Dinah Mulock Craik, perhaps best known for her highly successful novel John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), chose to serialize her next work of fiction, Mistress and Maid, in Good Words from January to December of 1862. She did so in order that servants might have access to the publication after their employers had finished the reading the periodical. Craik's decision reveals a dual audience with a clear hierarchy between the two groups of readers. The plot of Craik's didactic domestic novel follows two young women: Harriet Leaf, the orphaned daughter of an imprudent lawyer, and Elizabeth Hand, an uneducated and sullen servant-girl. Under Harriet's kindness and careful training, Elizabeth's intellect and self-control develop rapidly. Multiple layers of didacticism are at work in the text, and the narrative provides a course of moral instruction for both employers and the employed. In her emphasis on the benefits of a paternalistic mistress/servant relationship, Craik echoes other writers who saw familial relationships between employers and their servants as a solution to the woes of the "servant problem." As Elizabeth Langland has explored, Victorian women writing about the troubles of staffing their homes with suitable servants were able to engage with political issues and underscore their own authority to speak on these matters while maintaining the social appearance of separate spheres. In validating their own authority, these middle-class writers often reinscribed traditional hierarchies of social class. Craik's novel engages in the cultural work of domestic fiction, and shares didactic strategies with non-fiction advice texts of the time, which often asked both mistress and maid to consider, at least momentarily, their disputes from the perspective of the other party. While Craik's narrative treats servants and their complaints more sympathetically than other works, Craik encourages mistresses to adopt an attitude of paternalistic benevolence while still preserving markers of social distance and decorum. My paper will explore how Craik encourages cross-class sympathy while also defining the limits of even emotionally intimate employer/servant relationships. I'll also briefly discuss how patterns for nineteenth-century romantic relationships underscored the structures of household authority.

Sally Mitchell, whose recovery work reintroduced Craik to literature scholars, emphasizes the "fellow feeling of all working women" in Mistress and Maid (60). Recent scholarship by Anna Stenson Newnum has confirmed Mitchell's assessment, arguing that while Craik rejected political solidarity, she envisioned a female community united by the shared experiences of labor and an ideological and religious belief in that labor's value. I agree with Newnum that Craik's work highlights bonds between women that are capable of crossing class boundaries but I disagree that these women's relationships overcome class hierarchies (10). While Craik's text does insist that "'real ladies' [...] thought no manner of work beneath them" (189), the text upholds the idea that working class women were simply more suited to the difficulties of manual labor. While Hilary does perform domestic tasks because of the family's scant financial resources, her eldest sister and surrogate mother expresses anxiety about the physical toll of this work. Johanna's "heart was often sore to see Hilary's pretty hands smeared with blacking of grates, and roughened with scouring of floors" (15). No one expresses any anxiety about what housework might do to Elizabeth, because the text emphasizes that she is clearly suited for it. While Hilary is "small altogether, hands, feet, and figure (85)," Elizabeth is "tall, awkward, and strongly-built" (1) and her overall appearance is one of undisciplined dishevelment. Selina, the middle- and bad-tempered sister, describes the new servant as a "great hulking girl" (76). Both Elizabeth's rough physicality and name reveals a legacy and aptness for service. After Johanna's concerns about her younger sister's hands being ruined by housework, Elizabeth's last name of Hand seems significant—she will now do the work; she will become Elizabeth's hands. Elizabeth's first name, too, speaks to her potential to be a devoted servant to the Leaf family. When Elizabeth first comes to the Leaf household, her mother reveals that she named her daughter after her mistress in her "first place, and I never had a second" (32). Loyal service and physical ability are encoded into Elizabeth's very name. For Hilary, domestic labor has the potential to degrade; for the working-class Elizabeth Hand, domestic labor is her natural role.

As a working class woman, Elizabeth's body is not only rough and course, but she is also Othered by being racialized. Although born in an English village to English parents, Elizabeth is repeatedly described, strangely enough, as a "South Seas Islander" (17). As Catherine Delafield indicates in her work on Victorian periodicals, Craik was responding directly to MP Harold Smith's published lecture encouraging charitable and missionary efforts on behalf of the people of Borneo and South Seas Islanders. Craik satirically adopts his language to encourage missionary work at home on behalf of the servant population. Craik's humorous remarks about Hilary as a "South Seas Islander" also tie in with the anxiety and commentary surrounding Irish servants, a frequent scapegoat for all household woes. Servants who carried their Otherness into the heart of the home were problems for the Victorians, and Craik's tale offered a proposed script to overcome the racial and class differences that could lead to domestic discord. What Craik ultimately advocates is that both mistress and maid adopt feudal modes of behavior, with each position defined by its duties, rather than its rights. Servants—the "South Seas Islanders" who work in the kitchens of the metropole—are objects of pity, instruction, and charity, which mistresses had an obligation to provide. The mistresses who were intended to be the first readers of this text were informed of their duties, and when the periodical passed into the hands of the lower orders, they received different instructions. Servants were obligated not only to wash their employers' dirty clothes and chamber pots, but also to gratefully receive instruction in the minutia of these tasks, respectfully adore their employers, and remain in their service even if it meant sacrificing their personal desires. Craik's text recognizes this sacrifice and sympathizes with it, but still demands that it be made. Inherent class differences make Craik's sisterhood one of emotionally charged but hierarchical bonds rather than truly intimate equality.

When Elizabeth first enters the Leaf's household, she is described as an outsider, and a threat to family privacy. While Selina is uncertain that the girl will be suitable for the position, the family decides that her youth and inexperience are ultimately assets: "Better perhaps, a small servant, over whom they could have the same influence as over a child, than one older and more independent, who would irritate her mistresses at home, and chatter of them abroad" (268). Eventually, the family comes to see Elizabeth as "one of the family" but this is limited to certain material kindnesses. Elizabeth is given her share of whatever treats come into the rather poor household, and Hilary even devotes considerable effort teaching her maid to read and write, but Elizabeth is deliberately kept from knowledge of the family secrets. As the narrator explains, "the family affairs, so far as she was trusted with them, were warmly her own, but into the family secrets she had no right to pry" (932). The rhetoric of paternalism that encourages employers to accept servants into their family lives only extends so far; Elizabeth both is and is not part of the family. Despite the affection that develops between Hilary and her maid Elizabeth, Elizabeth is shut out of Hilary's most private and most painful secret—her abiding love for her tutor, Richard Lyon, who leaves the family first for London and then for India, without even hinting of a shared future together, other than vaguely telling Hilary that she must trust him (889). After Lyon's departure for India, Hilary is visibly distraught, and her devoted maid does her best to cheer her with small, devoted acts of service, never inquiring into the source of her mistress' distress.

Both Hilary and Elizabeth experience a romantic relationship in the novel, but the patterns for these romances are limited by ideologies of religion and class. Although Mitchell writes that "Elizabeth Hand's brief romance with a workingman is treated with as much respect and dignity as Hilary's relationship to Robert Lyon" (60), there are significant differences in how these suitors are depicted. Robert Lyon very much follows the pattern of a mentor-lover laid out by Patricia Menon. Lyon enters the Leaf family as a tutor to both Hilary and her flighty nephew. Although of poor and obscure origins, Lyon's position as Hilary's tutor gives him the traits that Menon believes drives the disciplinary romance between a mentor and mentee—"power, judgment, and moral authority" (1). Craik references Shakespeare to articulate Hilary's feelings toward her tutor, quoting Miranda's pledge of devotion to Ferdinand: "To be your fellow / You may deny me; but I'll be your servant / Whether you will on no" (309). Like the family maid, Hilary expresses her affection through small acts of service, "always contriv[ing] to make his supper herself" (309). Lyon is her tutor in Greek, Latin, and mathematics, but her devotional and faithful affection for her teacher serves her moral as well as intellectual development. The narrator emphasizes that "[d]uring the teaching he had also taught her another thing, which neither had contemplated at the time—to respect him with her whole soul, and to love him with her whole heart" (146). Their romance is structured by a process of discipline. At one point, Hilary reflects that, "It seemed almost impossible that he should love her, at least till she grew much more worthy of him than now" (309). Hilary's period of labor and faithful devotion to Lyon even though he left for India without making a promise of marriage are intended to develop her patience of character until she can make a suitable wife. Although the text does not require that Hilary completely submit or self-abase herself, Lyon's moral authority is unquestionable. Hilary's first glimpses him at church, and his "grave, heavy-bowed, and somewhat severe face" reveals his character and disciplinary affect (137). He is a suitable suitor for Elizabeth because he fills the culturally-approved role of the lover-mentor-disciplinarian.

The relationship between Elizabeth Hand and her working-class suitor fails in part because he neither performs this disciplinary role nor embodies moral authority. While Hilary first sees Lyon in church, Tommy doubts the very existence of God, a major red flag in a text that repeatedly affirms that both minute life events and class orders are ordained by providential authority. Tom's unsuitability is later confirmed when he has an affair with another servant girl. Although Elizabeth retains her feelings for Tom, she refuses to forgive and marry him. Craik's tale acknowledges serving women's human feelings, but cautions working women not to reject service in favor of just any marriage (a frequent complaint of middle-class mistresses). This cautionary tale attempts to stabilize servants as a class by encouraging them to keep their places. Craik argues that an interested and kind mistress can provide a more emotionally satisfying relationship than a coarse and morally suspect working-class man.

Indeed, the mistress/servant relationship between Elizabeth and Hilary parallels the romantic, disciplinary romance between Hilary and her tutor Richard Lyon. Almost immediately after Elizabeth enters the Leaf household, she begins to admire her young mistress, because Hilary's efforts to teach the girl awaken both her intellect and affections. While Craik acknowledges that serving-girls may pine for the satisfactions of romantic relationships, she strongly suggests that they would be better served by sublimating those desires into a loyal affection for a good mistress. Like Mitchell and Newnum, I do see a sisterhood in the novel, but it is a sisterhood of instruction and submission that never overcomes the structures of social class. Women, willing to accept male discipline of their intended, are then justified in asserting their own moral authority to instruct their servants. Hilary eventually marries, transcending that disciplinary period, while Elizabeth remains a servant, representative of a class perpetually childlike in their vulnerability to correction and instruction.

Works Cited

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