PREFACE.

WHEN, A LITTLE OVER A year ago, I arrived in London with a star-spangled banner in my pocket, I had no intention of remaining long enough to make any extensive experiments in the line of the “newer journalism.” I had only “taken a run” over to England to visit Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, and the Tower, expecting then to return home and write up my “impressions” of London and Londoners.

“Don’t forget that you are an American, and are going to England simply to compare the inferiorities of that country with the superiorities of your own.” This was the parting injunction of a certain American editor when I left New York.

For some time after my arrival I not only never forgot that I was an American, but I took particular pains that nobody else should forget it. I waved the Stars and Stripes en every possible occasion, and sighed for an opportunity to defend my country. It was not long in coming, for I had been in London but a little over two weeks when Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s criticisms of America appeared in the Times. My patriotic outburst, which I headed “An American Girl’s Reply to Mr. Kipling,” was printed in the same paper a few days later, and Uncle Sam sent me his congratulations across the water. That was the beginning of my journalistic career in London—a career that has not been without its pleasures as well as some very hard work.

At the end of a few months I began to like London so well that I decided to stop longer, in order to study something more than the “inferiorities” that my patriotic American co-worker had bidden me seek, so I hung up my flag in the hall where it might be seen without being too obtrusive, and turned my attention to active work.

When I wrote my “In Cap and Apron” experiences for the Weekly Sun, I determined to say nothing about my nationality, and in correcting the proofs I thought I divested the narrative of all obvious Americanisms. But, alas! it was the “wash-bowls” and “pitchers” that betrayed me.

“Does not Miss Banks know how to use proper English, that she says ‘bowl’ instead of basin, and ‘pitcher’ instead of jug?” wrote an irate matron to one of the papers, and the Editor of the Weekly Sun was severely criticised for allowing “vulgar American” to appear in its columns. Another lady declared that I must be a person of strangely carnivorous tastes to demand a meat breakfast, which led to a letter from someone else, who gave it as her opinion that I must have come from America, a land where the inhabitants breakfasted off chops and steaks and buckwheat cakes. Many epistles came to me personally: some from ladies who seemed to be under the impression that I had come to London to set up the servants against the mistresses, and I was requested to return to America before I raised an insurrection.

On the other hand, the servants looked upon me as a sort of Moses II., come to deliver them out of the hand of their oppressors, and the congratulatory letters that some of them sent me were rather amusing. After I finished my description of my life at Mrs. Allison’s, and began to write concerning my experiences at Mrs. Brownlow’s—I need hardly say that I have not given the real names or addresses of these people in any case—everybody turned round about face. The mistresses concluded that I was not half bad, after all; while the servants abused me because I advised them that it was wrong “to break and not tell.” One housemaid, in her rage, wrote that she had intended suggesting that I be made an officer of the Domestic Servants’ Protective League, but now I would be denied that honour, as every “proper servant” in London was my enemy.

During the time that I was relating my experiences as housemaid and parlourmaid, Mrs. Allison and Mrs. Brownlow received condolences from many quarters, though it appeared to me that the sympathy was wasted; for neither of them were such objects for public pity as some people seemed to imagine. Mrs. Allison, in particular, was looked upon as a deeply-injured woman, a sort of martyr, “butchered,” as one writer expressed it, “to make a journalistic holiday.” So far as I have been able to discover, no serious consequences attended my housemaiding exploit at Mrs. Allison’s. To be sure, the scrubbing was woefully neglected during my régime, but otherwise the housemaid’s duties were not so badly performed.

To those who understand how small the world really is, it will not appear strange that Mrs. Allison and I should have mutual acquaintances. Quite recently a friend invited me to accompany her to a Sunday “at home,” where, I was assured, I would be welcomed by a charming hostess and meet most agreeable people. The house to which she would have taken me was that of Mrs. Allison, of Portman Square! On hearing the name, I suddenly remembered that I was “writing against time,” and the printers were waiting for copy. I have several times met my former mistress and her daughters on the street, and at the theatre we have often been near neighbours; but my change of costume proved a good disguise, and I doubt if they would know me unless I appeared to them in the garb of cap and apron.

The Brownlows forgave me for the deception I had practised upon them, and then went to America, to recuperate their fortunes, which, Mr. Brownlow said, had suffered considerably through the mistakes of the Cleveland Administration.

The criticism which my “In Cap and Apron” articles excited was mild when compared with that called out by the appearance in the St. James’s Gazette of “The Almighty Dollar in London Society” series. Not even yet am I able to understand how I merited it. I have felt somewhat in the position of the unlucky cat which suffered drowning at the hands of the cruel Johnnie Green, although, according to the nursery rhyme—«

“It never did him any harm,

But caught the mice in his father’s barn.”

When I acted the part of an American heiress, I not only exposed the methods by which certain English aristocrats sold their social influence, but I held up to ridicule the shoddiness of some of my own country-people, who are well known on two sides of the Atlantic. In explaining that Lady —— chaperoned Miss Porkolis for a particular sum of money, I did not attempt to excuse the young Chicagoan for her part in the transaction; for, surely, the purchaser of social distinction is not a whit better than the person who turns it into a marketable commodity. Furthermore, I have not put forward Lady —— as being a typical specimen of all those who move in high society, any more than I have portrayed the representative American girl in Miss Porkolis. My object was but to show that the confidence Americans are accused of having in the purchasing power of “the almighty dollar” has not been altogether misplaced. I have noticed that the Colonial papers, especially those of Australia, have looked upon my American heiress campaign in the light of a huge joke played upon the aristocracy. A New Zealand Editor, in commenting upon the letters I received in answer to my advertisement for a chaperon, sighs for a peep into my desk, which, he thinks, must be brimful of interesting material that has not yet appeared in print. So far as those letters are concerned, I could safely hand him over the key; for, aside from what is now in print, nothing of that interesting correspondence remains with me. Those who requested the return of their letters received them, and the rest were long ago consigned to the flames.

As regards the chapter in which I describe my search for a pedigree, it is but another instance of what dollars and sovereigns will do. I do not, however, hold up these would-be aristocrats as typical Americans. In the great hustle and bustle of our American life, dead and gone ancestors play no part. So thoroughly do we believe in ourselves that self-confidence might almost be said to amount to self-sufficiency. We demand of a man not who his father was, but what he is himself. Yet, among over sixty millions of people, there must necessarily be a few snobs by way of variety, and that their money allows them to come to London to purchase the social precedence that is denied them at home, and a line of ancestors made to order, is a misfortune to America and England alike.

To the Editor of the English Illustrated Magazine I am indebted for the privilege of republishing the two articles which recount my experiences as a flower-girl and a crossing-sweeper. They do not take up any very serious social or moral problems, and so need not be further referred to here.

My trial at laundry work was the most difficult task I have yet attempted, and that I lived through it, and long enough to put the adventure into print, is a fact that still causes me to wonder. The relation of my experiences, coming at a time when the question of shorter hours and more perfect sanitation for laundries has been brought before Parliament by the Home Secretary, I hope may not be without the effect of calling attention to a class of working girls who stand in great need of a helping hand from the better classes.

If my exploits have done nothing more than to give many of my journalistic co-workers topics for some exceedingly clever and humorous “copy,” they have not...