It's a biographical telling of the year and a half that Dickens, born into a genteel family and bored with life, decided to get a job as a domestic in the role of the cook. She recounts in a light and entertaining way each of the houses where she worked (from bourgeois apartments in London to country family estates). She is admittedly not great at her job but does really try hard and improves. It's not laugh out loud funny, but it is, as they say, thoroughly delightful and I would add, quite readable. She has an excellent way of describing the worst kind of people in a way that is damning and yet excusing at the same time. A large part of her enjoyment in the experience, which she shares with us, is the eavesdropping of the people for which she works. Some of them are just awful, whereas others, particularly the last family, are quite loveable.
There isn't really anything deep here beyond perhaps a very nice anthropological exploration of the evolving relations between the classes in the context of domestic service in England at the beginning of the 20th century (it was written in 1939). Underneath, though, you really do see how hard this work is. You have to have a significant skill set (cooking is huge but also cleaning those old houses required all kinds of knowledge and techniques) but more importantly be really efficient and organized. It's one thing to make a meal for your own family (a decent enough amount of work), but with these jobs, everything has to be presented correctly and with the exact right stuff. It's kind of like running a private restaurant, not to mention that you have to be up before everyone else to get the stove running to make the hot water to prep breakfast.
I really enjoyed this book and will now have another name to look for in the gasp literary section of used book stores!
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3 comments:
I'd never got around to reading her, but I might read this one now. Two generations back, a few people in my family did that kind of work, and it's always interested me what their lives would have been like, when you had to live in the house of your employers and obey very exacting social mores.
I think you will enjoy it. What is interesting about this one in light of your comment about your family is that this book takes place in a period where those exacting social mores are eroding.
Indeed, and it would've been that period – my great-aunt on Dad's side was a cook in some big houses, and my mother's mother was a lady's-maid, all between about 1890 and World War I. That war really fragmented the master-servant relationship in England.
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