Servants
A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain
1st Edition
Published on 14. March 2013
320 pages
978-1-4088-3407-7 (ISBN)
Description
'Hugely enjoyable' - Kathryn Hughes, Guardian
Glorious ... Full of eyebrow-raising and laughter-inducing vignettes' - Daily Telegraph
Servants is the social history of the last century through the eyes of those who served. From the butler, the footman, the maid and the cook of 1900 to the au pairs, cleaners and childminders who took their place seventy years later, a previously unheard class offers a fresh perspective on a dramatic century.
Here, the voices of servants and domestic staff are at last brought to life: their daily household routines, attitudes towards their employers, and to each other, throw into sharp and intimate relief the period of feverish social change through which they lived.
Sweeping in its scope, extensively researched and brilliantly observed, Servants is an original and fascinating portrait of twentieth-century Britain; an authoritative history that will change and challenge the way we look at society.
Glorious ... Full of eyebrow-raising and laughter-inducing vignettes' - Daily Telegraph
Servants is the social history of the last century through the eyes of those who served. From the butler, the footman, the maid and the cook of 1900 to the au pairs, cleaners and childminders who took their place seventy years later, a previously unheard class offers a fresh perspective on a dramatic century.
Here, the voices of servants and domestic staff are at last brought to life: their daily household routines, attitudes towards their employers, and to each other, throw into sharp and intimate relief the period of feverish social change through which they lived.
Sweeping in its scope, extensively researched and brilliantly observed, Servants is an original and fascinating portrait of twentieth-century Britain; an authoritative history that will change and challenge the way we look at society.
More details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
ISBN-13
978-1-4088-3407-7 (9781408834077)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
09/2013
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
€43.54
Article in reprint
Book
03/2013
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
€44.76
Article exhausted; check different version
Person
Lucy Lethbridge has written for a number of publications and is also the author of several children's books, one of which, Who Was Ada Lovelace?, won the 2002 Blue Peter Award for non-fiction. She is the author of Spit and Polish (2016) and Tourists, published to critical acclaim in 2022. She lives in London.
Content
- Cover
- Title Page
- By the Same Author
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Part I: The Symbolic Pantomime
- 1 'A Sort of Silence and Embarrassment'
- 2 The Dainty Life
- 3 'A Seat in the Hall'
- 4 Centralising the Egg Yolks
- 5 Popinjays and Mob Caps
- 6 The Desire for Perfection
- 7 'Some Poor Girl's Got To Go Up and Down, Up and Down . . .'
- Part II: The Sacred Trust
- 8 The Ideal Village
- 9 'Silent, Obsequious and Omnipresent'
- 10 'Bowing and Scraping'
- Part III: The Age of Ambivalence
- 11 'Out of a Cage'
- 12 'Don't Think Your Life Will Be Any Different to Mine'
- 13 'It Was Exploitation But It Worked'
- 14 'Tall, Strong, Healthy and Keen to Work'
- 15 The Mechanical Maid
- Part IV: Outer Show and Inner Life
- 16 'A Vast Machine That Has Forgotten How to Stop Working'
- 17 'Bachelor Establishments Are Notoriously Comfortable'
- 18 The Question of the Inner Life
- 19 'Do They Really Drink Out of Their Saucers?'
- 20 'Of Alien Origin'
- Part V: A New Jerusalem
- 21 'A New and Useful Life'
- 22 The Housewife Militant
- 23 'The Change: It Must Have Been Terrible for Them'
- 24 The Shape of Things to Come
- Part VI: 'We Don't Want Them Days Again'
- 25 'We've Moved to the Front'
- 26 'I'd Never Done What I Liked . . . Never in All My Life'
- 27 'We Like It Because the Past Is Not So Worrying as the News'
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- A Note on the Type
- eCopyright
