with the price of flour, so the canny housekeeper stocked up when prices dropped. Rice could be stored for ‘more than three years, by spreading a well-aired linen sheet in a box, and folding it over the rice, the sheet being lifted out on the floor, once in two or three months, and the rice spread about upon the sheet for a day or two’. If the space was available, dried goods were to be bought only twice or three times a year.50 When possible, shopping was to be done seasonally, when things were cheapest: towards the end of the century coals cost about 15s. a ton in summer; £1 1s. a ton in winter. A 112 lb sack of potatoes cost about 6s. and lasted four or five people three months – an outlay of about 6d. a week. If a smaller quantity was bought, or the potatoes were bought out of season, it might cost 1s. a week to feed the same number of people.51
Weekly stores to be handed out to the cook included ‘Baked flour, prepared crumbs of bread, garlic, shallots, onions, black onions, burnt sugar, stock, glaze, salt, mustard, pepper, cayenne, all kinds of spice, dried herbs, vinegar, oil, string, pudding-cloths [one for every pudding ordered that week], paper for roasting, paper for fried fish, etc; fish napkins, plenty of clean towels, oatmeal, groats, flour, split peas … lard, butter, eggs, etc, etc.’52 The cook also needed every week a dishing-up cloth, a dresser cloth, a tablecloth, six kitchen cloths, a dish cloth, a knife cloth, a floor cloth, a rubber (to clean linoleum), three dusters and a flannel.53 Good housewives did not give these things out promiscuously: Mrs Haweis expected her model women to inspect each old duster to ensure it was sufficiently worn out before exchanging it for a new one.54
The handing out always caused problems: many servants were insulted by the implication that they were not responsible enough, or honest enough, to be allowed to take what they needed when they needed it. Gwen Raverat’s mother had the same cook for thirty years, but to the end the cook ‘had to go through the farce of asking for every pot of jam or box of matches to be given out of the store cupboard, for she herself was never allowed to hold the key for a single instant’.55 The system mortified Hannah Cullwick. After more than two years working for a widow and her daughter in north London, she said bitterly, ‘Every little thing I’ve to ax for & I carina always remember at the time what I may want to use, & so it’s inconvenient – besides I think it shows so little trust & treating a servant like a child.’56 (The equation of servants with children will be discussed in the next chapter.)
Women were taught that running a house economically was a virtue in itself, regardless of income. If waste and excess were present, no matter what the household could afford, the housewife was a bad housekeeper and, consequently, a bad person: a thrifty woman was a morally upright woman. Elizabeth Grant, a Scottish woman living near Dublin, wrote in her diary, ‘A poor woman with a sickly baby came [to the door] … luckily I had some old flannel and socks of Johnny’s for the little wretched thing – and mind, dear little girls, never to throw away anything – all old clothes I put carefully away, sure that some day some distressed person will want them. The merest rag goes into a rag bag which when full a poor woman will sell for a few pennies.’57
By contrast, the second Mrs Finch in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) was an obviously bad housekeeper, and therefore the reader knew from the outset to regard her household with a dubious eye. When the narrator first met her, ‘Her hair was not dressed; and her lace cap was all on one side. The upper part of her was clothed in a loose jacket of blue merino; the lower part was robed in a dimity dressing gown of doubtful white. In one hand, she held a dirty dogs’-eared book, which I at once detected to be a Circulating Library novel.’ She was not properly dressed, not clean and she read novels: the narrator was unsurprised later to find that Mrs Finch came from a lower-class background before her marriage.58 She gave out the stores improperly dressed, and had no control over her household:
‘Eight pounds of soap? Where does it all go to I wonder!’ groaned Mrs Finch to the accompaniment of the baby’s screams. [Note that the baby is in the wrong place: by being out of the nursery, it emphasized Mrs Finch’s bad housekeeping.] ‘Five pounds of soda for the laundry? … Six pounds of candles? You must eat candles … who ever heard of burning six pounds of candles in a week? Ten pounds of sugar? Who gets it all? I never taste sugar from one year’s end to another. Waste, nothing but waste …’59
Mrs Finch, it was plain, never checked her maid’s dusters before giving out new ones.
Even the charitably inclined Mrs Grant was, by many advice books’ reckoning, profligate: sheets were expected to last between five and seven years (or three to four years if there were only two sets: one on the bed, one in the wash); then, when the centre part of each sheet became worn, they were cut in half and sewn ‘sides to middle’ – the sides which tucked in and were therefore fresher became the middle, and the old, worn centre became the sides. After a few more years they were demoted to dust sheets for a further few years, to be used to cover furniture when cleaning out fireplaces, dusting, etc. Only then they could be torn into strips for bandages, or given to the poor. To give things to the poor too soon – when they were still ‘good’ – was as foolish as any of Mrs Finch’s behaviour.
Items from the kitchen were even more urgent candidates for what we now know as recycling and was then considered simply thrifty. Rubbish was divided into two parts: dust (coal dust, ashes from the fires) and refuse (everything else). From 1875 refuse was removed by the municipality as a legal obligation. Until then many suburbs had no regular collections at all, and residents had to arrange for removal as necessary, paying per collection. For this reason, as well as the moral value of thrift, housewives were encouraged to reuse everything possible.
There was, of course, less to dispose of: packaging as we know it had yet to be created, and goods came either unwrapped or wrapped in paper. Open fires allowed an overly dirtied paper (that had wrapped meat or fish, for example) to be disposed of immediately. Cleaner paper was kept for reuse, and really clean paper had two further uses. One was as lavatory paper (see p. 295). Secondly, many households used waste paper to make ‘spills’ – long strips of twisted paper, used to light fires or candles. In Mrs Gaskell’s novel Cranford (1851–3), Miss Matty, the elderly spinster, sets aside one evening a week for this. She has done her weekly accounts and her correspondence, and so uses the old bills and letters for the task. (She also makes spills out of coloured paper, in decorative feather shapes, which she gives as presents.)60
One system of disposal that has vanished was the number of street traders who regularly visited the back doors to buy various items. Paper was bought by the paper mills, and by manufacturers of papier-mâché furniture and ornaments. Dealers also bought old iron, metal, wood and lead. Mrs Haweis, really getting into her stride, gave prices that the virtuous housewife could expect for empty biscuit boxes, jars, tins and other household goods. She advised that ‘Champagne bottles with the labels on are worth more than without them.’61
Old textiles and bones were bought by the rag-and-bone man, who sold his wares to paper mills and to glue, gelatine, match, toothpick and fertilizer manufactures. In Bleak House, Krook’s shop carries signs which would have been familiar to all: ‘RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE; BONES BOUGHT; KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT; OLD IRON BOUGHT; WASTE PAPER BOUGHT; LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT’.62 By 1865 Henry Mayhew thought this type of sign very old-fashioned: rag-and-bone men now pasted up coloured prints which showed characters with speech bubbles advertising their services. Mayhew describes one such print thus:
The youthful Sammy, dressed in light-blue