Hannah Cullwick

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Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) was a Victorian era diarist and domestic servant, born and raised in Shropshire.

Cullwick's childhood was unremarkable, except that a lady arranged for her to attend a charity school, where she learned to read (mainly the Bible) and write, unlike most women of her class at the time. She began work as a servant at the age of eight.

When she was fourteen, she became sole nursemaid to a family with eight children. That year her mother died suddenly of an infection, and her employer refused to let her travel the three miles to visit her family. When she was seventeen, she worked as under-housemaid for another family, but was fired after only eight months because her mistress saw her (as she later recorded) "playing as we was cleaning our kettles."

She then obtained a position with an aristocratic family, who took her to London. There, in 1854, Cullwick met Arthur Munby on one of his regular urban expeditions to investigate working women. Munby was struck by her size (5' 7-1/2", 161 lbs) and strength, combined with the nobility of character he claimed to see in working women. Cullwick saw him as an idealized gentlemen who celebrated the intense labor she did as a maid of all work. In order to be near Munby, she began to work in various middle-class households in London, including an upholsterer, a beer merchant, and widow with several daughters, as well as in lodging houses (which gave her more freedom from supervision). The two formed a lasting relationship that led to a secret marriage in 1873.

Before she met Munby, Cullwick saw a lavish musical called The Death of Sardanapalus, on the first time she had been to 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 identified strongly with the play's heroine.

Cullwick proudly referred to herself as Munby's "drudge and slave", and called him "Massa", an example of a Master/slave relationship. For much of her life, she wore a leather strap 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 my dirt", showing the results of a full day of cleaning and other domestic work. She had a particular interest in boots, cleaning hundreds each year, sometimes by licking them. She once told Munby she could tell where her "Massa" had been by how his boots tasted.

Despite her display of subservience and loyalty, Cullwick remained independent. She stood up for herself if she thought the terms of her relationship with Munby were being violated. She entered marriage with Munby reluctantly, seeing it as dependency and boredom. They were secretly married in 1873, after which she moved to his lodgings in Fig Tree Court, Inner Temple, central London, where she lived as his servant, though she sometimes played the role of his wife. She also retained her own surname and insisted that Munby continue to pay her wages, and she had her own savings. She left him far more often than he did her, and in 1877 she returned to domestic service in Shropshire. Munby was a regular visitor from 1882 until her death.

Her diaries reveal that the erotic games with Munby often included infantilism and ageplay, with Cullwick carrying Munby in her arms and holding him on her lap. Cullwick appeared in Munby's photographs in many different roles: a farm girl, a kitchen drudge, a chimney sweep with blackface, a well-dressed lady (though with her hands, unmistakably those of a working women, prominently displayed), a Magdalen, and even as a man. Her ability to take different roles delighted Munby.

Cullwick's diaries (selections of which are published as The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant), provide detailed information on the lives of working-class Victorian servant women. They are a record of sixteen-hour days and ritualized obeisance to middle-class men and women.

In 2003, a short independent film based on Cullwick's diaries and called On My Knees was made by Kim Wood and stars Melora Creager of Rasputina.

[edit] Sources

• Judith Flanders. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
• Diane Atkinson. Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. New York: Macmillan, 2003.
• Barry Reay. Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England. Reaktion, 2002. (ISBN 1-86189-119-9)
• Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sex in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. (ISBN 0-415-90890-6)
• Liz Stanley, ed. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant. Rutgers, 1984.