ABSTRACT
In 1829, William Kitchiner, author of several best-selling advice manuals, remonstrated quite solemnly against the employment of illiterate servants.1 An Etonian and a medical doctor, Kitchener, by the norms of our own times, might seem an unlikely authority on household management. But the prestige of Kitchiner’s status as professional gentleman, suggests that home science was becoming a serious business by the start of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the elaborate structure of servant hierarchies laid out in home management manuals by authors such as Isabella Beeton, attest to a growing perception that an effi cient, well-trained, labor force was necessary for the production and sustenance of “sweet order”—an attribute of domesticity that Ruskin, writing a few decades after Kitchiner, would extravagantly sentimentalize in Of Queen’s Gardens. What is particularly noteworthy, however, is that, in addition to the traditional list of virtues required of servants, such as honesty, faithfulness and diligence, literacy begins to fi gure as a new and desirable pre-requisite for profi ciency in domestic service. After his admonition, Kitchiner, in a legalistic vein, enjoins his reader that when new servants arrive, “the whole routine of their Business be given them in Writing, with full and particular directions about everything which they are expected to do” (126).2 In stressing the essentially literate character of domestic culture, Kitchiner’s text refl ects a growing public awareness of the impact of mass literacy upon the home.
