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

"Despite their constituting the largest working group, the records on servants are often hazy, their lives rendered indistinct. Servants were simultaneously visible, their presence a sign of status, and invisible, the details of their individual experience subsumed into that of their employers; and it was employers who controlled the historical record."

This is an exceptional, very detailed history of servants across the centuries in Britain and, to a much lesser extent, the empire. The book also extends beyond this into a wider social history. Lethbridge has managed to give voice to a generally silent section of society by consulting an enormous range of sources. The Edwardian period, the height of the service period, was by far the strongest of the sections for me. There were so many interesting little titbits of information. For example, it was interesting to read about how the upper classes were reluctant to modernize their homes, they had servants to do the jobs, to keep the lamps clean rather than use the new fangled gas etc. As a consequence many of the middle class homes were more modern than those of the wealthy. An excellent history, but definitely stronger in the earlier years than in the "modern" era.