Servants

August 19, 2013
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.

October 15, 2013
A surprisingly substantive, elucidating social study of the British class system. London journalist Lethbridge emphasizes numerous important facets of the master-servant relationship that kept the great houses of Britain running smoothly until their apogee in the Edwardian era: namely, that the relationship represented by its orderliness and rigidity the very symbol of English imperialism. Indeed, even the middle classes enriched by the Industrial Revolution employed their coterie of servants, underscoring the master-servant bond as what judge Sir William Blackstone termed in 1765 the "first of the three 'great relationships of private life' " (the others being spousal and filial). Like the caste system of India, to which the British system glommed effortlessly, the army of domestic servants in England was highly stratified, divided into "niche skills." The pay was minimal, but the estate offered safety, room and board. The jobs were divided between indoor and outdoor servants and between those at the top, such as the butler and housekeeper, and those at the bottom, the charwoman and scullery maid. They were further delineated by height and appearance (the taller ones received higher-paying, front-of-the-house jobs). The number of people working as domestic servants rivaled the number of agricultural workers up until the turn of the century, and yet this huge body of workers was "largely excluded from the industrial unrest that rocked the first ten years of the 20th century...scorned by their working-class peers as the most despised representatives of class betrayal." Considered flunkies, "scivvies" and toadies by the urban factory workers, the career domestics tended to be conservative in their views, nostalgic even for the "sacred trust" established between patron and servant. The author explores how the forces of war, modern technology and feminist consciousness eventually helped blow the relationship apart. Employing numerous real-house and literary examples, Lethbridge lends poignancy to the master-servant dynamic.

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October 15, 2013
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 fascinatingand often dismayingstories 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 .(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2013

Not just for Downton fans: here is an account of the servant's life in Britain from Edwardian times until now, from the grandest estates to the middle-class household happy to show that they can afford help--if only just one maid.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2013

One of the most striking anecdotes in UK journalist Lethbridge's history of English domestic service over the last two centuries concerns a social researcher posing as a scullery maid in a fancy London house in the 1930s. When her invalid employer requested a milk drink and digestive biscuit, the task of preparing and delivering this simple fare turned out to involve the efforts of no less than eight servants, including the cook, footman, butler, and lady's maid. It's a scene that encapsulates the twofold nature of this book's appeal, for while it provides many such entertaining and eyebrow-raising episodes, its greatest strength is the author's clear-eyed exploration of the complex and shifting mind-set surrounding housework and domestic service in the country as a whole. Lethbridge's long-range view of English servants might drift a little in the early chapters, but, as the years roll on, she provides a thorough look at how this nostalgically retained tradition began to break down against the forces of financial instability, technological progress, and the changing attitudes of successive generations. VERDICT Studies and memoirs of life in service are currently thick on the ground, but the panoramic view of the subject and Lethbridge's engaging style and sharp observations make this book a valuable addition to the crowd. [See Prepub Alert, 5/13/13.]--Kathleen McCallister, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.