Archived news

01 October 2012: Learn more about servants

Pam Cox, one of the resident social historians in our Department has a new TV series, ‘Servants: the true story of life below stairs’.

Episode 1, ‘Knowing your place’ (BBC 2, 9pm, 28 September) told the story the armies of servants running the grand houses of Victorian Britain.

Imagine a quiet evening at home in Erddig, North Wales. The leisured lady of the house might be sitting in front of the fire with her embroidery. Life wasn’t so peaceful for the scullery maids who were washing up after dinner, or the chamber maids who had to make sure the bedroom fires were lit. From the lady’s maid to the laundry maids, from the housekeeper to the stable boys, these servants worked long hours for low pay. Hierarchies mattered in the Victorian era, and as the butler knew how to defer to the head of the house, so the boot boy knew he had to defer to the butler.

The world of servants is a fascinating one, but one that’s often hidden away. Servants worked in the private world of the home, not the public world of the factory and shop. If you enjoyed Pam’s programme and want to know more about the lives of servants in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, there’s plenty of excellent research you can read. Here are some pretty hefty academic books to look out for (you can request that your local library orders these books for you)

• Cox, Pamela (2003) Gender, justice and welfare : bad girls in Britain, 1900-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall (1987) Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780-1850. London: Hutchinson Education, 1987.
• Davidoff, Leonore (1995) Worlds between: historical perspectives on gender and class. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Gerard, Jessica, (1994) Country house life: family and servants. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Light, Alison (2008) Mrs Woolf and the servants. London: Penguin
  Higgs, Edward, (1986) Domestic servants and households in Rochdale, 1851-1871. New York: Garland Pub. Co.
• Waterson, Merlin, (1980) The servants' hall: a domestic history of Erddig. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1980.
• Delap, Lucy (2011) Knowing their place: domestic service in twentieth-century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
• Steedman, Carolyn (2009) Labours lost: domestic service and the making of modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Thompson, Paul (1977)The Edwardians. London: Granada Pub.

Come back next week to hear about the next episode, which looks at domestic service in smaller houses.