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Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain…
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Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times (original: 2013; edição: 2013)

de Lucy Lethbridge

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3961163,488 (3.84)25
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.
Membro:catherinepope
Título:Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times
Autores:Lucy Lethbridge
Informação:W. W. Norton & Company (2013), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 400 pages
Coleções:Sua biblioteca
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Informações da Obra

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times de Lucy Lethbridge (2013)

  1. 20
    At Home : a short history of private life de Bill Bryson (fannyprice)
    fannyprice: Bryson's discussion of the development of the home from a more open, collaborative space to a warren of special-purpose rooms as the concept of "privacy" became more important dovetails nicely with Lethbridge's discussion of the increasing physical separation between servants and the served in 18th and 19th century British homes.… (mais)
  2. 00
    The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History de Katherine Ashenburg (fannyprice)
  3. 00
    Longbourn de Jo Baker (fannyprice)
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very repetitive, with the exact same quote appearing in multiple chapters. however, an interesting thesis, especially developed towards the end of the book, that domestic service, which evolved out of a medieval lord's retainers and entourage, did not actually disappear with the world wars and rise of household electronics, but rather has changed in shape and tone. the middle and upper classes still seek event planners (butlers, head maids), personal shoppers (cooks, lady's maids), cleaners, au pairs, etc. ( )
  zizabeph | May 7, 2023 |
What cruelty is to Russian rulers, greed/status is to British and American rulers, although the two countries have somewhat divergent paths, with the emphasis being more on greed only in America and more on status as well in the UK. In America, you fire people because you resent paying their modest wages; in the traditional specifically-British rulers’ culture, you hire lots and lots of servants to tie your shoelaces so everybody can see them do it, you know.

Of course, it’s difficult, as this book tries to do, to give a voice to servants—here the literal British kind of servants—especially a hundred years ago or whatever. But Lucy tries, at least, and that’s worthy. It’s certainly a very domestic social history…. History for cruel boys, history for preening boys—history for everyone; yay! 🥳

…. I think that the details are useful. It’s not something where a single event strikes you, you know; it’s the attrition. And one detail at least is suggestive: the fact that the servants were often so young, you have this girl beginning service at the average (not earliest) age of fourteen, and so of course she’s not getting much in the way of being taught to read or write or anything. The employer—he can read and write books if he wants. She can scrub his shit away, you know.

…. It is kinda amazing how such a short time ago they didn’t even pretend or aspire to things, you know, just— yup, good jobs for good people, from good families! Shit jobs for shit people, who had better be kept under.

And that’s just how it should be!

I mean, you read novels by an about the affluent falling in love and discovering things, you start to like them maybe; but probably the bulk of them didn’t feel obligated to justify their position by being romantic with their sweethearts or reading a lot, and if they did, it was as a marker of status, and not a pure thing, you know. Masterly things are good for masters—ah, but for servants to be too good for such as them! And ah, for servants to be bad! How much better for servants just to be servants—and then I can be fat and lazy and stupid and comfortable, and no one will but tell me I am the village god.

And that’s just how it should be….

…. And it’s like, the worse I hold what I hold in trust, the more I imagine myself to deserve it, because I treat you right, you see the light, like a child of the light, and not just a servant, but I starve you of the light, then you are just a servant, so you clean the shit off the pots and pans, because you’re a servant, not somebody like me.

…. And of course the whole ‘servant question’ or whatever didn’t just magically vanish into white light with the end of the First World War, or whenever it was supposed to have happened…. People still have ‘romantic’ ideas about the servant-hiring classes and the recent past, so much so that the recent past isn’t really dead. Even though it’s the 2020s and we’re Americans, I wonder if most Episcopalians and other old-style lib Prots are so different from that. (Who you are speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say. Ralphie.) Obviously you can put the worst of the new world on TV and it sucks, but the old world is still here, and it’s still a lie. The only time they’ll talk about money in church is when the roof starts to leak—when they start asking. To learn about /making/ money, you’d have to be new age or something, not sleepy and rich and content! It’s like, if you were supposed to have money, you’d have it already. It’s like with dating. They allow you to date and bring dates, of course, in fact they assume you’ll marry and have children in there for as long as they’re still dependents, but it’s like, you know, on another level, if you were supposed to be married, you’d already be married.

Money is bad, because it makes me think of the servants. Money is bad, because They have servants!…. Money is for people who grew up with servants, and who die in assisted living, you know. And in America it’s the Southern version of servanthood, not the British kind, but the idea is the same. The nursing aide’s mom’s neighbor is NOT going to be coming into the assisted living residence to get taken care of, you know!

Why, it just wouldn’t do!

…. Speaking of the age of servants, to truly understand the past is not the same as to idealize or lie about it, and I think much of our educational system is basically a scar left over from the age of servants and employers-of-servants. Schools should teach kids relationships—I mean a teacher should teach, and not leave it to the bullies and the gossips—and spirituality, health, prosperity, and some more theoretical topics but basically if you’re in a trigonometry class it should be because you want to be there, because you want to be a computer person or whatever, or because you’re an intellectual, but that can’t be code for not liking people and not liking life. In the age of servants, school was basically something that Lord Billy had to prove that he really deserved to be born to money, that he was Better, and it had little to nothing to do with making people a success who weren’t born to it, you know. It still has that cast to it in many people’s minds; you can’t understand me…. (villain laugh).

Intellectuals can be very paranoid about their status, seeing as most people are not and probably never will become intellectuals, but helping the masses transcend idiocy, to serve the people, and to make the academy something other than the unearned benefit of a race, class, and gender that it was in the age of servants, won’t actually make things worse for the born intellectual, regardless of his or her born class, etc. Doing good doesn’t ruin us, you know. It’s acting on the fear that does that.

…. They demanded a lot of loyalty, and often didn’t give much back. It was almost like an inverse-thing, the whole worthiness trick.

I’m grateful that ‘those days are over’ mostly, and I know that we didn’t come this far, to only come this far! 🌝

The Christian church and its countries can be like a Six-paradise-from-hell: I get to be loyal to the group! In exchange for nothing! I get to be fleeced and leased and locked up! Hip hip, hooray! 😁

Not for the past and servanthood, but for the future country where work is good.

…. If the IRA and UDA terrorists of Northern Ireland are the textbook example of the Bad War, WWII, despite the almost textbook evil of the Nazis and even of the British Empire in India, may have been a good experience for some people. War is necessity, and sometimes a little necessity for an over-comfortable class of people can be good—all these rich Englishmen who thought that the purpose of life was having clean sheets, and who resisted labor saving tech because That’s Not The Way It Should Be, you have servants and you keep them in their place, you know, eating nutrition bars for six years or whatever they did, fighting Hitler, might have been good for them. I guess that’s why I dislike slogans and formulas about war. War’s certainly not the best thing or the answer to life—if war’s your answer to life in general, you’re probably a fascist—but war, like life, is more a mystery than anything else, even if, arguably unlike life in general, the best thing is to transcend it.

…. “Some living, some standing alone.”

I know you’re not supposed to go through life as cynical as motor oil, right, but as for me, I’ll never make dove eyes at Downton again and that, I think, is a good thing. It’s not good to like things that don’t have substance to them, things that misrepresent themselves. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t make use of a manor house in fiction, of course, just as materials, but the whole, ‘Ah! When the whole white race was loyal, and women were romantics!’—no. No, thanks, I’ll pass on the lies and deceptions.

…. We should all be able to be rich, if we want it enough to find it within ourselves, and /not just Mr Shallow & Arrogant/, whose life is one big superficial lie. Gosh, and some people would crack the whip for him! Deepak was right; a butler is a Perfect villain! 👹💂🏻‍♂️👹

I mean, it’s a little funny, but—honest to fuck, right.

(sigh) And, you know, sometimes people who can handle life’s basic challenges can help people be freer to deal with something bigger, if the person freed up isn’t just a lazy fake, and the liberating servant isn’t there because “you’ve got no choice and you’re not getting out, and you’re stuck because you’re less than…. And gosh, I’ll beat you up inside so I remind myself—I don’t have to be afraid, I’m not you!” 🤴🏻👵🏾

(deeper sigh) (waves off) But do what you want. It’s your life, right.
  goosecap | Apr 14, 2023 |
This book feels like a wildly informative chat with a well-informed friend. Lethbridge definitely has scoured all the sources: contemporary accounts, movies, literature, newspaper articles, "sits vac" ads in the papers, the job registry and list goes on. Her grasp of the topic is momentous though she never feels the need to boast, simply to share the wealth.

A fascinating subject for me, an adequate book might have left me somewhat enthralled. What a treat to have something fantastic to read instead! ( )
  ednasilrak | Jun 17, 2021 |
Um wow this book has everything, detailed accounts of servants and those they served. Fascinating details on servants daily life, career track, as well as life both inside of service and outside of service. This equally covers the class system and distinctions both within society at large as well as society below stairs and behind green baize doors. Fascinating how the wars (WWI and WWII) change service. Service barely stabilizes, a very much smaller and less presumptuous affair than in Edwardian heyday. WW2 just kills whatever is left of that style of living, very much to the benefit of the rest of the country. The vast poverty that existed across the country, while the Aristocracy lived so unbelievably better was horrifying. To think poverty lived next door to extreme abundance like that. It's also fascinating how the war as well as fair taxation for the Aristocracy took the class down so quickly. The nostalgia for the wealthy of that time period puzzles me. I love Downton Abbey but the treatment of those below stairs is vastly and unrealistically idealized. The Aristocracy controlled massive amounts of wealth and largely ignored the suffering of the poor. Only taking advantage of them in service. Harrowing system. ( )
  LoisSusan | Dec 10, 2020 |
A fascinating account of the apotheosis and decline of household servants in Britain, 'Servants' takes the reader from the great houses of the Edwardian era, where excess was the norm, to the 21st century where the newly 'super rich' seek staff who can guide them through upper class manners even as they serve.
Lucy Lethbridge draws on a very wide range of sources, including contemporary fiction as well as first hand accounts from servants and employers. Perhaps the most interesting observation is the change in the relationship between the server and the served that occurred somewhere between the 17th century - when Pepys assumed that his servants would join in with family games - and the turn of the 20th when the grandest Edwardian families would expect their staff to turn to face the wall as they passed.
Extremely well researched, and arranged according to themes rather than strict chronology, this is social history delivered in an engaging and thoughtful manner. I enjoyed it enormously, and came away with a book list of source material for further reading. ( )
  Goldengrove | Aug 4, 2015 |
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In 1901, in a slim volume published to mark the accession of Edward VII, the author, identified only as 'One of His Majesty's Servants', sketched an idyllic picture of domestic life in the royal household, stressing the new monarch's domestic rectitude, and his homely side, hitherto unknown to his subjects: 'Few people outside the Royal Family and the circle that is honoured by the King's intimate friendship are aware of the high standard of domestic life that he has always set himself and observed.'
Preface: In 1901 the Earl of Derby, viewing the prospect of hosting the new King, Edward VII, and forty of the King's friends at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool, was overheard to say of the arrangements the visit would require : "that makes sixty extra servants and with the thirty-seven who live in, nothing could be simpler..."
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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.

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