Up and Down Stairs Read Free

few are resident. The mid-to-late twentieth century became the era of the daily cleaner – with agency staff brought in, often on a regular basis, for larger-scale hospitality and special events.
     
    According to Fiona Reynolds, Director-General of the National Trust, most of us in Britain – where less than a hundred years ago domestic service was still one of the largest employers – will have ancestors who were in service. This prompts our interest in the whole working of the house, its domestic spaces as well as the grand state rooms. Both have – after all – always been entirely interdependent. 19
     
    Although the country-house servant might be seen as belonging to a separate and elite group, with modest relevance to the rest of the world, they were the same staff who moved back and forth between the country house and the London town house where so much political entertaining went on, thus playing their role in that arena. 20 The servants of aristocracy were the scene shifters and wardrobe mistresses of the pageantry of British politics.
     
    Moreover, country-house servants are ever present in many of the best novels and stories that define our sense of national identity, both in our own eyes and in those from other countries. When I began this project, I asked Professor Cannadine, then the head of the Institute of Historical Research in London, for advice. His first words to me were: ‘You must look very carefully at P.G. Wodehouse.’ And he was right; Wodehouse has helped to form the image of the servant in the modern imagination. His stories are a study in upper-class life, of course, but, for all their humour, it is the well-observed detail that makes them so effective: in the mixture of formality and intimacy, the potency of the emotional dependence of the upper class on those who worked for them. Jeeves was a manservant – a valet, a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ – rather than a butler proper, but valets often become butlers and certainly travelled to countless country houses in their roles, as Jeeves does in the stories. 21
     
    If Jeeves is compared to Wodehouse’s other fictional butler character, Beach, the long-suffering attendant to the Earl of Emsworth at Blandings Castle, it is clear that they are cut from the same cloth. But remember, too, the delicious tug of war that goes on between theearl and his head gardener, the tough no-nonsense Scot McAllister. Their subtle battle of wits must have been played out time and time again in the English country house, between the specialist servant and his or her employer.
     
    The artful servant, in the service of a not quite so bright master or mistress, has a long history and was a familiar theme in the drama of classical Rome, where servants or slaves were depicted as either cunning or foolish. The heroic figure of Figaro in Mozart’s famous opera is a classic example of a smart servant outwitting his master. Napoleon described the original character as depicted in Beaumarchais’ play, on which Mozart based his opera, as ‘revolution in action’. 22
     
    The struggles of servants, their right to be respected as distinct individuals, and their dependent and often vulnerable status, were a particular focus for the eighteenth-century English novelist – even if sometimes viewed as tragicomic. Daniel Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
(1722) begins with a pretty young woman taken into service as a companion, prior to her seduction by one of the sons of the house, which leads to her extraordinary and picaresque career.
     
    Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela
(1741) describes the efforts of an attractive maid to resist being compromised by her young master after the death of his mother; she holds out for marriage and in the end succeeds. Henry Fielding considered this tale so pious, and its outcome so unlikely, that he wrote a parody,
Shamela
, and the perhaps better known sequel,
The Adventures of Joseph Andrews
(1742), about her fictional and equally virtuous