Lois 's Reviews > Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth-Century to Modern Times

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.