I’m reading Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs (called a masterpiece by Geoffrey O’Brien; see this post) and I was struck by the final phrase in this paragraph:
Here, in a small cubic space, existed Miss Cecilia Williams, in a room that was bedroom, sitting room, dining room and, by judicious use of the gas ring, kitchen – a kind of cubbyhole attached to it contained a quarter-length bath and the usual offices.
I deduced what those offices must be, but I was unfamiliar with that use of the word; the OED (entry revised 2004) enlightened me:
7.a. In plural (formerly also occasionally in singular). The parts of a house, or buildings attached to a house, specially devoted to household work or service, or to storage, etc.; esp. the kitchen and rooms connected with it, as pantry, scullery, cellars, laundry, etc.; (also) the stables, outhouses, barns, and cowsheds of a farm.
[…]7.b. In singular or plural. A privy, a lavatory. In later use frequently as usual offices. Cf. ease n. III.11b. Now somewhat archaic or euphemistic.
1727 The Grand Mystery..proposals for erecting 500 Publick Offices of Ease in London and Westminster.
(title)1871 The forty-five big and little lodgers in the house were provided with a single office in the corner of the yard.
E. Jenkins, Ginx’s Baby (1879) i. 91890 The boys’ offices should be provided with doors.
in P. Horn, Village Educ. in 19th Century Oxfordshire (1979) 1531909 Three reception, four bedrooms, kitchen, and usual offices.
Daily Graphic 26 July 16/1 (advertisement)1948 Mildred had been too shy when Adam, indicating a door, had said, ‘“The usual offices”..,’ to open the door and look in.
J. Cannan, Little I Understood ix. 1241951 I went to the usual office at the end of the passage.
N. Marsh, Opening Night ix. 2201957 The bathroom’s to the right and the usual offices next to it.
J. Braine, Room at Top i. 131980 Aft of the lobby..is the dining saloon for the passengers with the offices of necessity on either side of it.
W. Golding, Rites of Passage i. 6
Even if it’s now “somewhat archaic or euphemistic,” I’m surprised I hadn’t run into it (of course it’s possible I’ve simply forgotten, as I had forgotten that Latin officium is a contraction of opificium); are you familiar with this quaint expression?
Yes, I’ve seen it in cozy British mysteries and maybe other genres of the mid 20th century.
Ah, so I’ve probably run into it and it simply didn’t stick in my memory.
Singularly, “house of office” goes back well beyond those citations, including multiple ones in Pepys’ Diary (1660s).
Virtually all alternate labels for the hardware in question that that phrase is “euphemistic” for are themselves euphemistic at some point in their etymology, although then there’s some variation of the Euphemism Treadmill that eventually makes them seem so non-euphemistic that they need euphemisms to replace them.
entirely familiar, which means I’ve probably read way too many early-mid 20th C English novels..
Another marker of the period, is cigarettes. The novels of that era spend about 5-10% of their words describing people lighting, smoking, putting out cigarettes.
I learned this usage from Jane Austen; it appears in her letters also, I think.
“As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact;
but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the
roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were
the walls covered with honeysuckles. A narrow passage led directly
through the house into the garden behind. On each side of the entrance
was a sitting room, about sixteen feet square; and beyond them were the
offices and the stairs.” Sense and Sensibility Ch 6
“Cleveland was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping
lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure-grounds were tolerably
extensive; and like every other place of the same degree of importance,
it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk, a road of smooth
gravel winding round a plantation, led to the front, the lawn was
dotted over with timber, the house itself was under the guardianship of
the fir, the mountain-ash, and the acacia, and a thick screen of them
altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars, shut out the
offices.” Ditto Ch 42
It’s funny, in reading passages like that I wouldn’t have known exactly what “the offices” were but I would have assumed they had some sort of bureaucratic function — the truth would never have entered my head!
The first love letter I received was a quote from John Keats, through SMS.
I’m not sure what would have constituted “offices” in Sense and Sensibility. In Austen’s day, everyone still had a chamber pot in their bedroom, and privies were located outdoors—if possible, far away from a house to hide the stink. Homes had basins that had to be filed from drawn or pumped water, and the gentry could well have had indoor baths, but I’m not sure what else might accompany them.
Having now finished Five Little Pigs, I can say that it is indeed one of her best novels (as far as I remember them), splendidly constructed and full of acute observations on human behavior. It gets the Languagehat Seal of Approval (Detective Division).
What @JF said. No surprise it’s in Agatha Christie.
Oh, It’s a Poirot novel, and a mid-war one also? I really need to read that.
So the idea is you would go to the usual offices to take care of business through the usual orifices?
Speaking of euphemisms, the houses on this old, narrow country lane typically have usual offices in the attached barns. Our house has what is known locally as “a three holer”. It’s a little less exposed to the elements than a half moon house. Still, a nocturnal visit when the temperature dropped into sub-zero (°F) territory must have been a brief adventure.
An interesting observation, but I haven’t had much success finding out what a ‘quarter-length bath’ is. A bath that is a quarter the length of a normal one doesn’t seem very useful to me.
‘quarter-length bath’
i suspect it’s what my landlord recently removed from one of our (until then) least-renovated bathrooms! a not-quite-square tub a meter or less long, and significantly deeper than most bathtubs, with a faucet mounted just above it. physically more or less like a longer version of the deep half of a proper deep-and-shallow sink pair; functionally, a washtub with plumbing. depending on your girth and flexibility, you could sit, squat, kneel, or stand in it and wash yourself reasonably well. our going theory was that depending on when it was installed, it marked that bathroom as intended for servants (if it was original) or rooming-house tenants (if it was more recent).
I was at place where they had three faucets for water at the bathtub. One could have been for cold water, the other for hot water, but what was the middle one for? I didn’t stay long enough to find out, and I didn’t ask.
At _a_ place, sorry.
champagne, i hope!
:snort:. Probably some old plumbing thing. But champagne would be great 🙂
Ha! I read this this morning, and saw the phrase tonight in Noises Off! But I’m afraid it’s left out of the film version.
My mental image for “quarter-length bath” was what I would call a hip-bath or sitting bath — something like this.
a proper deep-and-shallow sink pair — a what now?
usual offices in the attached barns
In the 70s my parents rented what used to be a farmhouse for a couple of years. Our neighbors still were part-time farmers, and they had a functioning one-hole latrine at the far end of the stables. This was a typical Fehnhaus, so the people were living at the front of the house (where they had modern “offices”, and the stables were at the rear end.
a proper deep-and-shallow sink pair
historically – though now they’re much less widespread – one of the common nyc kitchen sink set-ups was a double sink, one about the depth of most current sinks, the other about twice as deep. in my memory, the shallow sink was mostly used for a dish-drain, and the deeper one for washing up (and occasionally bathing a baby) – i’m not sure whether that would’ve been true earlier in the 20thC. and i don’t know anything about their history, so all i can say is that phenotypically it’s a kind of cousin to the restaurant double steel sink or the two-basin kind of slop sink, but i’ve only seen those with equal depths.
Jane Austen’s ‘offices’ probably refers to the kitchen, scullery etc.
In ‘The Penguin Book of English Christmas Carols’ (1965), Elizabeth Poston says in her notes for ‘Ding Dong! Merrily on High’ that the tune was an old French dance called ‘Branle de l’official’. She adds that “An ‘official’ was one from the ‘office’, in French the kitchen quarters of a great house (hence the ‘usual offices’ of house agents).”
Presumably the other sense came from the house owners thinking of the kitchen, and the lavatories, as a necessary part of the house that they didn’t need to concern themselves with overmuch!
In Spain they (diminishingly) use the term office (as opposed to oficina) for the practical bits connected with a kitchen: where the servants might work, I suppose. I found this confusing when I first came across it, almost 40 years ago, but now wonder why on earth I didn’t pick up this usage at work! Hey ho.
Jane Austen’s ‘offices’ probably refers to the kitchen, scullery etc.
Yes, that’s the OED’s 7.a. “The parts of a house, or buildings attached to a house, specially devoted to household work or service, or to storage, etc.; esp. the kitchen and rooms connected with it, as pantry, scullery, cellars, laundry, etc.”; I quoted it in the post to show where the usage I was concerned with came from.
Duh, of course. I guess my familiarity with the term referring to lavatories blinded me to the older usage, even though it was quoted right there.
When did the murder mystery genre stretch to considering servants might be the perpetrators? (In P G Wodehouse, usually the servants know a great deal more about everything than them Upstairs.)
Another linguistic curiosity (quoted trying to avoid revealing spoilers)
That sense not in any (BrE) dictionaries I can find
The story was first published in USA, and I’m reading an American edition (Harper). Never the less, I’m surprised to find a distinctly non-Brit Americanism.
@AntC
Green’s has this with the cites after 1900 overwhelmingly non-American, including one from Joseph Conrad.
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/gdufr7i
When did the murder mystery genre stretch to considering servants might be the perpetrators?
I don’t know when that happened, but by 1971 it was a cliché.
‘ I quoted it in the post to show where the usage I was concerned with came from.’
I beg your pardon; I had forgotten that while scrolling through all the comments!
By 1922, in a play called The Barton Mystery, for those who can’t see the GB link.
Maybe it was later in the German-speaking world, but this traces the “the butler did it” cliche back to 1930 or earlier in English-language texts: https://bookriot.com/the-butler-did-it-trope
(Oops. My previous comment was an answer to the question about when “the butler did it”. Then my computer felt a need to restart, which may be why I can’t edit that comment.)
@JWB: It may have become a cliché in Germany well before 1971; that is merely the date when it made it into this song, which was quite popular at the time. The German WP article on the song mentions the (also wildly popular) Edgar Wallace TV adaptations of the 1950s as one of the sources of the cliché in German popular culture (although I’m not sure how many murderous servants Wallace novels feature – as far as I remember from reading a lot of them in my pre- and early teens, they rather featured gangsters and similar low-life characters as the villains).
I beg your pardon; I had forgotten that while scrolling through all the comments!
No need to apologize — it happens to me all the time.
TVTropes of course has a relevant page, which dates suspicions of servants to 1893, and critiques of the cliche to 1928
35 years from invention to overuse feels quite Warholesque
I think the issue with the butler doing it is often really Van Dine’s rule 10 rather than 11:
10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story–that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest. For a writer to fasten the crime, in the final chapter, on a stranger or person who has played a wholly unimportant part in the tale, is to confess to his inability to match wits with the reader.
11. Servants–such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like–must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his time has been wasted. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person–one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion; for if the crime was the sordid work of a menial, the author would have had no business to embalm it in book-form.
If the servants have been characters in the story, even relatively minor ones, then they won’t necessarily seem unreasonable as suspects, but if they haven’t it’s too much deus ex machina.
In Murder at the Vicarage Miss Marple definitely considers the vicarage maid as a possible culprit in just the same way as she considers everyone else.
Der Mörder ist immer der Gärtner
There was one (Christie?) story where the butler is the too-obvious suspect, and is eliminated from consideration early; in the end it turns out to really have been the butler, after all.
As time went on, Christie had to get more and more ingenious to stay one step ahead of her ever more sophisticated readers and keep surprising them, which she generally did.
@ulr: I guess we’re about the same age 🙂
@Jen: Van Dine’s Rule 11 is a degree of snobbery that seems amazing now. Servants are lower-class beings, so there’s no interest in making them criminals—it’s too obvious.
(It also has “begging the question” meaning something like “dodging the question”, the previous prescribed-against meaning.)
Looks like that was before the change of “love interest” from an interesting feature of the story to the person a main character is romantically interested in. Recently I heard it meaning a love relationship, something like “A has a love interest with B”.
That may be part of why the one Philo Vance story I read bored me.
I’ve read most of the Philo Vance stuff, I think, but it was kind of just the same story over and over again.
There is a definite divide between proper Golden Age mysteries, where crime is done by an unlikely person in an unlikely setting and the reactions of the other characters to their world being shaken are part of the story, and ‘hard-boiled’ stuff where crimes are done by habitual criminals in a setting where they’re common.
But in most of the British Golden Age stuff, at least, a ‘respectable’ and hard working servant is probably at least as unlikely a person to commit a crime as their employers are – it’s soaked with snobbery, of course, but it’s not quite Van Dine’s kind of snobbery. I suppose the ‘too easy solution’ there would be something like finding a burglar did it in a panic at being disturbed.
When did servants become visible at all in British literature, at least to the point of having visible personalities?
@Y: Jane Eyre‘s titular character is a servant, so no later than 1847
I suppose it’s somewhere between Austen and Brontë (Jo Baker’s 2013 Longbourn is a servant’s view of Pride and Prejudice.)
Corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy has something of a personality. If plays count, A Comedy of Errors probably wasn’t the first.
Oh well, servants are always welcome in comedies.
Is Chaucer’s Cook a servant? Highland Mary was, since we’re talking about Burns elsewhere, but she’s obviously not being addressed in poetry *because* she’s a servant.
The zanni in commedia dell’arte is a servant stock character.
And so are Leporello in Don Giovanni, various characters in Plautus, and maybe Sancho Panza. The smart or wisecracking or put-upon servant is always good as a comedic foil. I was thinking more of an equal representation of their humanity, despite the inequality of class and freedom of expression, which Agatha Christie and such like to pull out: the butler, underneath the polite protocol, may be lovelorn, or shellshocked — or vengeful.
Is Chaucer’s Cook a servant?
The Reeve? The Canon’s Yeoman?
Thank you. I was never quite sure what the “offices” referred to in Jane Austen were. My guesses were actual offices for estate business, servants’ quarters, servants’ working areas, daytime toilets (the gazunder being used at night). It sounds like it was a deliberately vague term which could refer to any and all of them.
dorothy sayers has mervyn bunter – lord peter wimsey’s batman-turned-majordomo* (more valet than butler, but also serving in that office) – as a significant character from the start, which was 1923. wimsey certainly considers house servants as suspects throughout the novels; i’m pretty sure sayers alludes to “the butler did it” as a cliche a few times, i think even before she introduced harriet vane as a consistent channel for commentary on the genre (Stong Poison, 1930). sayers has her characters refer to mystery novels quite frequently – there’s a case for the lord peter wimsey books as key early meta-genre experiments, and for bunter’s name as a play on “the butler did it”.
.
* and – speaking of clichés – quite clearly wimsey’s primary (though never exclusive) emotional/romantic partner up to the point when harriet vane (with bunter’s permission) makes the couple a trio.
Pamela is about a servant.
As for murder, in real life surely servants have always been easy suspects, and detective stories are inspired by true crime. There are some famous cases, like the cook Richard Roose who was boiled to death for supposedly poisoning the Bishop of Rochester in 1531, and Courvoisier, who was hanged for killing Lord Russell in 1840. Dickens attended the hanging. (In Bleak House the murder is committed by the French maid.)
too much deus ex machina.
As time went on, Christie had to get more and more ingenious to stay one step ahead of her ever more sophisticated readers …
Indeed. And yet every Christie story I end up feeling the crux relies on something that happens off-stage [**], that no reader’s grey matter could have intuited.
For that reason, there’s no fun in re-reading a Christie story. Thus I won’t include any spoilers here. Contrast Sayers’, Marsh’s or Keating’s stories are enjoyable to re-read, to relive the characters and the ‘form of life’.
Five Little Pigs is not as bad as many, is my grudging judgment. Murder in Retrospect (its original title) should have stayed; the gratuitous Piggies conceit should have been written out: it’s too stretched.
I must say I (again) find Poirot himself intensely annoying. (And David Suchet’s portrayals even more wooden than found on the page.) Contrast Lord Peter is so engaging, I can well see why Sayers wrote herself into the story (as Harriet Vane — great choice of homophonous name!) just so she could be affianced to him.
[**] Mousetrap reference.
I don’t think the complexity or misdirection of Christie’s novels actually increases over time. Her very first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, already has some weirdly convoluted dealing going on (although only in terms of its plot, not its literary structure). Her third novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is another one that is commonly called a masterpiece, and I agree with the assessment in that case. It’s just as modernist as Five Little Pigs, with which it shares a number of key features.
AntC doesn’t mention the flip side of Sayers writing herself into her stories to fall in love with her detective. Agatha Christie also wrote herself in, as Ariadne Oliver, but to complain about her detective character.
Five Little Pigs is not as bad as many, is my grudging judgment. Murder in Retrospect (its original title) should have stayed; the gratuitous Piggies conceit should have been written out: it’s too stretched.
Agreed on all counts (changing “not as bad as” to “better than” in my case); I got very tired of the Piggies.
I should reread Roger Ackroyd.
Yes, I thought the nursery rhymes worked in And Then There Were None and A Pocket
Full of Rye, and she should have left them there.
I should read Roger Ackroyd, though unsurprisingly I know how it ends.
As for Poirot, he talks a lot about order and method, but I don’t think we see much. And he’s really mean to Hastings. I thought he was pretty bearable in Five Little Pigs, though, partly because Hastings wasn’t there.
I also agree with AntC about Sayers and Marsh. I wonder how Marsh would have done with a non-mystery novel.
@Jerry Friedman: In the first two books you mention, the nursery rhymes are not just thematic (as they are in Five Little Pigs) but are actual elements of the crimes. The killers take advantage of the nursery rhyme motifs to confuse either their victims or those subsequently investigating. So yes, they work a lot better in those instances.
I should probably read more Marsh. I always assumed that Agatha Troy was at least partially another self-insert character, but I haven’t read enough of her books to really know for sure.
The passage in Gaudy Night where Harriet finally falls in love with/realises that she is in love with Lord Peter (while staring at his ear) is pretty much perfect.
Staring at his ear- this is how Anna Karenina falls OUT of love with Karenin, but I suppose there are ears and ears.
I await a study of Ears in Literature.
@Jen: There is a definite divide between proper Golden Age mysteries, where crime is done by an unlikely person in an unlikely setting and the reactions of the other characters to their world being shaken are part of the story, and ‘hard-boiled’ stuff where crimes are done by habitual criminals in a setting where they’re common.
So you’re telling me that only a minority of murders in Britain are committed at country houses and in West End theaters?
One literary genre of the mid-20th-century that has now become largely obsolete (mostly for good reasons!) is the Memoir of the Ex-Communist Intellectual, explaining how with great spiritual agony the writer finally Broke with the Party. Many such memoirs were written in various languages, but one of the more important AmEng examples of the genre was _Witness_ by Whittaker Chambers, which has a famous set piece involving Ears. He specifically claims the moment when his own Break with the Party began to slowly commence was one day in his then-apartment in Baltimore, when he was watching his infant daughter sitting in a high chair and smearing porridge on her face. For some reason he started gazing at the intricate whorls of her ear and this somehow led to a sudden flash of realization that the Scientific Materialist account of human existence and purpose was incomplete and inadequate. And then things developed from there.
One soon-to-be-prominent reader of Chambers’ book when it was published in the 1950’s was a Hollywood personality named Ronald Reagan, and he often credited it with helping to solidify his own negative views about Communism, which became globally significant when he subsequently held elective office. He was reportedly especially fond of the ears scene, which he liked to work into his own conversation, and I recall an anecdote from one of his White House speechwriters to the effect that if you were working with the boss on a speech about the Communist Menace and suddenly pointed to your own ear, he would smile because he knew you were referring to Chambers’ story and he appreciated the reference. Indeed, you can find on the internet a piece referring to the ear of the young Ellen Chambers as “The Ear that Destroyed the Soviet Union,” which I recommend as a chapter title for the forthcoming study of Ears in Literature.
There is a certain vague-but-resonant parallel, within the broader genre of 20th-century right-of-center literary polemics, to Chesterton’s rather unconservative rant about the little girl with red hair and how civilization must be ordered for the sake of her hair rather than she have her hair cut to accommodate the convenience of a barbarous society. But Red Hair in Literature is another volume.
@Brett: Good point about those other nursery-rhyme novels.
To my taste, Marsh is uneven. My favorite is the still first one I read (that’s not the only time that has happened to me with the writer of a series), Artists in Crime, the one where he meets Troy. I don’t think she’s that much a self-insert, but I don’t know much about Marsh. Maybe Troy is more like a version in paint of what Marsh would have liked to be.
But I’m not sure Harriet Vane is a total self-insert either, though yes, her relationship with the victim in Strong Poison is supposed to be based on Sayers’s view of her relationship with John Cournos (who wrote a novel of his own about it). That part about being always one step behind Wimsey, for instance–did Sayers often feel that way? Or want to?
All I remember about Ears in Literature is that at the beginning of Titus Groan there’s a remark that ears can on occasion be monstrously expressive (which happens in Gaudy Night). I didn’t understand that when I read it, being too deuteranomalous to connect the “ears burning” feeling with the mysterious “blushing” that happened to people and apparently even to me.
@JWB:
A geopolitical ear. Like Jenkins’.
ears can on occasion be monstrously expressive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear-reddening_game
Incidentally, I note that Sayers broke some of Van Dine’s rules. She has a letter in cipher, a culprit who’s a servant, a secret society (in one of the worst short stories), a mysterious death that turns out to be suicide, and of course plenty of side issues and more than one love interest. Christie breaks some too.
Undoubtedly most mystery fans here know Fr. Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detection and some know the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký’s collection Sins for Father Knox (Hříchy pro pátera Knoxe), which has ten stories, one breaking each of Knox’s commandments. I didn’t think it was a good as the concept, but still good. Wikipedia says it was made into a TV series.
Mention of weirdly strong reactions to body parts along with Ronald Reagan reminds me that Peggy Noonan once wrote a bizarre column about her emotional response to seeing Reagan’s foot in just a sock.