Product Description

In 1851 there were over a million servants in Britain. This book reveals first-hand tales of put-upon servants, who often had to rise hours before dawn to lay fires, heat water and prepare meals for their employers, and then work into the small hours. Yet there are also heart warming stories of personal devotion, and reward, and of how the servants enjoyed themselves in their time off. There are moments of great poignancy as well as hilarity: a steward's dawning realisation that the house keeper he befriended is a thief; a young footman chasing a melon as it rolls through a castle's corridors into the moat; the smart mans servant weeping at the station as he bids farewell to his mother. This was an era when footmen were paid extra for being six foot or over, and female servants had to wear black bonnets to church. Drawing on letters, diaries, and autobiographies "Keeping Their Place" provides a vivid insight into the day-by-day lives of country house servants between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76918 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Synopsis
In 1851 there were over a million servants in Britain. This book reveals first-hand tales of put-upon servants, who often had to rise hours before dawn to lay fires, heat water and prepare meals for their employers, and then work into the small hours. Yet there are also heart warming stories of personal devotion, and reward, and of how the servants enjoyed themselves in their time off. There are moments of great poignancy as well as hilarity: a steward's dawning realisation that the house keeper he befriended is a thief; a young footman chasing a melon as it rolls through a castle's corridors into the moat; the smart mans servant weeping at the station as he bids farewell to his mother. This was an era when footmen were paid extra for being six foot or over, and female servants had to wear black bonnets to church. Drawing on letters, diaries, and autobiographies "Keeping Their Place" provides a vivid insight into the day-by-day lives of country house servants between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

About the Author
Pamela Sambrook is a freelance lecturer, writer and consultant to the Heritage Industry and is a Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University. She is the co-editor (with Peter Brears) of The Country House Kitchen: Skills and Equipment for Food Provisioning, 1700-1900 and the author of The Country House Servant, both for Sutton Publishing.

Customer Reviews

The lives of country house servants in their own words
Before the invention of labor-saving home appliances, live-in domestic servants were an indispensable component of the country house. Over a million Britons were employed as domestics in the mid-nineteenth century, and the greatest houses required staffs of over a hundred servants to perform the myriad number of functions necessary for their smooth operation. Yet in spite of their ubiquity, most of them remain to us as unseen and unheard from as they were often expected to be in performance of their duties. Pamela Sambrook's achievement is to turn these servants into real people by using their writings to convey what life was like for those 'downstairs'.

To that end, Sambrook combed through published and unpublished collections of letters, diaries, memoirs, and other works for illustrative passages. Covering country house life from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the selections capture the patterns and experiences of the servants' everyday lives. She presents them thematically by grouping them into sections that examine different aspects of their lives, from their recruitment and work to their recreations and old age. Each chapter begins with a short overview summarizing these experiences, which provides a useful context when reading the passages that follow. But it is the words of the servants themselves which are at the heart of the book, giving voices to these long-silent figures.

Through this method, Sambrook succeeds in transforming the servants into real people. Some of her selections are funny, others are tragic, but all of them help the reader to understand the lives they and their colleagues led. With an excellent bibliography of her sources as a guide to further reading, this is an good starting point for anyone seeking to learn about the lives of domestic servants in the country houses.