Hannah Cullwick
Hannah Cullwick was a working-class English woman whose diary depicts her immense pride in her work and reveals themes of domestic and racial fetishism that structured both her life and the society of the British Empire in which she lived.
While working in domestic service, Hannah Cullwick had a chance encounter with prominent barrister and philanthropist Arthur Munby, who was conducting a close study of the conditions of working women. The two embarked on a lifelong, unconventional relationship. Both of their diaries – as well as letters and photographs – document the role-playing, cross-dressing, and other fetish rituals that differentiate their relationship from the perceived norms of Victorian England. Cullwick's diary also reveals the autonomy she was able to keep even in the throes of extreme social inequality.
Early life and immediate family
Cullwick was born on 26 May 1833 and raised in Shifnal, Shropshire, England. Her father was Charles Fox Cullwick, a Master Saddler of Shifnal and a Burgess of Bridgnorth. The family had been Master Saddlers in Shropshire since one of Charles's great-great-grandfathers, Richard Cullwick, of Newport, set up his saddlery business, about 1670. Hannah's mother was Martha Owen, a Lady's Maid to the aristocratic Mrs Eyton. Cullwick had more than a dozen uncles and aunts, and more than fifty first cousins. All were literate, and most were in business as farmers, publicans, and saddlers.Hannah's father, Charles, appears to have suffered business losses; the family was subsequently very poor. There were five children: Hannah, James, Dick, Ellen, and Polly. James was a master wheelwright and later owned houses. Dick was a master saddler and became a harness maker in London. Ellen married William Cook, the Registrar for Poplar in London. Polly owned a large haberdashery store in the Ipswich Buttermarket.
The five children received a rudimentary schooling; Hannah was sent to the Bluecoat Charity school in Shifnal, and had to contribute financially to the family from the age of eight—first in the home of a solicitor's wife, Mrs Andrew Phillips, a friend and neighbor of the Cullwicks, and then in the Red Lion Inn before becoming the sole nursemaid to the large family of the Reverend Robert Eyton at Ryton Rectory.
When Cullwick was fourteen, both of her parents died suddenly. Her mother died of an infection, at the age of 47, and Hannah's employer, Rev Robert Eyton, refused to let her travel to visit her family, fearing that the fever would spread to Ryton, the nearby village. Hannah's father died two weeks later, at the age of 44, leaving the five children as orphans. The three youngest children needed to be housed: Dick was placed in a saddlery apprenticeship in Horsley Fields, Wolverhampton, with his uncle, William Cullwick ; Ellen lived with Aunt Small on her large farm, in Albrighton near Shrewsbury; and Polly went to live with her spinster aunt Elizabeth Cullwick, in Haughton, Shifnal.
When Hannah was seventeen, she worked as under-housemaid for Lady Boughey at Aqualate Hall, Forton, Staffordshire. She was dismissed after eight months because her mistress saw her "playing as we was cleaning our kettles."
Cullwick then worked for Lady Louisa Cotes, wife of John Cotes, of Woodcote Hall, Sheriffhales. During the London seasons of 1852, 1853 and 1854, Lady Cotes took Cullwick as her kitchen maid to London. She worked as a lower servant at both rural manorial estates and urban dwellings of elites. Other specific occupations included working as a pot girl in an inn, a nursery maid, and a kitchen maid.
Relationship with Arthur Munby
In London of May 1854, Cullwick met Arthur Munby during one of his regular urban expeditions to investigate working women. Munby was struck by her size, 161 pounds ) and strength, combined with the nobility of character he claimed to see in working women. Cullwick saw him as an idealised gentleman, who celebrated the intense labour she did as a maid of all work. To be near Munby, she began to work in various middle-class households in London, including an upholsterer's, a beer merchant's, in lodging houses, and that of a widow with several daughters.Before she met Munby, Cullwick had seen a lavish musical, The Death of Sardanapalus; it was the first time she attended the theatre in her life. The musical, based on the play by Lord Byron, told of an ancient, pacifist king who loved one of his slave girls. The slave, Myrrha, loved the king, but also had her own democratic and republican desires. Cullwick empathised strongly with the play's heroine.
Their courtship lasted for 18 years until they married on 14 January 1873. Cullwick prioritised her status as a working-class woman, but eventually married Munby with reluctance in Clerkenwell Parish Church by Special License granted by Archibald Campbell Tait, the then-Archbishop of Canterbury. Even after their marriage, Hannah Cullwick kept her maiden name. Munby and Cullwick never had any children because Cullwick never wanted to have any children.
Once they were married, she moved to his lodgings in Fig Tree Court, Inner Temple, central London, where she lived as both his wife and servant in his basement kitchen. Munby paid Cullwick a housekeeper's salary for the remainder of her life – even though wifely duties were unpaid during the time period. Munby even paid her during the decade apart after a major altercation in late October, 1877, which resulted in their temporary separation. During the following 9 years, she seldom met her husband and lived with several friends and relatives in Shifnal, Wombridge, Brewood, Wolverhampton and Bearley near Stratford-upon-Avon, where she cared for her niece's husband's grandmother Mrs Hannah Gibbs. From 1887 onwards, she and Munby rented a cottage in the Shropshire village of Hadley, and they regularly spent time together. In 1903, they moved to Wyke Place in Shifnal, just a few meters from the house where Cullwick was born.
Fetishism
Cullwick and Munby's relationship included a strong current of fetishistic roleplay. Shortly after they met, Cullwick began to call herself Munby's "drudge and slave," and called him "Massa". For much of her life, she wore a leather strap, which she called a "slave band," around her right wrist and a locking chain around her neck, to which Munby had a key. She wrote letters almost daily to him, describing her long hours of work in great detail. She would arrange to visit him "in dirt," showing the results of a full day's cleaning and other domestic work. She also frequently wore blackface, as they would have seen in minstrel troupes in London. Cullwick reported enjoying the degradation involved with cleaning boots and sometimes cleaned them with her mouth. Based on Cullwick's accounts, the couple did not engage in sexual intercourse, either before or after their marriage, as she described occasional kissing as " me as much as your nature will allow you to." At times, the two roleplayed as adult and baby, with Cullwick cradling Munby. Munby photographed Cullwick in a variety of costumes, dressing as an upper-class man, a Black male slave, an upper-class lady, or other situations.Cullwick's insistence on maintaining a master-slave relationship between the two caused friction at times. Munby at first embraced the idea, encouraging her to perform degrading work as a way to achieve a sort of redemption through abasement, which he described as "inverted Socratic theory." However, later, after marrying, he expressed regret about his teachings to her about the value of work and degradation, as she refused to participate in the social niceties expected either of a wife or a servant.
Diaries
Diary-keeping became part of the relationship between the two shortly after meeting, when Munby encouraged Cullwick to write and send diaries and letters so the two could keep in touch. Servants in this period had little free time, so despite living just a few miles away from one another, the two were rarely able to meet until they lived in the same household. Due to the social and educational gap between the two they had trouble making conversation in person; the diaries were a way for Cullwick to relate information Munby wanted to know: the number of boots cleaned, dirty tasks done around the home, and how she spent her money.Cullwick's diaries span seventeen volumes and were written from 1854 to 1873, comprising several million words. The tone and style varies from brief sentence-long summaries to longer, more thoughtful entries. Munby seems to be the main motivator of her diary-keeping, as she professed to prefer sewing, and ceased writing diary entries after their marriage.
Historical analysis
Hannah Cullwick's life and diaries have been thought by historians to exemplify a number of social dynamics that characterized the Victorian era in which she and her husband, Arthur Munby, lived. Their roleplaying scenarios frequently dramatized the intersections of sexuality, race, social class, and gender. Cullwick's role as a maid-of-all-work allowed her to straddle the dwindling world of the ancient gentry and the growing world of industrialization.Women in Victorian England and the art of invisible labour
Middle-class women in Victorian England were often expected to display idle, leisurely lifestyles. Women were meant to maintain the domestic sphere as housewives, but conceal any signs of their labor within their households. Despite the fact that maintaining a middle-class household required immense amounts of energy, often requiring the help of maids like Hannah Cullwick, women attempted to hide any evidence of their work and conform to the societal ideal of the idle woman. However, only a small population of the elite-upper and upper-middle class were able to afford adequate household staff to maintain their houses. In reality, many middle-class women were working tirelessly to maintain the upkeep of their homes, desperately trying to preserve their station in the "respectable" class. The concept of the ideal woman, who performed the "conspicuous labor of leisure," devalued the work that women were actually doing, hiding this work from society's view.If Victorian households had enough income at their disposal and they were able to employ household servants, these servants were expected to remain unseen. Servants were expected to do their most unsanitary work during the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the night, avoiding the view of their employers and guests. Maids and governesses were also expected to present themselves with clean white sleeves and aprons, removing any indication of their labor from the domestic realm.