...13 years ago, during a group read in Janeites of Amanda Vickery's A Gentleman's Daughter, Diana Birchall wrote the following, and the ALL CAPS portions of this passage (about real people from JA's era) take on an almost unbelievable additional meaning in light of my latest claim re Mansfield Park re Mrs. Norris and her apparently intimate relationship with her "chief counsellor" Nanny.
Some of you will
no doubt consider the uncanny parallels set forth below between real life and
fiction, as merely a coincidence, or JA being psychic, because her depiction of
Mrs. Norris so eerily tracks aspects of the real life of Mrs. Elizabeth
Shackleford. For me, the
parallels are so specific and so uncannily
apt that I conclude that somehow JA had access to, or at least a secondhand
report about, Elizabeth Shackleford’s real life diary about poor Nanny Nutter,
who sounds like a real life combination of both Nanny, and also Fanny Price, both
of whom Mrs. Norris took possession of at a young age.
Either way, it’s
pretty mindblowing, and my assertions about something more personal going on
between Mrs. Norris and Nanny than just a
mistress-servant relationship add a whole additional layer of complexity to the
literary “cream cheese” recipe served up
below:
"Mrs.
Shackleton's diaries are full of laments about the difficulties of keeping
servants. "Nobody left as a woman servant in this house. God help me what
will become of me," she wrote in 1780. She was so desperate to keep competent
people that she overlooked cases of drunkenness and insolence -
"Immaculate
delicacy was a luxury she could not afford," Vickery writes. THE
MISTRESS-SERVANT RELATIONSHIP WAS COMPLEX AND PARADOXICAL, COULD BE FOND AND
INTIMATE, or distant and antagonistic. The case of NANNY NUTTER, WHO SLEPT IN
HER MISTRESS'S BED, was given many trinkets, yet KEPT RUNNING AWAY and being
brought back by her father. Mrs. Shackleton AT TIMES REFERRED TO HER SERVANTS WITH
CONDESCENDING SENTIMENTALITY, especially in her later years ("she was poor
and came to me WHEN I WAS DESOLATE & QUITE WITHOUT HELP"), but more
usually expected gratitude, CONSIDERING HER SERVANTS BEHOLDEN TO HER....
...Yet in
Elizabeth Shackleton's household there is much evidence that THE MISTRESS
HERSELF DID SOME WORK HERSELF (no doubt especially when servants were
unavailable), and certainly she was never relieved of the burden of ACTIVE
SUPERVISION IN ORDERING HER HOUSEHOLD...At times it sounds as if SHE IS DOING
LABORIOUS TASKS HERSELF ("I wash'd all the China Pots & c in the Store
room...we scowered all the Pewter")...
...She was
actively concerned in the running of the home farm, notes all the rhythms of
the farming year, and OVERSAW HER BUTTER SALES, the trade of which was worth
the annual wages of two or three maidservants....There is no suggestion that
she prepared food on a routine basis (we may remember Mrs. Bennet assuring Mr.
Collins that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen), although ONCE SHE
OFFERED HER HUSBAND A SPECIAL CREAM CHEESE MADE BY HERSELF as a peace offering
- and we can recall an occasion in Jane Austen's fiction when cream cheese was
given a similar importance and significance: MRS. NORRIS TOOK A BEAUTIFUL
LITTLE CREAM CHEESE AND ITS RECIPE as her chief prize from her day at
Sotherton!" END QUOTE FROM DIANA
To which I add
these following additional Mrs. Norrisesque tidbits which I have pulled from
Vickery’s original 1993 publication of her findings:
“To Mrs. Shackleton’s horror, Susy Smith was discovered
dispensing fine white sugar for the servants’ tea in 1771 and the
cook-housekeeper Molly Vivers was surprised drinking full cream milk in 1772.
The expropriation of illegitimate perquisites threatened both Elizabeth
Shackleton’s authority and her good housekeeping, a dual challenge made
explicit in a note of 1779:
‘Found Betty Crook making coffee and breaking white sugar
to drink with it. Servants come to a high hand. What will become of poor
housekeepers?”
…An entire diary is devoted to the career of an
adolescent maid, Nanny Nutter…”
And finally I found this anecdote which is utterly
Norrisesque from this 2009 web article:
“One of [these servants] she calls Nanny Nutter and
virtually adopts from the age of 12, but she runs away and ends up as a
neighbour’s chambermaid. Shackleton writes in her diary (Vickery discovered 39
of them) that she’s ‘an ungrateful, lying girl’. Nanny Nutter cannot answer
back because she was most probably illiterate.”
Ungrateful, lying girl—need I say more?
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode onTwitter
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