In the 1850s the Melvilles at Arrowhead, keeping a cook, would have been in what percent? 15%? 20%? 30%? In Brentwood (the LA Brentwood) what percentage of families in one-family houses have a live-in maid?
An excerpt from the second volume of my biography of Melville.
Ever since the middle of the twentieth century it has proved hard for students of Melville to understand why Melville ran advertisements in the local papers seeking a cook, highest wages paid, or put such knowing passages in The Confidence-Man about the search for an honest "boy" to help with the outdoor work. In Volume One of this biography I underestimated the number of live-in servants at the Melville house on Fourth Avenue. The census-taker on 19 July 1850 among the "free inhabitants" at 106 Fourth Avenue in New York City listed four Irish servants, Eliza Brown, 32; Mary Lynch, 26; Margaret McGuire, 25; and Eliza Whittendale, 20. The census report, taken 8 June 1855, at the brick house on 26th Street (valued at $9,000) owned by "Allen Mellville," thirty [sic] year old lawyer, born in New York City, listed (besides his twenty-seven year old wife, a native of Rhode Island, and their three living children), two servants born in Ireland, Joana, age 29, eight years a resident of New York City (listed as "Joana D[itt]o"--i.e., "Joana Mellville") and Ellen Carlise, 3 years a resident of New York City. At this time, people of Melvilles' class, even those who lived in rough old farmhouses like Arrowhead, always had a staff of servants, at least one man for outdoor work and driving, a cook, a nursemaid when there was a child, and a woman to do the cleaning.
At the beginning of the third millennium it is hard to convey the severity of the servant problem as it was experienced by characters in this biography. Youthful Irish had tumbled off the Liverpool ships in the 1840's and early 1850's (passenger lists show that they were heartbreakingly young, exiled alone so that they might survive, almost never arriving in intact families as the Scandinavian and Germans often did). By the 1850s the worst famine years were past. Some of the Irish immigrants were moving into the general American work force and fewer of their younger brothers and sisters and cousins were arriving. In the Melville family, almost no one had good help any more, year after year, except the extremely lucky and financially stable, like the Van Rensselaers at the Manor House, who for years had their Ashbul as a personal postal and expressman, or the Shaws, who kept Mrs. Sullivan after Lizzie was married, although they loaned her to Lizzie at times. Their recent loss of Canning had devastated the Shaw household, and any replacement, like the current Stewart, lacked the knowledge of the minutia of services Canning had performed and lacked the will to perform all the tasks that he let himself become aware of. At a party in 1854, the Shaws painfully had to make do with a new lady's maid, though happily not a stranger to them. Even Nilly, with her fine Dutch training and wealth, was vulnerable: one time Maria and Helen found her huddled in the cold in her Mt Vernon Street mansion because her waiter had gone off without starting the morning fires.
Being away in Boston did not deter Maria from offering good advice to Augusta at Arrowhead:
Why do you not enquire about a cook, give Mrs Welsh notice. No more green hands for me in the kitchen department. I hope Lizzie by this time is suited and comfortable in the possession of an efficient woman to take charge & assist her in her maternal duties.
Shaw relayed to the Grigges "a fine story" Lizzie had written him about the last cook, who had left abruptly. Maria and Helen were both anxious that Augusta "not wait longer, but make earnest enquiries about getting a cook," and relief floods a note from Helen to Augusta on 5 April: "I am charmed to hear that you have the Cook in good training, remember me to William, Lizzie likes her nursery maid, I hope." At Arrowhead so many of the Catholic cooks had the same name that "Mary" became the generic term, and the family invested progressively less effort in getting to know the servants as individuals, since they tended to disappear abruptly. The worst of it trying to remember that the new Mary rarely started work with her head full of everything that had been inculcated so carefully into the previous Mary. In Manhattan Allan and Sophia had fewer servant problems than most members of the family, partly because Sophia through the Thurstons had access to an established network of employers, partly because it was easy to waylay a ship from Liverpool and pick out a likely servant. Decade after decade, the Melvilles faced the problem of getting and training new servants (which, in Melville's case, in later years, meant speaking brusquely). In 1892, the year after Herman died, Lizzie gave as one reason for moving to the pioneer apartment building (the Florence) her desire to live a life which was not "servant-ridden."
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