Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) worked all her life as a maidservant, scullion, and pot-girl. In 1854 she met Arthur Munby, 'man of two worlds,' upper-class author and poet, with a lifelong obsession for lower-class women. And so began their strange and secret romance of eighteen years and marriage of thirty-six, lived largely apart. Hannah's diaries, written on Munby's suggestion, offer an absorbing account of life 'below stairs' in Victorian England.
But they reveal, too, a woman of extraordinary independence of will, whose chosen life of drudgery gave her the freedom not to 'play the Lady,' as Munby demanded. Rescued from obscurity, these diaries are a remarkable historical and personal document.
What an interesting read! I'd highly recommend for those interested in Victorian history, especially as it relates to class and gender. Hannah Cullwick's diaries are very readable and shed fascinating light on the life of a servant in the Victorian period.
Cullwick's diaries are fascinating, in both voyeuristic and political ways. Her complicated, seemingly nonsexual marriage with Arthur Munby, her tough ingenuousness, and her seemingly never-ending litany of daily drudgeries draws the readers she never intended to have into a vibrant portrait of a very different side of Victorian life than most texts portray.
A set of fascinating documents - but selected diaries always makes me wonder what has been left out (and if what has been left out, would change our understanding of anything, and above all of the person writing them). Not to mention that we should not forget that these are not a private diaries as such, they were written to be read, as a part of the relationship between Hannah and her master, as a part of their 'play'. The editor of this book, Liz Stanley, doesn't give much thoughts to that fact, and she also seems to want to tone down some parts of the submissive messages of the text, painting Hannah as (just) a very strong woman, albeit in a rather weird relationship. And you could read the texts as that, but almost denying the sexual tension and themes (from both sides) is taking it too far, when we actually look at the texts.
This was, well, a revelation. I had heard mostly the smutty stuff about Hannah Cullwick, and read this kind of on a lark and kind of hoping to round out my sense of the Victorians as they lived. After reading this, it was a lot less smutty than I'd expected, but was instead a really rich and complex portrait of a life as lived-- I don't have a lot of experience reading diaries, but they require a certain kind of reading rhythm to get into, and a kind of imaginative sympathy to make sense out of what is told and what is left out, even in a diary. For whatever reason, I was more than ready to supply HC with the depths she otherwise withholds from reader(s) here.
The writing is pretty wonderful throughout, and Stanley has done a really nice job formatting the diaries to make them readable. One scene in particular, of Hannah cleaning the chimney, will likely stick with me for a long time, and many other sections will lurk in my memory, creating a sense of a kind of proud self-abasement, a level of control in a life that deinied HC many opportunitues to exercise control or to determine her sense of self-worth.
The apparatus of this book, in the form of Stanley's introductions, especially, is almost half the book here. I didn't find it intrusive, as such, and as I commented above, I felt her paragraphing, etc, made the diaries themselves very much more readable. I did feel, sometimes, that Stanley pushed her framing a little hard; I'm glad to have a frame, and I'm glad Stanley acknowledges what she's doing, but it still felt a little violent at times, like she was supplying too many of the individual puzzle pieces, instead of merely giving us a sense of the big picture. But having read her introductions, it's hard to imagine how I would've done without them. I just mean to say that there's a lot of Stanley in this edition, and for me, that was on balance a good thing.
At times, and especially in the post-married sections, it felt like Stanley was counting on my familiarity with texts I don't know, that she wanted to dispute with. That was a little odd, and in a perfect world, there'd be an edition that was more multi-vocal, with present critics who disputed her analysis of the final state of HC and AM's relationship (in place of Stanley's summary of same), and maybe something similar about her intros to different diaries. It might be a peculiar feature of this diary, or all diaries read out of the life that wrote them, but I wanted more different guides to understanding HC, without ever questioning what Stanley was telling me.
This book blew me away -- not just great intimate details of servant life in Victorian England, but a whole bizarre master/slave romantic relationship with a gentleman that lasted most of her adult life. It was so surprising and interesting!
I have become a most terrible crank in my old age. When a book makes me too angry I just won't make myself read it. And unfortunately this book really peeved me. Arthur Munby, Hannah's boyfriend/eventual husband, was a real piece of work. He met her, thoroughly encouraged a totally servile attitude and practice in her and did it a little too well because he made her into his life-long slave. Then later he wondered why she couldn't back off it a little bit and do his will enough to become his Lady Wife instead of a housemaid. Munby's creation displeased him by taking it to heart in a most stubborn and tenacious way and when he wanted that creation to change and she wouldn't he was most displeased. Ah, The Victorian Male, what a singularly selfish creature he was, what a real rotten old cove. Yes, there is a real tone of the S&M to this book. And the editor addresses all of it in the introduction. But for all the apologetics, the relationship between "The Drudge" and "Massa" was a little too much for me to take. I like to think of myself as this terribly sophisticated, post-modern thinker and it's not that I'm ignorant of the politics of all of this sort of thing - it's complicated and often those in subservient positions are actually the ones who hold all the cards - yes, I know a bit about Foucault and all that. Taking into account as well the delicious freedom Hannah found in most certainly not being a lady, the woman does seem to make a lot of sense in her desires to remain as "low" as possible. But the racism/classism/sexism deeply ingrained in this creepy Victorian relationship, combined with the endless directives from Munby that Hannah "come to him in her dirt" as well as her endless descriptions of rapturously crawling across floors on her knees to hand her "Missis" something or gleefully wash the feet of strange male houseguests just made me want to puke. I wanted to find the nearest time machine, get in it, find Munby and slap the living daylights out of him for creating this in Hannah. So yeah, leaving it unread. One has enough aggro in one's life just trying to get by. I don't need any more.