Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times

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.)