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Even for girls who knew their place, social life imposed requirements which they could not fulfil while undergoing full-time education. Molly Hughes, aware that she was going to have to support herself, rushed with her friend to tell her parents that they had matriculated. She found the friend’s sister had brought her new baby for a visit, and ‘When we burst out with “We’ve passed the matriculation … we’re members of the University,” we received the response, “Yes, dears? … and did it love its granny den!”’ Molly’s brother grudgingly admitted that, as Molly’s fiance was not earning enough for them to marry on, she might as well work for a degree, adding, ‘Don’t work too hard.’
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That was the key. Girls and young women must not give their undivided attention to anything. Florence Nightingale, who certainly broke out of her family’s expectations, wrote an impassioned essay on the subject in 1852, when she was thirty-two. She thought it important enough to revise it seven years later, on her return from the Crimea. On the advice of her friend John Stuart Mill she did not attempt to publish it. A great advocate of women’s equality, he was none the less probably right: the anguish she felt was so nakedly apparent that she might have subsequently found it difficult to get men in power to take her health-care concerns seriously. She wrote:
How should we learn a language if we were to give it an hour a week? A fortnight’s steady application would make more way in it than a year of such patch-work. A ‘lady’ can hardly go to ‘her school’ two days running. She cannot leave the breakfast-table – or she must be fulfilling some little frivolous ‘duty’, which others ought not to exact, or which might just as well be done some other time …
If a man were to follow up his profession or occupation at odd times, how would he do it? Would he become skilful in that profession? It is acknowledged by women themselves that they are inferior in every occupation to men. Is it wonderful? They do everything at ‘odd times’ …
We can never pursue any object for a single two hours, for we can never command any regular leisure or solitude …
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All study had to give way to other members of the family – Maud Berkeley and her friends found that even practising the piano, that ladylike occupation par excellence, was difficult to achieve: ‘[My father] came in while I was hard at work on my arpeggios, to say he had just started a course of reading Plato and found he was vastly distracted by my music. Very difficult, attempting to be studious when each attempt brings only reproach … Heard from Lillian later that Mr Barnes made a similar protest.’
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Sarah Stickney Ellis, in The Daughters of England, was very firm. There was no point in educating women, because men had done everything before, and done it better. ‘What possible use’, she asked rhetorically, ‘can be the learning of dead languages?’ There were already translations available of all the major works, from which girls would ‘become more intimately acquainted with the spirit of the writer, and the customs of the time’ than they ever could by attempting to read works in the originals. Likewise, a girl need not study science more than superficially. A mere acquaintanceship would render her ‘more companionable to men’, because luckily ‘it should not be necessary for her to talk much, even on his favourite topics, in order to obtain his favour’. Knowledge was important only for a girl to be able ‘to listen attentively’, otherwise she would ‘destroy the satisfaction which most men feel in conversing with really intelligent women’.
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The Daisy Chain was enormously successful, and considered a very sound moral tale, helpful to young girls. Ethel, a bookish, hoydenish girl, is gradually brought to understand that the pinnacle of womanhood is in the renunciation of the use of her intelligence. At first she studies with her brother. He attends school, and passes on to her the gist of his lessons, which she is permitted to indulge herself with after she has performed such essentials as mending her frocks. However, by being clever and untidy and having no aptitude for household work, she will. Miss Winter fears, grow up ‘odd, eccentric and blue’. Soon her family decides that the time has come for her to stop studying Latin and Greek. Her brother, who has been her champion, agrees: ‘I assure you, Ethel, it is really time for you to stop, or you would get into a regular learned lady, and be good for nothing.’ So Ethel gives up all her aspirations, and crowns the sacrifice (which she now thinks of as a triumph) by finding pleasure instead in stitching up her brother’s Newdigate Prize submission in Balliol colours.
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Girls who were not prepared to give up all personal aspirations, as Ethel had done so cheerfully, had other reasons to desist from serious study. Education for adolescent girls was a serious health risk, they were warned. The educator Elizabeth Missing Sewell’s Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation was concerned with the upper classes, but she pointed out universal truths:
[A boy] has been riding, and boating, and playing cricket, and both body and mind have been roused to energy; and so, when he comes to study, he has a sense of power, which acts mentally as well as physically, and enables him to grasp difficulties, and master them. The girl, on the contrary, has been guarded from over fatigue, subject to restrictions with regard to cold and heat, and hours of study, seldom trusted away from home, allowed only a small share of responsibility; – not willingly, with any wish to thwart her inclinations – but simply because, if she is not thus guarded, if she is allowed to run the risks, which, to the boy, are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease, which, if not fatal, will, at any rate, be an injury to her for life.
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Dr James Burnett, in Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children (1895), assured his readers that a girl would, at puberty, always fall behind her brothers in academic achievement: her ‘disordered pelvic life’ guaranteed that she ‘must necessarily be in ill-health more or less [ever after] … Not one exception to this have I ever seen.’
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Despite this consensus, many popular novelists deplored the lack of female education: Dickens, Thackeray and also Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot painted vivid pictures of the resulting misery of ignorance, for both sexes. Jeannette Marshall’s father, a surgeon and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy, encouraged his daughters to attend lectures at University College. He even hoped they would sit exams. They refused to do the latter, and attended few lectures. It was not surprising. From the schoolroom onwards, girls were never tested, never matched against others, never socialized in any form. Jeannette and her sister Ada managed one term before the requirements of their social life supervened: they had made no friends with any of the other women attending the college; from Jeannette’s diary, it is not clear that they ever learned any of their names. For Jeannette, education was a matter of passing the time – she studied algebra in late adolescence as ‘a cure for boredom’ – or, more importantly, of prestige. She had piano lessons with the well-known pianist (and founder of the English Wagner Society) Edward Dannreuther, and noted of some new acquaintances, ‘I went up 100 per cent in their estimation when they heard Mr. Dannreuther was my [music] master. A good card to play!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Jeannette enjoyed her music, and intermittently worked hard at it, while she never became one of those women condemned by the author of Maternal Counsels to a Daughter. ‘Who would wish a wife or a daughter, moving in private society, to have attained such excellence in music as involves a life’s devotion to it?’
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Ignorance was, in many ways, a desirable state. Knowledge was burdensome, and could overwhelm those unable to bear its weight. Mrs Gaskell worried about sending the toddler Marianne to school, where ‘she may meet with children who may teach her the meaning of things of which at present we desire to keep her ignorant’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This need to protect girls from knowledge did not grow less when they became adult. Half a century after Mrs Gaskell expressed her anxiety, Gissing depicted his characters arguing about the same subject. Monica, a woman who had been forced to marry for economic security, disagreed with her new husband on whether or not a mutual friend was ‘nice’ for her to know. He responded:
‘… In your ignorance of the world’ –
‘Which you think very proper in a woman,’ she interrupted caustically.
‘Yes, I do! That kind of knowledge is harmful to a woman.’
‘Then, please, how is she to judge her acquaintances?’
‘A married woman must accept her husband’s opinion, at all events about men.’ He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. ‘A man may know with impunity what is injurious if it enters a woman’s mind.’
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Knowledge of a fact could corrupt not because of the fact itself, but because of the gender of the mind it resided in. This was not to say that girls and women were expected to know nothing. It was just that their accomplishments and abilities were important in reactive ways: as Mrs Ellis said earlier, girls needed to know enough about science so that they could look intelligent while men talked. Equally, girls should be able to play the piano, not for the pleasure derived from music, but because it was useful. Mrs Panton thought that girls’ natural reason for learning to play the piano was ‘because they can be useful either to accompany songs and glees or to play dance-music’,
(#litres_trial_promo) not love of music. Nearly half a century later the function of a daughter had not altered: ‘it is the daughter’s privilege … to act the part of sympathiser and interested listener in the home circle. No other claim is greater.’
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Girls were only to respond to others, not have thoughts of their own. It took Molly Hughes some time before her place as a reactive rather than an active family member became clear to her:
the family pooled what gossip they had got from school … discussing future plans and telling the latest jokes … I, as the youngest, seldom got a word in and was often snubbed when I did. Thus, after venturing, ‘I did well in French today’, I had the chilling reminder from [her brother] Charles, ‘Self-praise is no recommendation.’ If I related a joke, ‘We’ve heard that before’ would come as a chorus. Once when I confided to Dym [another brother] that we had begun America, he called out, ‘I say, boys, at Molly’s school they’ve just discovered America.’
That kidnap victims take on the ideology of their captors in order to survive is a well-known psychological effect, called the Stockholm Syndrome. Molly Hughes was a prime example. She used the word ‘chilling’ for her brother’s crushing retort, but she little appeared to recognize quite how chilling the scene related above was. She ended, ‘In short, I was wisely neglected’, and confided that ‘I tried to carry out the wishes of these my household gods by being as ordinary and as little conspicuous as I could.’
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Felix and Henrietta Carbury, the brother and sister in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, showed similar characteristics, albeit heightened for fictional purposes. Felix Carbury was a wastrel who had run through his inheritance and was now battening on his mother, who could ill afford to support herself and her daughter. Henrietta, however,
had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance … That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses were curtailed because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was her mother’s, she never complained.
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This deference to men was not a single hierarchical one: fathers at the top of the family pyramid, mothers next by virtue of authority vested in them by their husbands, and children at the bottom. The children were in their own little pyramid too, with boys, of whatever age, above girls. Eleanor Farjeon spelled it out:
Whatever pains and penalties, whatever joys and pleasures, were dispensed to us by the parental powers in the Dining-room and Drawing-room … in the Nursery there was one Law-Giver who made the Laws: our eldest brother Harry.
… he invented rules and codes with Spartan strictness; if they were to be enforced, he enforced them; if relaxed, only he might relax them …
In our Nursery he exemplified Plato’s ‘benevolent despotism’ with so much benignity, entertainment, and impartiality, that we began life by accepting it without question.
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The last sentence implied that Farjeon grew out of her deference. Molly Hughes, when she came to write her autobiography nearly half a century after the events described, still thought her family’s viewpoint was reasonable: ‘I suppose there was a fear on my mother’s part that I should be spoilt, for I was two years younger than the youngest boy. To prevent this danger she proclaimed the rule “Boys first”. I came last in all distribution of food at table, treats of sweets, and so on. I was expected to wait on the boys, run messages, fetch things left upstairs, and never grumble, let alone refuse.’ Yet even after all those years she tried to rationalize their behaviour. ‘All this I thoroughly enjoyed, because I loved running about.’ And surely it must have been all right, because, after all, ‘The boys never failed to smile their thanks, call me “good girl” …’ She was unable to distinguish between herself and her captors: ‘We were given a room to ourselves – all to ourselves.’ In it ‘there were four shelves, and … each [of the four boys] had one to himself.’ It did not even cross her mind that she alone had not got a shelf. Furthermore she was allowed to enter this room that was ‘ours’ only with the permission of her brothers, and for the most part she spent her afternoons alone in her bedroom.
(#litres_trial_promo) Laura Forster noted the same isolation: ‘The boys could and did come into the nursery when they liked, but they never played there or stayed long, whilst I had no other room open to me, except by special invitation [from them], until the evening, when we all went down to my parents.’
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The responsibilities for a girl were more onerous too. Laura, as the oldest girl, looked after the younger children in the nursery, staying there longer than was customary because the nursemaid ‘said I could not be spared, and Miss Maber, who taught my three eldest brothers, avowedly cared only for boys and would not accept me in the school-room’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a given that girls waited on their brothers: Louise Creighton, as a younger sister, only once had the ‘privilege usually reserved to the elder ones of getting up early on the Monday to give the boys their breakfast before they went back to school’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Constance Maynard and her sister were also expected to defer to their eldest brother. (As they referred to him as ‘The Fatted Calf’, it appeared that they had perhaps not accepted their subordinate role in quite the way they were expected to.)
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These were mostly girls from upper-middle-class families with no shortage of money. They were expected to perform services for their brothers not because there was no one else to do it, but because that was what girls did. Slightly down the social scale, as Molly Hughes’s experiences showed, things were no different. Helena Sickert, the sister of the artist Walter Sickert, went to day school, as did her brothers. In the afternoons, after homework was finished, the boys were allowed to play, while she ‘very often had to mend their clothes; sort their linen, and wash their brushes and combs’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And the lower-middle-class girl had more responsibilities yet. Hertha Ayrton was born Sarah Marks, the daughter of a clockmaker and a sempstress.
(#ulink_91ff09f6-e603-534d-8c47-d7c6302c21f5) Sarah/Hertha made all of her younger brothers’ clothes and took care of the boys so that her mother could take in needlework to support them after the death of her husband.
(#litres_trial_promo) Alice Wichelo, known as Lily, was the eldest of ten children (and later the mother of E. M. Forster); her father was a drawing master who had died young. By 1872, when she was seventeen, Lily had taken her youngest brother to Tunbridge Wells alone, finding a childminder to look after him and settling him in lodgings.
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It was not that all experiences of all girls were the same, but rather that the received ideas bred an attitude that many aspired to: to be the comfort-giver, whose primary function was to ensure the smooth running of the home, for the benefit of he who financed it. The engine room of this comfortable ship was the kitchen.
* (#ulink_8ebd7b69-f888-5ca2-a6df-516b7d912b0a) No one, however, can trump Augustus Hare’s parents, but as an upper-class child he can only (just) be accommodated in a footnote. Hare’s uncle, also an Augustus Hare, died shortly before his godson-to-be was born; his widow, Maria, stood god-mother instead, and she tentatively asked his parents if she could perhaps have the child to stay for a while. The answer to her letter was immediate: ‘My dear Maria, how very kind of you! Yes, certainly, the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.’ Maria Hare cared for him for the rest of her life, and he called her his mother.
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* (#ulink_a4fb3287-b769-53d1-9ff2-ed20291571b1) Not, please note, the mother. The wicked or incompetent servant loomed large in the minds of the middle classes. Mrs Warren told of a nursemaid who caused a child’s death by taking the child out when she was told not to. Mrs Beeton warned that the mother should learn to distinguish the different cries of her child, ‘that she may be able to guard her child from the nefarious practices of unprincipled nurses, who, while calming the mother’s mind with false statements as to the character of the baby’s cries, rather than lose their rest, or devote that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours’. See a larger discussion on servants and their employers’ fears on pp. 111ff., 115–17.
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† (#ulink_c4882d6b-9013-56ff-8c8c-7daa135eec44) Ipecacuanha and calomel were used with ruthless regularity in Victorian households. Ipecac, as it was commonly called, was a powdered root, and functioned as an emetic, causing vomiting. Calomel, made of mercury chloride, was a purgative. Both were used routinely in attempts to ‘expel’ various illnesses.
* (#ulink_2bbbd155-fc3f-54b9-80fe-e2ea49e217d8) Gutta-percha was produced from the sap of the Isonandra gutta tree, native to Indonesia. When vulcanized, it acted as a waterproofing, insulating material, much as we used rubber and now use plastic. It first appeared in Britain in the 1840s, becoming widely used for, among other items, hot-water bottles, golf balls and the insulating cover for the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
* (#ulink_541476ea-2f9f-5b72-98b5-fe4b897f97b2) When she did go into detail, it is hard to imagine that some of her ideas could have been considered seriously: her children’s piano lessons consisted of playing only scales and finger exercises, with the occasional ‘sacred piece’ but no other tunes, for seven years. She did admit that this regime was ‘inexpressible weariness’, but its very wearying nature promoted discipline and was therefore to be encouraged. She also taught children drawing by letting them draw only straight lines, and then curved ones, for more than a year. It was lucky for these children that they were merely fictional devices, as real children must surely have ended up running amok.
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† (#ulink_86493665-4438-5c0b-9c13-da20fb4a6a24) Religious education, even in houses a great deal more observant than the Hughes’, was often not much more successful. Mary Jane Bradley, the wife of a clergyman, prayed every morning, first by herself, then with Wa, then with the maids (note the careful segregation). When Wa was two and a half she worried that he did not appear ‘capable of understanding the idea of God and Christ being the same’. A year later he had, she thought, understood the idea of the Resurrection; then he asked her if God would come back as a stuffed rabbit. The three-year-old appeared to understand some things better than his mother, however. On being told to thank God for his blessings, he asked why God did not give the same blessings to ‘poor little beggar boys’. She replied: ‘we know that it’s right because God does it.’
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* (#ulink_a2ac2480-2e28-558c-960a-4e723a941d33) This Guide to Science was written by the author of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fables.
* (#ulink_80c0a90a-870e-52d5-a5df-de151d325aef) The college, now part of the University of London, merged with another college and was known as Queen Mary and Westfield College; two years ago it was ‘rebranded’ as Queen Mary College.
* (#ulink_85d4b740-f0db-572d-8c2f-f9a83171c5ab) One exception whom he saw fairly regularly, but must have somehow overlooked, was his daughter. Ivy Compton-Burnett. It may be significant that her career as a novelist did not take off until after a major breakdown decades after his death, and one looks again at her gallery of tyrannical parents. (It should be noted that, although Dr Burnett was a homoeopath, his opinions coincided in this matter with those of his more conventional medical brethren.)
* (#ulink_26061439-e7e8-5fed-9f7e-8a79690ee560) Ayrton read mathematics at Girton, with her tuition paid for by George Eliot. In 1899 she was the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
† (#ulink_26061439-e7e8-5fed-9f7e-8a79690ee560) Compare this to Louise Creighton, p. 51.
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THE KITCHEN (#ulink_c08bb386-8f8a-5e00-9ad7-62c94e933981)
VICTORIANS LIKED THEIR ROOMS to be single-purpose, where we often see a multiplicity of function in our own usage. The kitchen is one of the few rooms we today would think of as single-purpose, or at most dual-purpose (cooking and eating).
(#litres_trial_promo) The Victorian ideal held that the kitchen was for cookery only, with food storage, food preparation and dishwashing going on in, respectively, the storeroom and larder, the scullery, and the scullery or pantry, depending on the type of dish and the level of dirt. The reality in most middle-class houses was that the kitchen performed a wide range of functions. Many of the middle classes with one servant, in four-to-six-room houses, had only the kitchen for her to sleep in. (In houses this size, it was always a ‘her’: menservants were for the wealthy.) Larger houses still did not necessarily mean the kitchen was for cooking only: larger houses meant a larger staff, and the kitchen remained a bedroom to many. Less prosperous householders used the kitchen themselves: Snagsby, the law-stationer in Bleak House, used the front kitchen as the family sitting room, while ‘Guster’, his workhouse maid-of-all-work, slept in the back kitchen, or scullery.
Bedroom, kitchen, sitting room: many uses, although it was usually the least regarded room of the house. The desire for separation meant that an often small space had even smaller portions cut out from it, to keep essential functions apart: a scullery, with running water, was for any food preparation that made a mess – cleaning fish, preparing vegetables – and for scouring pots and pans; a pantry was for storing china and glass, and silver if there was any, and it had a sink where these things were washed or polished; a larder was for fresh-food storage; a storeroom was for dried goods and cleaning equipment. Each separate room, in the ideal home, had a different type of sink: the scullery had a sink, or better yet two, for cleaning food and washing pots; the pantry sink was of wood lined with lead, to prevent the glass and crockery chipping. If there was a housemaids’ cupboard upstairs, for storing cleaning equipment, it too had a lead-lined wood sink, so that bedroom ware was not chipped, and a separate slop sink, where chamber pots were emptied. (It looked like a lavatory pan, but was higher, and was also lead-lined.)
(#litres_trial_promo) In addition, after indoor sanitation arrived, the servants often had their own lavatory downstairs – not for their convenience, but to ensure that they did not use the family lavatory upstairs.
This was, however, only the ideal. The actuality was often a dark, miserable basement, running with damp. The scullery might be a passageway off the kitchen, with the lavatory installed in it. The pantry was a china closet, the storeroom another cupboard, kept locked; the larder yet another, rather hopefully installed as far away as possible from the kitchen range, which, as it supplied the household’s hot water, blasted out heat all the year round for up to eighteen hours a day. Below ground, the kitchen received little if any light from the area.
(#litres_trial_promo) The gas burned all day, with at best a small window near the ceiling to remove the fumes. Often no windows were possible, and air bricks and other ventilation devices were the most that could be hoped for. In this miasma of cooking and gas, the servant unfolded her bedding to sleep after the day’s work was over.
This was what Dickens had in mind for the kitchen belonging to Sampson and Sally Brass, the unscrupulous solicitor and his sister in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841): ‘a very dark miserable place, very low and very damp, the walls disfigured by a thousand rents and blotches’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Dickens was showing the turpitude of the household’s occupants through the house itself, but Arnold Bennett’s kitchen of the 1860s and 1870s, belonging to the entirely upright Baines family in The Old Wives’ Tale, was an only marginally more salubrious version of the same thing:
Forget-me-nots on a brown field ornamented the walls of the kitchen. Its ceiling was irregular and grimy, and a beam ran across it … A large range stood out from the wall between the stairs and the window. The rest of the furniture comprised a table – against the wall opposite the range – a cupboard, and two Windsor chairs. Opposite the foot of the steps was a doorway, without a door, leading to two larders, dimmer even than the kitchen, vague retreats made visible by whitewash, where bowls of milk, dishes of cold bones, and remainders of fruit-pies, reposed.
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There was a coal cellar which contained the tap – the only running water – and another cellar where coke for the range was kept and ashes were stored awaiting collection twice or thrice a year by the dustman.
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Arthur Munby, the civil servant, had a long-term relationship with a maid-of-all-work named Hannah Cullwick. (They eventually married.) He was sexually aroused by the idea of working-class women, and spent a great deal of time talking to working women he approached on the streets. (They were all ‘good’ women – he seemed to have no interest in prostitutes.) Despite the unusual nature of his interest, the fact remains that because of it he had far more knowledge of their working conditions than many of the middle class. Even he was shocked when once he saw Hannah in the kitchen of the house in Kilburn where she was employed as maid-of-all-work to an upholsterer and his family:
She stood at a sink behind a wooden dresser backed with choppers and stained with blood and grease, upon which were piles of coppers and saucepans that she had to scour, piles of dirty dishes that she had to wash. Her frock, her cap, her face and arms were more or less wet, soiled, perspiring and her apron was a filthy piece of sacking, wet and tied round her with a cord. The den where she wrought was low, damp, ill-smelling; windowless, lighted by a flaring gas-jet; and, full in view, she had on one side a larder hung with raw meat, on the other a common urinal; besides the many ugly, dirty implements around her.
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A roasting jack, which was fixed either to the top of a meat-screen (p. 66) or the mantelpiece. This is a bottle-jack, with a clockwork mechanism to turn the meat in front of the fire.
It was generally recommended that kitchen floors be covered in linoleum, for easy cleaning, often laid over a cement base to foil the vermin.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Panton suggested that ‘if the cook is careful … she should be given a rug, or good square of carpet … to put down when her work is done’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The carpet could not be permanently on the floor, for hygienic reasons. It is hard to imagine that after a long day’s work in the conditions described above the thing Hannah Cullwick most wanted to do was unroll a carpet. Anyway, there were rarely upholstered chairs in a kitchen, as only wood survived the steam and mess of an active kitchen, so she would have had no place to sit comfortably.
The labour, steam and dirt all centred around the kitchen range. The closed range was the first technical development in Britain to move beyond cooking over an open fire. It appeared at the beginning of the century, although it took decades before it was commonly in use. Wemmick, in his ‘castle’ in Great Expectations, was still cooking with ‘a saucepan on the hob, and a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a roasting-jack’.
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(#litres_trial_promo) There were many styles of range, but the main features of all of them were an oven or ovens, with a boiler to heat water. Both were operated by means of a fire fuelled by coke, which generated heat that was transmitted by flues and modified by dampers. By the 1840s The English Housekeeper was advising its readers on the benefits of the range: ‘It is a great convenience to have a constant supply of hot water, and an advantage to possess the means of baking a pie, pudding or cake.’
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(#litres_trial_promo) The early models had boilers that had to be filled by hand, and if the water level got too low the boiler cracked; later they became self-filling, with a tap to draw off hot water for use, and a stopcock for controlling inflow from the mains.
