The Family in the Age of the Fish Oil Lamp
Seated around the supper table with Margarethe’s unsuspecting parents and her eight siblings, Margarethe and Octav stole longing glances at one another. Margarethe was the eldest daughter of the prosperous merchant and Stock Exchange Elder Jacob HinrichHudtwalcker; Johann Octav Nolte was the son of an impoverished merchant who had once been a friend of the family. He was serving his apprenticeship in Hudtwalcker’s counting house (Comptoir) and lived under the family’s roof. It was the year 1767. She was nineteen, he twenty-three, when the spark was lit—the first great love for them both.
Their story is told in a remarkable document preserved in the Hamburg State Archive: the private memoirs of an eighteenth-century Hamburg woman. At that time, the lives of Hamburg’s respectable women revolved around household account books, the catechism, and raising children. They had little place in the intellectual life of the Enlightenment. Margarethe Hudtwalcker’s biography, edited by the historians Rita Bake and Birgit Kiupel, offers a vivid account of everyday life and the inner world of an old Hamburg merchant family: who was permitted to marry, what united husband and wife, what role emotions played—and, above all, the importance of money.
The love between Octav and Margarethe had no future. One evening the strict Jacob Hinrich Hudtwalcker overheard the young couple pledging their eternal fidelity through a door concealed behind wallpaper. Margarethe’s parents were horrified. For the daughter of a Stock Exchange Elder, a mere apprentice in the counting house was entirely out of the question.
Their daughter was met with icy contempt. The insulting word dirne—”harlot” or “wench”—was spoken. “Oh, I should have prayed. Since I could find no other help, I should have opened my whole heart to my mother and, with tears of repentance, thrown myself into her arms,” the despairing Margarethe later wrote. But, as she recalled, her mother “was always very strict with me”: a simple woman who managed her large household with iron diligence, remarkable organisational skill, and the utmost frugality.
Margarethe was quickly married off—to the thirty-year-old theologian Johann Nicolaus Milow. He was a respectable son-in-law, but as a preacher in Lüneburg he earned only 300 marks a year and was therefore considered virtually penniless. Even after providing a substantial dowry of 4,000 Mark Banco, the Hudtwalcker family continued to support the young couple financially for several years, until Milow was able to secure a better position in Wandsbek. Margarethe later recalled that she went to meet her future husband “like a lamb being led to the slaughter.»
The marriage turned out to be a happy one. Margarethe came to love her husband, and together they had eight children. Yet, as her memoirs suggest, the lively young woman from Hamburg gradually became a frugal and deeply pious pastor’s wife in the provinces. She died of cancer in 1794—a fate shared by many Hanseatic women of her time. Octav Nolte, meanwhile, pursued a career as a merchant in Livorno and later in Lübeck. At the age of forty-two he married his twenty-year-old sister-in-law, Johanna Matsen, with whom he also had eight children.
Starting a family was always a matter of careful financial calculation. In 1768, for example, Elisabeth Berenberg brought a dowry of 2,500 marks into her marriage with Johann Hinrich Gossler. It was intended to furnish the household, provide investment capital, and serve as security for old age. The annual rent for the couple’s new house amounted to 900 marks. A cook earned 82 marks a year, each maidservant about 40 marks, while the governess employed for the daughters received 210 marks. A fattened ox cost 124 marks, a bottle of Rhine wine five marks, a corset nine marks, and a cotton dress twenty-two marks. A professor at the Johanneum earned roughly seventeen times as much annually as a maidservant, while a skilled journeyman received about three times her wages.
Despite the decisive importance of money, emotions played a major role in everyday life. The Enlightenment was also an age of sentiment. Poets and theologians who celebrated “pure love”—towards fellow human beings as well as towards God—and who cautiously questioned oppressive conventions were admired almost reverently by the younger generation.
Even so, young people were expected to submit to their family obligations and establish a respectable household. Every carefully laid life plan, however, remained vulnerable to misfortune beyond anyone’s control: business setbacks, illness, or accidents. The family was the only reliable safety net capable of softening such blows.
For that very reason, despite strict discipline and numerous constraints, parents and siblings were often deeply attached to one another with genuine tenderness. Every separation was painful. Family members exchanged long, affectionate letters, and men felt no shame in shedding tears.
Among the prosperous classes, preserving the family as an economic unit and safeguarding its social standing outweighed individual wishes. Economics placed clear limits upon love. This was even more true for the poor.
For many Hamburg residents—from greengrocers and journeymen craftsmen to maidservants and factory workers—marriage was simply beyond their financial means. Around 1780, more than 30,000 Hamburgers, nearly one-third of the city’s population of 100,000, struggled to secure even the most basic livelihood.
During the winter of 1788–1789 alone, Hamburg’s General Poor Relief Institution distributed alms to 11,109 people. Furthermore, two-thirds of all those registered as needy by the institution between 1788 and 1796 were single women, many of them mothers.
Among the lower classes, families were often formed outside formal marriage and dissolved just as readily. Their survival depended crucially upon the earnings of women. If a woman could no longer work—for example because she had given birth—the family almost automatically slipped into dependence on poor relief. No one ever recorded how many men simply abandoned their families under such circumstances.
Hamburg’s civic leaders did not establish the General Poor Relief Institution in 1788 solely out of Christian charity. Together with the Poor Relief Office, the orphanage, the workhouse, and the house of correction, it formed an integrated system of social institutions. Their aim was not only to reduce begging but also to educate the poor toward what they regarded as “a modest and humble way of life.»
Those housed in the poorhouse were expected to contribute to their own upkeep. Even the children worked in contracted manufactories for only one-quarter of the prevailing local wage. Their plain uniforms bore a large letter “A,” marking them as recipients of poor relief.
Municipal welfare supervisors monitored the moral conduct of the poor. Unmarried mothers were quickly branded as “immoral,” while women employed in the cotton-printing workshops were often dismissed as loose women simply because the heat forced them to wear light clothing. From the viewpoint of respectable citizens, it was considered deeply immoral when a poor woman took in a male lodger merely to help pay the rent.
Remarkably by today’s standards, around ten percent of all children born in Hamburg at the time were born outside marriage (today the figure is around twenty-one percent). Together with the frequent abandonment and killing of infants, this reinforced the belief among the better-off classes that the poor were morally beyond redemption. A foundling wheel donated to the orphanage by the merchant Overbeck in 1709 received between eighty and one hundred and fifty abandoned infants every year during the following years. In 1715 the wheel was removed because maintaining so many foundlings had become too costly for the orphanage.
Margarethe E. Milow: “Ich will aber nicht murren.” Edited by Rita Bake and Birgit Kiupel. Expanded edition, 1993, including a “Lexicon of Objects and Emotions from Farewell to Gingerbread Baker.” Dölling und Galitz Verlag.
Irene Jung
Hamburger Abendblatt, 4 June 1994.
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