants’ own life stories.Footnote 10 His approach involves the disclosure of new sources, evidence from legal records, a more searching analysis of literature and art as well as greater confidence in the use of statistics. In addition, the insight of feminist studies helps us to see the lives of domestic servants through eyes other than those of their employers. Carolyn Steedman's particular concern is with the ‘middling sort’ of servant-keeping households. She finds evidence of her neglected work force in court cases, parish records and taxation returns. Her work is remarkable for her concern with the ‘felt conditions of their labour’.Footnote 11
While the scope of these historians is much wider, their pioneering approach and methodology has informed this study in its attention to a new range of sources. We can learn much of the lives of washerwomen from their frequent appearances in court, notably the Old Bailey, as victims and witnesses of crimes as well as perpetrators. As handlers of one of the most coveted (and necessary) possessions of eighteenth-century life they were highly vulnerable to theft. Others were drawn into crime themselves, an activity made all the more possible by their contacts with wealthy households and the allure of the new consumer goods, intended for display. Many washerwomen survived day to day in precarious economic circumstances and in the less salubrious parts of town, which made temptations all the more compelling. For the same reasons, washerwomen feature in poor law authority records, applying, like Mrs Carritt, for what relief they could get to supplement the other possibilities of an ‘economy of makeshifts’ – the various and often desperate strategies by which the poor sought the means to survive.Footnote 12 Occasionally plebeian autobiographies, mostly written by men, provide insights into the experiences of sisters, mothers and wives earning what they could at the washtub. Finally, a number of washerwomen, notably Mary Collier, surprised their contemporaries with poetic works which included heartfelt accounts of the day by day routine of washday and its hardships.Footnote 13
Those in charge of household management took the business of the household wash seriously in the interests of household propriety. As John Styles has shown, clothes were important to eighteenth-century people, for warmth and comfort, of course, but also as markers of status, a feature of conspicuous consumption or, at least, ‘respectability’. It followed that clothing should be clean and well maintained, indicating moral as well as social worth.Footnote 14 Washerwomen were an occasional feature of many eighteenth-century households. In upper class establishments the laundry maid was part of the permanent staff, well-schooled in the different processes appropriate for a whole range of different fabrics. The scale of the operation in large households, however, meant that it was usually necessary to bring in extra help especially for the more demanding physical work of the early stages. When Jacques Giradot, a prosperous Huguenot from France, set up a residence next door to his own in Croome Hill for the two orphaned sons of his first wife, he took care to arrange for the services of a visiting washerwoman, Catherine Meard, alongside the small residential staff.Footnote 15 Even quite modest families called in extra help for washing. Samuel and Sarah Adams, with many years of experience in domestic service, believed that most households with one or two resident servants would engage a part-time washerwoman to help with the laundry.Footnote 16 Thomas Turner, a shopkeeper in East Hoathly Sussex, with a household of wife, maid and boy, called in washerwomen on a regular basis. Dame Vinal in 1757 was ‘a-washing half the day’. In 1764, Dame Akehurst washed for two days, perhaps because Turner's wife had died and there was no longer anyone to assist the visiting washerwoman.Footnote 17 Turner served his local community conscientiously as a poor law overseer and churchwarden; he took these roles seriously and an image of respectability was of great importance to him. The Lathams, a farming family with an annual expenditure of no more than £20–£40, usually took upon themselves the physical labour required to run the farm and household. They nevertheless employed women and girls to help with household work, including washing, before the children were old enough to help and when a new child was born. Clothing items, or cloth to make clothes, were their most important purchases after food. Items included fine woollen goods and silk tape as well as more routine linen and calico, which makes it unsurprising that they took washing seriously.Footnote 18 The Lathams were a literate family and owned a number of religious books, which, with their attention to clean clothing, perhaps distinguished them from poorer neighbours.
Servants and apprentices were expected to be clean and neat in their dress. Household manuals and tracts for servants were insistent on this. The anonymous author of Domestic Management (1800) urged housekeepers to hire as domestic staff only those who were clean and possessed a change of linen. A servant, the writer warned, might put on their best clothes when interviewed; it was necessary to ‘enquire into her wardrobe’.Footnote 19
For the most part, living-in servants could expect their clothes to be cleaned in the regular household wash, but when on board wages (an allowance given to staff left behind when the family was away) it might be their own responsibility. Thomas, footman to the Sutherland family, arranged for his linen to be washed and starched by a local washerwoman, Mrs Clarke, who sent a man round to collect and deliver his bundle.Footnote 20 William Byney, a black servant with Samuel Lyde, Esquire in Bedford Square in London, seems to have made his own arrangements. Giving evidence in the Old Bailey in 1783, he explained how he had witnessed a break-in and burglary in the early hours of the morning: having been ordered by his master to get up and go out of town on Sunday morning, ‘I bethought myself I had no clean linen, so I went to my washerwoman's to get some’.Footnote 21 This concern with clean clothing indicates the pressure on servants, especially those in the public eye, to maintain standards particularly in high-status households. Such matters featured in the fiction of the period. Humphrey Clinker, having been dismissed from his job as a stable hand on account of his shabby appearance, was to be ‘metamorphosed’ when the gift of a guinea from Matt Bramble, his new employer, allowed him to redeem his decent clothes and emerge with, amongst other items, ‘a clean linen shirt’.Footnote 22
An apprenticeship indenture obliged the master or mistress to be responsible for washing the apprentice's clothes along with food, clothing, training and accommodation. These were the standard requirements appearing on indentures by the eighteenth century for pauper as well as other apprentices.Footnote 23 Private contracts between master and the apprentice's parent(s) included the same commitment. In the 1730s John Walkden, a Yorkshire farmer's son was to have ‘Tailor's board and thread’ as well as washing.Footnote 24 When parson Woodforde took on John Secker, ‘aged about thirteen’, in 1785, the boy was to be allowed ‘something for being washed out and mended’.Footnote 25 Washerwomen, especially of the better sort, might take on both tasks. The commitment was difficult to monitor, but organizations with a reputation to maintain took it seriously. The Birmingham Blue Coat School, a Church of England charity which apprenticed its pupils with local households, was not afraid to admonish failing masters. In 1782, when the Reverend Downing complained that Elizabeth Fieldhouse, his Blue Coat apprentice, was ‘very dirty and lousy’ the school committee insisted that Downing and his wife were to blame. Elizabeth's sorry state was ‘not to be wondered at, so long as her dress is so mean and paltry, and she has been without a shift to her back for a month together, greatly to our disgrace’.Footnote 26 Cleanliness, if not next to godliness, was a public manifestation of worth. Private agreements on other household matters often clarified the position on washing responsibilities: when the Reverend George Woodward of East Hendred in Berkshire took Mrs Price of Lockinge as a lodger in 1759 he noted his various obligations to her, adding, ‘we are to find her in everything but washing’.Footnote 27 She was to be responsible for cleaning her own linen or making arrangements for the same.
Concern for well-washed clothing did not come only from above. Styles has shown that attention to appearance and clean clothing extended to those aspiring to respectability wherever and whenever income permitted. The task was made easier in towns with a communal washhouse where a poor woman could avoid the disruption of home washing by paying a small fee to use the facilities it provided. At the same time, she made contact with others and picked up local gossip. A busy woman in a tradesman's household might send a servant girl to the washhouse with a bundle of family washing. In North Shields at the end of the eighteenth century, Mary Lay operated a modest laundry service which she ran from the local washhouse and for which she paid 1d a day.Footnote 28 John Fielding, the London magistrate much concerned with raising moral standards, recognised the need for such a service when he put forward the idea in 1758 for a charitable institution to function as a laundry and, at the same time, provide reformed prostitutes with a means of earning an honest living:
As many Families have not the Convenience of washing their Linen at home, it is to be hoped they will send it to the Public Laundry, where it will be got up in the greatest Perfection at a Reasonable Price, and returned with Safety and Regularity.Footnote 29
His proposal failed through lack of funding from the ‘Persons of Rank’ to whom he appealed rather than the absence of the need for such a service.
Poor families without access to a communal washhouse could use one of the many urban washerwomen who offered services from their homes. Single men and those without a fixed residence frequently made use of such facilities. On 23 February 1780 Richard Moulds appeared at the Old Bailey accused of stealing items of clothing from the house of John Ray. Moulds claimed that he had left his ship and entered the property in which Ray lived in order to seek out Mrs Smith, a washerwoman. The jury were not inclined to believe his story (there was no washerwoman living on the premises), but no one questioned the idea that a travelling working-man should seek out a washerwoman for this purpose.Footnote 30 Clothes were also important to the poor as an investment. Purchased when times were good, they could be sold or pawned when families hit hard times. Clearly clean clothes did best in either case. Francis Place, apprenticed in the 1780s to a leather breeches maker, witnessed the change to cotton, corduroy and velveteen breeches. This was driven by cost and fashion but the ease with which the new materials could be cleaned was an added bonus.Footnote 31
1. The cost of washdays
Washday was an expensive event incurring the cost of fuel, soap, starch and extra labour. Soap, for example, had been taxed from the 1640s and materials used in its manufacture (oil and wax for example) were imported goods. It is difficult to estimate the relative cost of cleaning clothes in different households, but we can gain some idea of its importance in the household budget. In the 1740s a bachelor with an income of £238 was expected to spend £12 a year on laundry requirements (including soap, starch and blue as well as labour).Footnote 32 By the 1780s, John Trusler, advising on prudent household economies suggested that a family with a household expenditure of £235 a year should spend £6 10s on ‘washing abroad’. This was the same as the annual expenditure on tea and sugar, working out at 2s 6d a week.Footnote 33 Soap remained a significant item when costing washday. The account books of more affluent households provide us with more precise details of the cost of soap than Trusler's estimates of what ought to be, and of how this compared with the cost of other items. In February of 1761, six soaps were purchased for the Marquis of Carnarvon's residence at a cost of 3s 6d. This was the same as the cost of 12 ¼ lbs of cheese purchased a month before.Footnote 34 By 1777, the annual soapman's bill at Arbury Hall, the residence of the prosperous Newdigate family in Warwickshire, amounted to £12 3s, exceeding the annual wages paid to their laundry maid (£9).Footnote 35 Even when soap became cheaper and more readily available, pleas to use it sparingly were frequent and reinforced by household handbooks.Footnote 36
Like others with limited financial resources, lower income families such as the Lathams (above) may have concocted their own cleaning agent (or lye) from wood ash and animal fat, materials which were easily available to families in the countryside. Nevertheless, as a variety of types and qualities of manufactured soaps came on the market, we find in their 1765 accounts that 2s 5d was spent on soap. This was purchased in small amounts throughout the year and presumably reserved for delicate items.Footnote 37 By the late eighteenth century, Sir Frederick Eden investigating the outgoings of rural labourers' families found that some purchased soap fairly regularly.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, agricultural labourers, who might earn no more than 8s to 10s a week, must for the most part have found soap to be beyond their means and continued to rely on the efficacy of beating and pounding with more basic cleaning agents. These methods persisted in many communities until the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 39 Even the grandest houses might continue to use soap only for finer fabrics and continue to steep and soak the heavier linen items in traditional ways.
One cost saving device was to space out or postpone a washing event – a decision sometimes determined by wet weather. For all its rhetoric on cleanliness, the Birmingham Blue Coat School seems to have used this strategy. In June 1783 a complaint was made that children were wearing stockings for too long without their being washed, ‘it being thought prejudicial to their health’. The committee decided that hereafter stockings should be ‘shifted’ as often as possible and ‘once a month at farthest’.Footnote 40
2. Washing day experiences
Washing days, coming as they generally did after an interval of some weeks, were disruptive events. Samuel and Sarah Adams described them as a ‘laborious deviation from the regular routine of family business’.Footnote 41 Other members of the servant household might be called away from their customary duties to help. We can see this in the list of duties which Elizabeth Purefoy required of her new maid in 1744; as well as her regular tasks which included milking three or four cows, managing the dairy, cleaning the garret bedrooms and stairs and ‘all the irons and pewter in use’, she was to help with the household wash. ‘Wee wash once a month, she and the washerwoman wash all but the small linnen, and next day she and the washerwoman wash [at] the Buck’. The buck tub was used, as Mrs Purefoy's account indicates, for an infrequent and therefore a large wash. It usually involved soaking the more heavy-duty linen in some form of ‘lye’ – a mixture of water mixed with wood ash, urine or other vegetable substances with bleaching properties. The process took many hours and much effort as water was run through the tub many times. No wonder that at an earlier date Mrs Purefoy had expressed a preference for ‘a young healthy girl’ to ‘stand at the Buck Tubb’; time at the buck tub involved ‘demanding physical work’.Footnote 42
Susanna Whatman, married to a wealthy papermaker in Kent, supervised her washing event with something like military precision. Washing began on Tuesday; a light was to be left on overnight on Monday to ensure that the maids rose earlier than usual. Folding took place on Wednesday (‘table linen doubled in two, three or four according to its size’) and mangling on Thursday or Friday ‘as may be most convenient’. Instructions for the complete laundry procedure (as for all other domestic tasks) were detailed in Mrs Whatman's Housekeeping Book (1776–1800), perhaps to keep newly recruited staff up to speed (her staff moved on frequently). Much the same rituals and rules were to be found in the plethora of household handbooks, which insisted on the sorting of linen before the wash began and the inspection of equipment, especially the tubs. Washing was to be hung out only on dry, calm days, delicates were not to be put on bushes and nothing was to be left out at night lest it be stolen.Footnote 43 When the purchase of mangling cloths went ahead in 1799 without Mrs Whatman's consent, she was clear that ‘nothing of the kind may happen in future’.Footnote 44 The use of mangling cloths indicate that this was a heavy ‘box’ mangle used to press the linen (rather than to wring out moisture) and so to smooth the laundry. The cloths kept the freshly washed items clean. Ann Shackerley in Cheshire was equally particular about equipment. Washballs (those for washing clothes usually consisted of rock alum compounded with a variety of cleaning agents including egg whites, saltpetre and ox gall as well as soap), were to be purchased in London but only ‘of Mrs Wharton at the sign of the Blue Coat Boy’ and ‘Mrs Stevens milliners at ye sign of the Blue Ball near ye Middle Temple Gate in Fleet Street’.Footnote 45
Mary Collier, the poet washerwoman, on the receiving end of demanding mistresses, resented those who came,
to inform Herself, What work is done that very Morn: Lays her Commands upon us, that we mind Her Linen well, nor leave the Dirt behind.Footnote 46
In 1753 Reverend George Woodward, parson of East Hendred in Berkshire, found washdays ‘so very inconvenient’ that he used the cost and chaos to discourage a visit by his step-mother and her children, ‘as it would keep the family in a continued scene of hurry and confusion’. Reluctance to host the visit perhaps led him to exaggerate the disruption; his argument, nevertheless, carried force: his stepmother, who at first offered to pay for soap and the hire of washerwomen, soon called off the visit. The arrival of four extra children (Woodward had two of his own) with their servants/nursemaids presented a challenge and the prospect of ‘the continual fuss and stir there would be with wet clothes’, which not even the head of household could avoid.Footnote 47 Elizabeth Purefoy must have felt much the same. In 1741 she wrote to ask her god-daughter Sukey to dine with her, adding ‘if you can't come this week let mee know what day you can come the week after this that comes in, the next week being our washing week’.Footnote 48 Sukey would have understood exactly why it would be difficult to entertain during washing week.
Others, too, saw washday as a significant event. In 1786 William Stone was tried at the Old Bailey for stealing clothes belonging to Joseph Clapp. Stone had allegedly tricked Clapp's servant, passing through Fredericks Place by Old Jewry with the bundle of clothes, into leaving it to go on an errand. The witnesses in the case were separated and questioned without the presence of the others to see if their accounts of Stone's movements on that day were consistent. The jury asked if they could be sure of their recall of events on the day of the theft when Stone claimed to have been at the house of a Mrs Hill where they were working. Chrissey Smith, servant to Mrs Hill, gave her reassurance, ‘it was a remarkable day, it was our washing day’, for which, exceptionally, a washerwoman had been brought in and ‘my mistress never had a washerwoman but twice’. The washerwoman, Jane Hearne, was equally clear that the exceptional nature of the day had fixed the details in her mind, ‘this was a great wash, she never had so great a wash since or before’. Of course, the women might have agreed on their accounts beforehand, but it is significant that both thought that such a washday could be considered a memorable event by the jury.Footnote 49 The defence was conducted by the celebrated William Garrow and either he or the witnesses were convincing as Stone was found ‘Not Guilty’.
Washdays at the Weston Longville parsonage were also spaced out, and consequently something of an event. Parson Woodforde observed the occasion calmly and with some interest:
Washing Week with us this Week. We wash every five Weeks. Our present Washerwomen are Anne Downing and Anne Richmond. Washing and Ironing generally take us four Days. The Washerwomen breakfast and dine the Monday and Tuesday, and each have one Shilling on their going away on the Evening of Tuesday.Footnote 50
If we can suppose that the seven people of the household (Woodforde, his niece, two maids, two male servants and a boy), changed their clothing at least once within the five weeks, this must have been a formidable task. But if washday was a disruptive event, Woodforde's account suggests that it could be something of a convivial occasion. The women were regular visitors who were known to the household servants and joined them for breakfast and dinner. Woodforde, famous for his generous table, recorded that dinner that day was ‘a small leg of mutton rosted’, which he judged ‘remarkably fine flavoured’. On another washday in 1796, boiled pork and cottage pie was on the menu.Footnote 51 It was probably washed down with ‘small beer’, which Woodforde brewed himself. The washerwomen would have eaten with the servants in the kitchen, but there is no reason to suppose that the same ‘bill of fare’ was not shared by all present: the parson's household consumed between 7lbs and 10lbs of meat a day.Footnote 52 In his more egalitarian household, Thomas Turner happily sat down to dine with washerwoman Dame Akehurst to exchange local gossip and share ‘a loin of mutton boiled and turnips’.Footnote 53 Pay for washerwomen was invariably low but a meal was generally part of the reward. The washerwoman recalling the day of the theft of Joseph Clapp's clothing (above), had enjoyed (servant and washerwoman agreed), ‘roast veal hot and some greens’. Purchased, ‘from a local eating house’ it was washed down with a pot of porter, a more robust beer than the parsonage allowed.Footnote 54 In London, however, spirits were often favoured: Jane Field, a washerwoman working in John Wheble's house was given ‘shrub’, a fruit cordial flavoured with spirits (probably gin or rum), before allegedly stealing out with 14 guineas.Footnote 55 Mary Collier was less certain of such rewards:
Then comes our Mistress to us without fail, And in her Hand perhaps a Mug of ale (emphasis added).
Mary Collier's rewards would have included meals, but possibly taken if working at the ‘big House’ in a separate room set aside for the outdoor, casual workers in order to maintain the hierarchy which prevailed amongst the servants as well as in the house as a whole.Footnote 56
William Cobbett gives us something of the romance and rigour of washday in recalling catching sight [in New Brunswick] of the girl who was to become his wife. ‘It was dead of winter … the snow several feet on the ground, and the weather piercing cold’ and when ‘hardly light’, ‘she was out on the snow, scrubbing out a washing tub’ in preparation for the day's work. He admired her fortitude – but also, it must be said, her beauty.Footnote 57 This was preparation for a family washday and not an undertaking by a servant but many hired washerwomen had learnt their craft in just such a way.
This early start to washdays is well attested. In a case of theft heard at the Old Bailey in 1783, Mrs Foreshall, washerwoman to Martha Perry, a bricklayer's wife in Great Stanhope Street, had arrived to begin work at 4 am. She later acted as witness to the alleged theft of clothing and silver spoons by the Perry's maid.Footnote 58 Washing during the night does not seem to have been unusual. Margaret Oldfield gave evidence in an infanticide case following the birth of twins to her neighbour's maid. Mrs Oldfield was up at midnight to work with her washerwoman and hearing the maid in labour had gone to help.Footnote 59 Night-time work could involve greater dangers. In 1810, three washerwomen arrived at Queenstown House on Harrow Hill Common at night, either in preparation for early work the next day or to commence work on arrival. The owners were away and the women stumbled upon the drunken gardener who barred their entry and protested at their coming ‘so late at night’. He put out the fire and behaved so violently towards the resident cook, Jane Woodford, that they felt compelled to rouse a neighbour from his bed to intervene.Footnote 60
Such incidents reveal the hazards of washerwomen's lives – heading for work in the dark through impoverished areas of the city and facing hostility from the resident servants. Mary Collier's experience in the countryside says little of such dangers; she conveys, however, the same experience of early starts and unsocial hours:
When bright Orion glitters in the Skies In Winter Nights, then early must we rise; The Weather ne'er so bad, Wind, Rain or Snow, Our Work appointed, we must rise and go.
The washing task of the day was not regulated by set hours; it was to be completed before they could leave for home:
Tho’ we all Day with care our work attend, Such is our Fate we know not when twill end.
Collier, too, complained that her coterie of washerwomen could be called out at midnight.Footnote 61
Such first-hand accounts of washdays are rare, but the hardships of the washerwoman's life to which Cobbett provides some insight are occasionally glimpsed from family or acquaintances. William E. Adams, brought up in a female dominated household in Cheltenham in the 1830s, remembered his grandmother's heavily calloused knuckles acquired years earlier from the ‘scrubbing and rubbing she used to bestow on skirts and shirts of her patrons’.Footnote 62
A century earlier Mary Collier documented the same punishing treatment to the hands of her fellow workers:
‘tis often known, Not only sweat but Blood runs trickling down Our Wrists and fingers; still our Work demands The constant action of our labouring Hands.Footnote 63
Physical stamina, as Olwen Hufton noted, was a priority: ‘the laundry maid was celebrated for her muscle power’.Footnote 64
3. Washerwomen: status and fortunes
Washing was never an easy option but a hierarchy existed even outside prestigious households as well as evidence of entrepreneurial enterprise on the part of washerwomen. Elizabeth Smart and her friend Mrs Foster were non-resident laundresses working for members of the legal profession in London. Mrs Foster, serving barristers in the Middle Temple, was known as a ‘Laundress of some Note’. Both commanded respect on account of their select clients.Footnote 65 Women with premises of their own and drying yards could employ other women to work for them and build up a regular business and reputation. Those with secluded drying areas could reassure customers who did not want their underwear to be exposed. Pamela Horn notes an advertisement in The Times in 1817 by a ‘respectable Laundress’ hoping to extend her range of customers. She could offer:
good drying grounds and every convenience: it will be got up in the best manner, and on most reasonable terms: the most respectable references can be given.Footnote 66
Well-organised and conscientious directors of laundries were well acquainted with their customers' distinct laundry marks. This was valuable not only for efficient return of cleaned linen but in the event of theft: stolen property taken to a pawnshop or found in the possession of the accused could be identified and restored to its rightful owner. When John Cornwall's tablecloths were stolen from the washing line his washerwoman, Frances Kempton, was able to give precise details in court: ‘one of the table cloths is marked JC, No.34, the other JC No.12.’Footnote 67 In 1779, Susannah Class described herself as ‘servant to a washerwoman’ when appearing at the Old Bailey after becoming a victim of an attempted theft in Mark Lane. The single bundle of linen she was carrying contained clothing to the value of more than £6, which suggests that her employer, Elizabeth Cooper, had built up a fairly profitable business. Susannah was coming from Hackney which might have provided Elizabeth with custom from the ‘middling sort’.Footnote 68
There were advantages too for those who could turn their business into a family affair. Daughters as they grew up were an asset. William Adams grew up with his aunts assisting his grandmother in her small laundry business in Cheltenham.Footnote 69 Service at the washing tub itself was a highly gendered task but boys or husbands might help with collection and delivery. Ten-year-old Thomas Hawkins witnessed a crime while delivering linen for his mother, a washerwoman in Bolton Street. John Norris, while apprenticed to a sash-maker, found time to collect linen from his mother's clients.Footnote 70 Taking in washing was traditionally seen as a wise move for widows; it was a hard life but held out hope of making ends meet for a woman with young children. As her children became old enough to assist she might even prosper.
Mary Burton a ‘widow and laundress’ seems to have operated a successful laundry service from her home in the Queen's Head Court in Grays Inn. In 1777, she took in Elizabeth North from the London Foundling Hospital as her apprentice.Footnote 71 Mrs Burton would have had to satisfy the Hospital inspectors that her business was viable and her character unblemished. Elizabeth was apprenticed for ‘household business’ and would have provided her mistress with unwaged help in return for the customary food, clothing, accommodation and training. It may be significant that she was seventeen, a good three years older than most girls on leaving the Hospital: her duties were likely to include assisting in the work of the laundry which as we have seen was best suited to a sturdy, older girl. Other apprentices from the Hospital may have assisted a wife who took in washing but it would most often have been the husband's business which had passed the ‘economic viability’ test. Mary Burton seems to have been unusual as a washerwoman of some substance and independence. The only other laundress to take in a Foundling apprentice in her own right in the last 25 years of the century was Sarah Stokes who in 1790 received Jane Gates. Jane was reassigned in 1793 which may mean that Sarah Stokes was no longer able to maintain her.Footnote 72 Most women taking children as apprentices from the Foundling Hospital in the same period were simply identified as ‘widows’ or spinsters without any reference to a trade. Their location, usually in affluent parts of London, indicates that these were women of independent means. Together there were eighteen of them. The most numerous group otherwise were schoolmistresses (six), a stable and respectable social group. The Foundling Hospital must have considered that washerwomen were not, in general, a good choice when they were in search of placements for apprentices or perhaps washerwomen themselves were aware that they simply could not offer the maintenance or stability required. Mrs Burton and Sarah Stokes were exceptions.Footnote 73
It is difficult however to fit these examples of apparently stable and flourishing laundry businesses into any clear model of business development in the period. Like many of those amongst the trades and skilled artisans researched by Hannah Barker in the north-west of England, washerwomen operated from their homes, generally built up their clientele by word of mouth, served a very local population and were often dependent for practical help as well as financial support on family and kin. Unlike Barker's businesses, however, laundries were providing a service rather than a product (putting them in a different and lesser category in Adam Smith's book); there is little evidence that washerwomen in this period were in a position to invest their capital or live in the sort of premises that even the most modest of Barker's ‘middling sort’ were able to do.Footnote 74 William Adams' family may have been typical of a small washing business. His grandmother first took up washing when her earning opportunities were limited after having a leg amputated in her youth.Footnote 75 She could still stand at the tub. Her daughters helped with the business and were eventually able to relieve their mother of ‘the drudgery of the washtub’. For a while they ran a successful laundry until demand declined when, according to Adams, they applied business principles learnt in laundry work to a small trading concern.Footnote 76
The Foundling Hospital examples, as exceptions to the rule, strengthen the impression that washerwomen were, in general, poor, insecure and a significant element in what historians now call ‘the makeshift economy’ – the strategies of those seeking whatever means they could to survive. As Patricia Malcolmson points out, the skills required were easily learnt and a woman could set herself up as a washerwoman in her own home with a few basic items.Footnote 77 Women in the most difficult of circumstances might take up washing in the hope of some small addition to the family income. Those formerly employed as domestic servants could realistically claim to have acquired some expertise in laundry work and this could be combined with other part-time or occasional means of earning a living such as sewing, charring, prostitution and crime. Consequently, and however meagre the rewards, washing was an overcrowded occupation and competition for customers and casual employment in larger households kept down wages. William Tayler, a London footman, ever mindful of the precarious employment circumstances of servants, noted in 1837 that when a vacancy for a washerwoman arose in his place of work, the house was ‘thronged with old washerwomen after the work’.Footnote 78 The 1851 census would record 146,091 women as laundry workers (washerwoman, mangler and laundry keeper), the twelfth most populous occupational group taking into account both male and female occupations. The terms themselves provide something of a guide to status within the profession and their placement suggests numerical importance. Most were just the kind of part-time, casual workers who grew in numbers from the last decades of the eighteenth century in absolute terms and as a proportion of the servant population as living-in maidservants became more expensive.
Like the other sources of income sometimes available to poor women, laundry work was usually unreliable and dependent on fluctuating demand. The vagaries of weather, which could delay opportunities for earnings, and illness were unpredictable setbacks. Domestic work and childcare imposed huge constraints on younger mothers who were, in general, reluctant to take up work over and above their already demanding household duties.Footnote 79 It was a measure of the desperate nature of their circumstances (and further explanation of the numbers of washerwomen) that many young mothers with small children did go out to wash in the houses of others or struggled to set up laundry services in their own homes; few options remained when the bread-winner died, deserted or became unemployed. Mary Rabey, struggling to feed her children while her husband, an Irishman, was away on active military service in 1816, illustrates both the need to do so and the difficulties encountered: ‘I myself get their living by going out washing sometimes 3 days a week and sometimes 4’ she told Mr Mason, the poor law overseer at St John's, Westminster. She had, however, to pay 18d for care for her two small children James and Jesse. She hoped the parish would send some relief soon ‘For I Cannot Do any Longer’.Footnote 80
4. Wages and rewards
Just how much were washerwomen paid? It is not difficult to find records of amounts paid for large and small washing stints. Parson Woodforde, as we have seen, gave his two women 1s each for two days work plus a generous breakfast and dinner. In the 1760s, Thomas Turner paid the woman who came ‘awashing’ at his house 18d for two days work.Footnote 81 In 1760, the Marquis of Carnarvon's household paid its washerwoman at the same rate; a woman working for two days received 3s on 17 June and again on 25 June.Footnote 82 This seems to have been exactly the sort of casual employment which washerwomen might occasionally hope for: it was done in the absence of Mrs Haydon, the resident (or regular) person in charge of the household washing. In the absence of Mrs Haydon in March of that year, however, the resident cook and kitchen maid had taken on the task.Footnote 83 At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Babington family of Rothley Temple in Leicestershire paid their contracted washerwomen 1s 2d per day and in January 1809 two women brought in together got 2s 2d each day.Footnote 84 Payment seems, as Mary Collier's account indicates, to have been for the completion of a task rather than for set hours. These are random and limited examples of payments from diverse places but suggest a certain consistency over a number of years whether determined by local custom, the capacity of households to pay or individual whim.
Such figures have little meaning unless we know how often these women were able to earn these sums, how many clients they had, how reliable these payments were or to what extent they received payments in kind over and above cash payments. It would be five weeks before Parson Woodforde saw Anne Richmond and Anne Downing again in their capacity as washerwomen; they may have had other sources of income. Woodforde's rates of pay were lower than others we have seen but his meals were generous and from time to time he rewarded with gifts which might be considered unofficial payments in kind. In 1801 when purchasing clothes for his live-in servants he also bought coloured handkerchiefs for the same two washerwomen. On another occasion, he sent his maid, Betty, to Norwich ‘to buy my two old washerwomen Mary Heavers and Nan Gooch a new gown apiece’.Footnote 85 Perhaps the women would have preferred ready money but such gestures by the parson and the congenial atmosphere at the parsonage present a contrast from the over-supervised regime described by Mary Collier, or Susannah Whatman's rigid timetable. Woodforde's women were also addressed by their proper names. Payment in kind could take many forms. William Adams acquired his education because his grandmother took in the schoolmaster's washing in lieu of the 6d to 8d weekly school fee.Footnote 86 Other arrangements suggest more desperate conditions. Phoebe Hain agreed to do washing in return for no more than ‘victuals’ when she arrived in London in 1792 with very little money.Footnote 87
Sometimes, in prosperous households with finer materials to deal with, specialists who could command a higher fee were hired for starching, bleaching and ironing. Matthew Flinders' record of accounts for 1777, includes payment of £6 4s 2 ½ to Mary Pigot for bleaching, but again we do not know how frequently she obtained such work.Footnote 88 With a wider range of materials coming onto the market, much prized by the growing consumer society, even casual hired women were required to have a more specialist knowledge. Thus, Mary Collier's regular band of washers were tested with fabrics and fashions unknown to their forefathers,
Laces and Edgings, costly fine and rare, Which must be washed with utmost Skill and Care.Footnote 89
Women offering their services from home were unlikely to have access to literature advising appropriate care for delicate materials. Madame Johnson, for example, in her 1765 guide recommended bran for cleaning silks and the ‘crumb of a Threepenny loaf’ mixed with ‘¼ ounce of powder blue’ for satins and damask.Footnote 90 Wisdom on treatments, techniques, and aids to the removal of stains, however, could be exchanged during washing-time gossip or at communal water pumps.
Records of wages mean little without comparison to other workers' payments or the cost of living. But this poses problems as well. Wages for servants undertaking similar work but living in a household provide a poor guide. These were paid annually or half-annually and supplemented by food, accommodation and sometimes clothes, all of which non-resident washerwomen had to supply for themselves and sometimes for their children. Comparisons with casual workers outside the living-in context or beyond the domestic sphere are rarely straightforward. In rural Somerset Frances Hamilton brought in women on a casual basis for a multitude of tasks including weeding, brewing and cooking as well as washing. Were the different tasks valued at different rates? This seems unlikely: the standard daily rate for these services was 6d a day and, as Carolyn Steedman observes, it is not always clear ‘when a woman was being paid to weed or being paid to wash’.Footnote 91 This was less than the 8d a day which had become the daily rate for local female field workers. From time to time, however, Frances Hamilton's women were, until her illness in 1801, rewarded with hats, gowns, buckles and such, which were unlikely to have come the way of field workers toiling in sizeable gangs and without the closer personal relationship which existed between employer and worker on this small family estate. These were ‘extras’ in the form of presents, but at times the payment was in part a non-cash payment, for example potatoes to the specialist washerwoman Catherine Vickery in 1796, to whom Hamilton was also willing to loan money. The paltry size of the loans, usually 2s, rather reaffirms the low level of income on which washerwomen commonly functioned.Footnote 92 The wage of a male worker provides another guide. In 1801, John Carrington the Hertfordshire farmer and diarist paid a casual (male) bricklayer 18d a day for nine days work plus board.Footnote 93 This was rather more per day than women working at Rothley Temple at much the same time and washerwomen could rarely hope for an unbroken period of nine days work in one place nor to command the same rate as a man for casual work. Such random and isolated comparisons, taken from a rural context (where cottage gardens, poultry and hedgerows might have provided sustenance), can have only limited relevance, but they do emphasise the complexities of any attempt to assess the relative fortunes of casual workers when so many variables must be taken into account. Clearly, however, the skills of washerwomen were not highly valued.
A better guide to the fortunes of casual washerwomen might be the perceptions of contemporaries and the testimony of washerwomen themselves. It was not unusual for a washerwoman to introduce herself in court, like Hannah Quinn, as ‘but a poor widow woman that works for my living, washing and spinning’. Martha Briant in 1790 and Mary White in 1793, who stood witness to the misdeeds of others, said much the same.Footnote 94 The Old Bailey jury seem to have accepted washerwomen and poverty as axiomatic. When, in 1783, Sarah Gilchrist, washerwoman to William Muir, claimed that the pairs of silk stockings she was accused of stealing were her own, the jury was doubtful, asking if a woman ‘in her situation’ could wear such things. A pawnbroker, giving evidence against a washerwoman who tried to pawn two linen tablecloths, ‘thought the linen seemed too good to be her property’. When Elizabeth Ward, a professed washerwoman, claimed Ann Smith had stolen several items of clothing from her including silk stockings, a satin hat and paste earrings the questioner was more blunt: ‘Is this finery fit for a washerwoman?’ The suspicion in this case was that Elizabeth fared as well as she did by keeping a bawdy house; washerwomen were too poor for such ‘finery’.Footnote 95
5. Roles and reputations
Non-resident washerwomen feature in significant numbers among Peter King's female defendants accused at the Old Bailey of theft from their places of work, 1791–1793. Many were in desperate circumstances, as was Phoebe Hain (above).Footnote 96 Their presence reinforces the supposition that what society and the law defined as ‘crime’ was seen by many of the poorest as a legitimate means of earning a living or an extension of the make-shift economy – ‘solutions to dearth, crisis, under and unemployment’.Footnote 97 Most crimes involving washerwomen were petty thefts, often followed by an attempt to pass the goods off as their own in a pawnshop. Pawning suggests a need to ‘get by’ from one week to the next rather than any hope of substantial gain. In 1728, Elizabeth Winnock stole clothes to the value of 39s from the house of Edward Sayer where she was employed to wash. It was difficult to deny her guilt because ‘some of them were on her back’. In 1757, Ann Britain was indicted on the evidence of a pawnbroker for stealing clothing while assisting the wife of Anthony Wilkins in her washing business. This was a fairly substantial theft, but the jury valued the stolen goods at under 1s allowing them to impose a lighter penalty, perhaps because she was very young or that her circumstances were particularly wretched. Ann was whipped and Elizabeth transported.Footnote 98 Both sentences show the harsh reality of the world in which the women operated. Washerwomen must have been aware of the risks they took. William Smith, a pawn-broker giving evidence against Mary Douglas, a washerwoman accused of attempting to pawn stolen bedlinen, claimed that he had warned her, ‘if it was given for washing, and she pledged it she was liable to be transported’.Footnote 99 Poor women were well aware of the penalties; they would also know that until the 1780s only a small proportion of crimes ever came to court.Footnote 100
More striking are the instances of theft or abuse against washerwomen and their helpers which underline the dangerous nature of their work at a time when opportunities for profiting from the sale of clothing were relatively easy. A frequent hazard was theft from a washing line or drying ground. While a drying area was an asset it was also easy to plunder as well as being an indication of a more up-market washerwoman responsible for high quality clothing. In Hackney in 1737 clothing belonging to Ann Godfrey's customers was taken from her garden between five and six on a May evening. In 1781, Ann Fisher protested that her washing, still drying in her yard at nine-thirty in the morning, was gone half an hour later: both examples of ‘daylight robbery’.Footnote 101 Such incidents were likely to lead to loss of customers and income; as the Court said in a 1742 case, ‘to be sure a washerwoman is answerable for what she is entrusted with’.Footnote 102 Well-established laundresses like Elizabeth Cooper (above), might have in their care clothing worth a significant amount, but even the poorest washerwoman took in laundry which, if stolen, was worth taking to the pawnbroker or selling on the thriving second hand clothing market.Footnote 103 In London, the Rag Fair, next to the Tower of London (and close to Mrs Cooper), provided a thief with the opportunity to sell stolen goods without queries about their provenance.
More alarming than simple theft were the attacks such as that Susannah Class endured: ‘he knocked the bundle out of one hand, he then hit me a blow on the head, twisted the bundle out of the other hand, and ran down Hart-street’. Washerwoman Mary Ship was a victim of a more vicious highway robbery when her life was threatened by two men who stole a guinea and a bundle of poplin.Footnote 104 Young deliverers were particularly vulnerable when out and about at night. John Norris was attacked on a December night in White-cross-street after collecting a bundle of linen for his mother to wash. Thomas Bolton was only nine when his master sent him out after nine at night with a bundle of linen to deliver to a washerwoman. Going up Gray's Inn Lane, the boy was approached by four men one of whom took hold of his neck and ‘said they would cut my throat if I did not give them a bundle’. Its value was 11s, a disappointing haul, perhaps, if shared between four men. John Griffier, referred to as a ‘boy’ throughout the trial of his attacker, was ‘in fear of his life’ when a man ‘knocked me down with his fist and cut my mouth’.Footnote 105 The victims were not without recourse; Mary Ship took her case to court; John Norris, though still an apprentice, gave chase and took on his assailant with help from a bystander; Thomas Bolton picked out his assailant in an identity parade and gave evidence against him after satisfying the jury that, while not yet ten years old, he was fit to do so.Footnote 106
If washerwomen were invariably poor, their honesty was less certain. The Old Bailey provides testimony for both honesty and malpractice. On taking her assailants to court, Mary Ship emerged as something of a model for her fellow washerwomen. A key witness, who had known her for many years, described her as ‘a very honest and industrious woman’. Mrs Ship's husband was a groom in the service of Lord Orwell and she lived in Stanhope Street within walking distance of Bloomsbury and Regent's Park where there was scope for serving wealthy households. She seems to have built a reputation as a trustworthy business woman. Further evidence of her honesty and worth came with the evidence of a witness that she had resisted a bribe from the prisoner in return for agreeing to drop the case against him. Joseph Cruttenden in 1774 clearly had the same opinion of his own washerwoman; when a shirt was missing from one of his drawers he had no reason to suspect her as he habitually left the drawer open, trusting her to come and go from his house to collect and deliver.Footnote 107 Other reputations were less clear. In 1771, washerwoman Margaret Masey gave her former employee, Elizabeth Hill, accused of attempted theft from a pawnbroker, a fulsome character report:
I have known her between eight and nine months. I never knew any harm of her in my life. I have trusted her with money and always found her honest. I would take her into my service again.Footnote 108
Masey's evidence was, perhaps, no more than sisterly support for a fellow washerwoman. The pawnbroker may have been a more reliable witness; wise to earlier dealings with Hill, he had warned his journeyman to watch her closely. When two friends came forward to support Jane Sweating, accused of pawning clothing belonging to Ralph Lane, they vouched for her honesty but also her weakness for drink, which they believed had led to the problem.Footnote 109 Susannah Brush sought to excuse her theft of linen shirts from her place of work and win sympathy from the jury by her confession that she had been ‘very much in liquor when I did it’.Footnote 110 This was a far from unusual defence strategy which seems to have been linked to earlier concerns about the link between gin drinking and crime, especially amongst women.Footnote 111 In any case, drunkenness was hardly a unique claim in eighteenth-century London; washerwomen could plead, like others, that theirs was thirsty, demanding work for which strong and abundant drink was necessary.
Elsewhere the reputation of washerwomen also seems to have been poor. At a meeting of church-wardens and overseers of the poor in St Clement Danes in 1786 the matron (presumably of the workhouse) complained that not all linen sent to the laundry had been returned; much that had come back was unclean. No further payments were to be made to the washerwomen responsible until the full assignment of washing had been recovered. It was to be sent back if not satisfactory and deductions made for the cost of extra soap.Footnote 112 At Bridewell Royal Hospital the matron's duties included careful supervision of the washing procedures. She was to observe the women at work to ensure that linen was, ‘Boiled as it ought to be and Washed in proper Suds’. This was, perhaps, conscientious attention to standards and the well-being of the patients but equally could suggest an unhappy history of working with washerwomen.Footnote 113 A more personal protest came from Mary Ashford recalling her life at the end of the eighteenth century. She had few good words for Mrs Long who had combined her washing responsibilities with looking after Mary from the age of four months. Mary was habitually neglected, well dressed only when her parents were due to visit, and had to suffer the quarrels between Mrs Long and her drunken husband.Footnote 114
6. Concluding remark
Enterprising women living in secure accommodation, with access to drying areas, and with a regular and relatively prosperous clientele close by, represented one face of the Georgian washerwoman. Others, like Mary Collier and Parson Woodforde's washerwomen, went out to work in the houses of those who were invariably better off than themselves, sometimes working alone, sometimes assisting the mistress of the house, sometimes in groups. In urban areas washerwomen served a wide range of households and institutions as well as itinerant workers. It was hard work in punishing conditions but there was the promise of companionship and a small financial reward. Although vulnerable to crime and poverty, they were not without enterprise and agency. Women calling themselves washerwomen at the Old Bailey might combine or alternate their washing role with a miscellany of mending, nursing, prostitution, petty crime, child minding and more besides. Elizabeth Ward told the court that she got her living ‘By plain-work [sewing], and I take in a little washing’, but keeping a ‘bawdy’ house seemed to the jury to be her more profitable side-line.Footnote 115 Elizabeth Cooper and Mary Ship were amongst those who felt confident enough to take their case to court. Others were persuasive enough to win over the poor law overseer with their pleas for assistance.
How did the lives of washerwomen change in this period? Most washing businesses were small and their existence precarious. William Adams' description of the conditions in which his grandmother worked at the end of the eighteenth century and beyond were strikingly similar to those experienced by Mary Collier and her fellow workers in the 1730s. There was certainly no ‘golden age’ for washerwomen unless, as Amanda Vickery remarks, you (curiously) see heavy manual labour as ‘intrinsically empowering for women’.Footnote 116 Nor, it follows, was there any marked deterioration of conditions. It remained a profession which was relatively easy for women to enter and one which remained almost exclusively in their hands. The separate spheres principle prevailed as it always had done. In some respects, conditions improved, at least for some women, thanks to cheaper soap of a better quality and improved techniques.
It is difficult to see washerwomen as a distinct group or to be precise about their numbers. Washerwomen slipped in and out of the role from month to month, often attached more importance to another working role and received rewards for which no record was made. Peter Earle's research, however, indicates that washerwomen were to be found in significant numbers in London at least in the early eighteenth century. More than a century later the 1851 census placed them as the twelfth most numerous occupation (146,091 for laundresses of various kinds). Anecdotal and circumstantial evidence suggests they were a familiar sight in London and many other urban areas collecting soiled linen and returning it washed, ironed and sometimes bleached and starched to its owners. They made appearances in small and grand households. Washerwomen appear frequently in the Old Bailey in person and feature as a backdrop to the everyday scene. William Cummings found his way into a multi-dwelling house by saying that he wished to see one Mrs Thompson, a washerwoman. No such person was ever located but having got inside Cummings stole linen sheets, a shirt and handkerchief.Footnote 117 Others, caught red-handed with bundles of clothing, protested that they were on their way to their washerwoman or in search of one.Footnote 118 The Old Bailey jury must have grown tired of such ploys; time and again the same explanations occur. We cannot know how many women at some time and in some capacity took up the washerwoman's role, but we can be sure that they were a noticeable presence in the long eighteenth century. Many were like Ann Smith, servant to a washerwoman, who also did ‘plain work’ [sewing] either at home or by household visits. Asked at the Old Bailey if she could maintain herself in this way, she replied, ‘I get my living as I can’.Footnote 119
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to Dr Alysa Levene and Professor Joanne Begiato of Oxford Brookes for encouraging me to develop my research after my PhD. I am grateful to the editors and reviewers for their positive and constructive help and advice.
