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“A ridiculously diverting glimpse of downstairs life in Edwardian England. . . . Most gratifying.”—Laura Miller, Salon
From the immense staff running a lavish Edwardian estate and the lonely maid-of-all-work cooking in a cramped middle-class house to the poor child doing chores in a slightly less poor household, servants were essential to the British way of life. They were hired not only for their skills but also to demonstrate the social standing of their employers—even as they were required to tread softly and blend into the background. More than simply the laboring class serving the upper crust—as popular culture would have us believe—they were a diverse group that shaped and witnessed major changes in the modern home, family, and social order.
Spanning over a hundred years, Lucy Lethbridge?in this "best type of history" (Literary Review)?brings to life through letters and diaries the voices of countless men and women who have been largely ignored by the historical record. She also interviews former and current servants for their recollections of this waning profession.
At the fore are the experiences of young girls who slept in damp corners of basements, kitchen maids who were required to stir eggs until the yolks were perfectly centered, and cleaners who had to scrub floors on their hands and knees despite the wide availability of vacuum cleaners. We also meet a lord who solved his inability to open a window by throwing a brick through it and Winston Churchill’s butler who did not think Churchill would know how to dress on his own.
A compassionate and discerning exploration of the complex relationship between the server, the served, and the world they lived in, Servants opens a window onto British society from the Edwardian period to the present.
- Sales Rank: #392481 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-11-18
- Released on: 2013-11-11
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Lethbridge explores the culture of 20th-century British domestic service workers, the families that employed them, and the practice's sudden collapse after WWII. She discusses the implications of the upstairs vs. downstairs arrangement in which servants were expected to be invisible and inaudible, and bizarre customs dictating everything from calling cards to the ironing of newspapers and shoelaces. Lethbridge also outlines the specific nature of many positions, including the footmen, regarded as effeminate embodiments of mincing servitude; butlers, among whom the Astors' Edwin Lee is most famous; lady's maids; chauffeurs; and charwomen. In a moment of historical reenactment, she relives Alice Osbourne's experience as a nursery governess and housekeeper through her diaries, and journalist Elizabeth Banks's account of going into service undercover. Service work in the British colonies, where employers were desperate to maintain the rituals of home, receives attention, as do the trials of refugees adapting to the British service lifestyle. By WWI many houses either closed or used women in the traditional manservant roles as domestic workers left for factories. Though many returned to service after the war, political and social changes following WWII dealt the final blow. Lethbridge comprehensively details an old convention that continues to fascinate the public. (Nov.)
From Booklist
The popularity of Downton Abbey has rekindled interest in all things British, especially the parallel lives of the privileged and those who served them. Lethbridge capitalizes on the trend by providing a comprehensive overview of domestic service from the late nineteenth century through modern times. As the twentieth century evolved, so did practical and social attitudes toward the entire upstairs/downstairs dynamic. In addition to relating a treasure trove of fascinating—and often dismaying—stories about the haves and have-nots who occupied the same households, she also analyzes how the disruption of archaic social, political, and economic systems by two world wars led to a seismic shift in values and practical realities, dealing a long-overdue deathblow to a moribund profession . --Margaret Flanagan
Review
“Absorbing history, much of it in the words of servants…[Lethbridge’s] subject is many-branched and full of pressing issues.” (Economist)
“Thorough and vastly entertaining…[Lethbridge’s] style is elegant, detached and slyly witty…Richly complex and enjoyable.” (Sue Gaisford - Financial Times)
“Beautifully written, sparkling with insight, and a pleasure to read, Servants is social history at its most humane and perceptive.” (Paul Addison - Times Literary Supplement)
“In this excellent addition to the history of domestic service in the 20th century, Lucy Lethbridge has swept the existing archive and added new sources of her own. The result is a richly textured account of what it felt like to spend the decades of high modernity on your knees with a dustpan and brush.” (Guardian (UK))
“As a panorama, Servants is a great success. Enthusiasts of bonnets and waistcoasts will find Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey all the more enjoyable after reading this nuanced and elegantly written account of the wider context. And in tracing the history of servants throughout the whole of the 20th century, Lethbridge offers a new vantage point from which to reassess British social history.” (Observer (UK))
“Move over Downton Abbey, Lucy Lethbridge portrays life below stairs as it really was. Absorbing, highly entertaining, and impeccably researched, Servants is so much fun to read that it’s practically a guilty pleasure.” (Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana and A World on Fire)
“Unlike the cozy downstairs world of Downton Abbey, most of those for whom the bell-pulls tolled in great British houses led existences of ceaseless drudgery and petty humiliation. Yet here Lucy Lethbridge re-creates the lives of everyone from butlers and housekeepers to 'tweenies' and 'skivvies' in a way that never fails to fascinate. With meticulous research and engaging prose she evokes a world that the plutocrats of America’s Gilded Age tried hard to emulate.” (Hugh Brewster, author of Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage)
“Lucy Lethbridge turns servants into stars, offering a colorful and compelling social history about the men, women, and children whose occupation rendered them invisible. Buoyed by substantial research, engaging anecdotes, and a lively narrative, the book places generations of overlooked domestics center stage, where, finally, they receive the attention they have always deserved.” (Deborah Davis, author of Strapless and Gilded)
“The panoramic view of the subject and Lethbridge’s engaging style and sharp observations make this book a valuable addition.” (Kathleen McCallister - Library Journal)
“A lively and complicating account of British social history seen through the eyes of the workers who made it possible.” (Andrea DenHoed - The New Yorker)
“Vivid …. Household service provides Lethbridge with a window into almost every corner of social history.” (New York Times Book Review)
“Lethbridge captures the revolution with both sweep and intimacy, and never loses sight of the workers at its heart.” (The New Yorker)
“Lethbridge writes with sympathy about her subject…. Evenhanded to the end, [she] stresses the inherent dignity of domestic service.” (Matthew Price - Newsday)
Most helpful customer reviews
71 of 75 people found the following review helpful.
Buy the book, not the download.
By EnglishMajor
I would have given this book 5 stars but for the fact that it is not well-suited to Kindle. The book itself is a terrific read. It is well-researched & -written, full of lively anecdotes, & it gives the reader a rich insight into the employer (more accurately, master/mistress)-servant relationships & class divisions of a Victorian era that actually lasted well into the 20th century. Imagine being a young teenager having your hands forced into boiling water so that you'd be better able to tolerate the requirements of doing the family's laundry, or having to turn your face to the wall if your master/mistress happened to enter the room while you were cleaning it, so that they could pretend you weren't really there. It appears that at least some employers adored their servants, even calling out for them from their own deathbeds ("Put your arms around me, Margery!"), but those same employers rarely provided any kind of care for their servants when the latter became ill or old, although they nevertheless fought fiercely against what is now the National Health Service. After reading "Servants," you'll be hard put to see "Downton Abbey" & "Upstairs, Downstairs" as much different from "Gone With the Wind."
However, I was frustrated by the fact that, although the Kindle version includes an "Index," the index references have no page numbers, nor can the reader use footnote numbers or asterisks to find the relevant endnotes. You can use the pad to highlight a word or phrase in the Index & find the relevant pages, but you have to be really careful how you go about it. If I had to do this again, I'd order the hard copy.
41 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
The real Upstairs,Downstairs.
By SInohey
As a fan of PBS Masterpiece Theater British series of “Downton Abbey” and “Upstairs, Downstairs”, (written by the progeny of a maid and a footman), I was intrigued by the title of this 385 pages book.
The book is well organized and flows smoothly, but it is a labored reading; meaning that the density of the material precludes reading through it in one or two sittings, unless of course one was a member of the leisure “upstairs” class without anything else to attend to.
Lethbridge covers about a century of English society, from the late 19th century through the 1960’s. It is a composite of anecdotes, vignettes and tales culled from the letters and diaries of mostly the servant population, contrasted with a few from their employers. The author deftly weaves the stories into a tapestry of an anachronistic life-style, oddly pined for today by some in Britain.
In early 20th century Britain, over one million women worked as servants, in vast country estates, city mansions, coach houses and townhomes. Having servants was a status symbol, even when the employer could not afford it.
Examples of the aristocracy’s dependence on servants to maintain their pompous lifestyle and the “symbolic pantomime” of the domestics, are described throughout in sometimes in humorous but mostly in realistic wretched images.
The Duke of Portland employed 90 in-house servants, at Welbeck, to satisfy his caprices, such as his demand that “a chicken be turning on a spit 24 hours a day, in case he felt peckish.” The ten upper servants who supervised the entire staff had their own under-servants.
The Duke of Bedford expected all his parlourmaids to be 5’10” or taller.
At Belvoir, the Duke of Rutland’s palace, one man was employed to just bang the mealtime gong. At Longleat estate, as “steel boy” spent his entire day polishing metal parts on horse harnesses while another’s job was just to clear cobwebs, the “spider brusher”.
There was no end to the menial tasks that were the lot of the domestics; scrubbing loose change (since no one knew who touched it), cleaning floors on hands and knees with brush and sour milk, or endless stultifying dull repetitive cleaning of furnishings. Teenagers traditionally learned the trade by waiting on the butler or the housekeeper.
Lethbridge deftly follows the progression of technology in support of the household and the upper crust’s reluctance to embrace it, fearing loss of status that was measured by the number of one’s servants, well into the post World War ll years.
During the war years, some country house raid shelters were divided by class, from “First cellar: . . . Wilton carpet, upholstered armchairs, . . . a ration of best bitter chocolate, . . . a Chinese lacquer screen concealing an 18th-century commode,” down to “Third cellar: for chauffeur, boot-boy, gardeners . . . a wooden bench, wooden table, an electric bell connected with first cellar in case owner should wish to summon masculine moral support, . . . no screen.”
The author reveals how the Communists and their historians downplayed and mostly ignored the servant class as “servile flunkies of capitalists”.
The upstairs/downstairs concept was a 19th century invention devised to satisfy the middle class’s newfound desire for privacy. Prior to that time the distinction was not that strict. In some households, servants ate the same table, joined in their masters’ games and slept at the foot of their masters’ bed.
In the post war years, a combination of advanced household appliances and the welfare state virtually cancelled domestic help. By 1961, less than 3% of British residences had servants. Foreign refugees, fleeing Nazi or Communist oppression, made up the majority of domestics during that period. Many of them came from the upper class in their home country. At present, nannies and “au pairs” are coming from east European and Asian countries.
The last portion of the book deals with aristocrats’ butlers’ memoirs and the irony of Chinese oligarchs hiring British butlers.
Lethbridge maintains an even keel between outrage at the abuses of the upper class that treated their hired help as appliances, and the contrived ceremonious customs of the aristocracy.
“Servants” is a fascinating book that would be interesting to anyone researching social mores of English society or is curious about the lives of the aristocracy and the rich.
Trivia buffs would be interested to know that during the filming of the series Upstairs,Downstairs (1971-75), the actors playing the downstairs roles had been allotted inferior dressing rooms, with showers monopolized by the actors playing their masters. This was to keep the actors in character.
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
"Victorians reinforced the separation between the domestic workings of a home and the sanctity of the family at its centre."
By Amelia Gremelspacher
"Servants" is a beautifully documented account of the role of serving people in England from the 19th century to the present. Many of we Americans can only summon visions of exquisitely run country homes with well respected staff or the "Little Princess" reduced to scullery and living in hunger and cold in the dark attic. While both extremes existed, in fact a middle ground did exist. Most fascinating to me was the author's juxtaposition of the view of serving person with that of the employer. As she wrily notes, "all sorts of desires become elevated to necessities when there is someone else to do the hard labour of realising them for you." Even the English home was shaped by deep dependence on servants. Even when available, electric appliances and central heating were not added until the supply of willing employees in fact dried up.
In each era, the book explores the range of domestic jobs available. While the grand houses did in fact provide a huge number of arcane and specific jobs, most servants worked as "dog's bodies" in small homes in which each servant had a huge amount of work to complete. The individual anecdotes bring the writing to life. And to round this work off, Lethbridge has included society attitudes, government regulation, and newspaper ads and columns as sources. I found this to be a well rounded treatment of the often romanticized, and seldom missed by the servant, age of servants.
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