The maid, Jenkins, leaves the door open behind her when she shows Everard in to Helen Tamberly. Helen closes the door, hoping that this will not shock Jenkins too badly. The next visitor is black. Jenkins introduces him:
"With frosty disapproval..." (p. 676)
"A maidservant rustled in with a tray of tea and cakes. She was obviously shocked by the newcomer but struggled to conceal it."
-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), p. 151.
For a voice from the era of master-servant relationships, we can turn to Dornford Yates whose novel, Lower Than Vermin (London, 1950) is dedicated:
"To the Gentlemen of the Old School
"who, whether they were peers or ploughmen, masters or servants, shop-assistants or statesmen - whatever walk of life they adorned, justly commanded the respect of their fellow men."
Yates' introductory NOTE to the novel concludes:
"If you were to tell a youth that, less than forty years ago, six hundred quail, among other things, were served at a private dance in Curzon Street, he would not believe you: but the man who roasted them was once in my service. Times have changed: that is all." (p. 8)
Times have changed indeed.
33 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Does it really bother you that some people had, or still have, servants? My view is both that it should not and is not a bad thing to happen, in itself. If a man or woman has the means needed to hire a domestic staff, why shouldn't they if the servants are treated well and paid fairly?
And if we can go by what Anderson had one of his characters saying in "Ramble with a Gamlbin' Man," one of the Flying Mountains stories, about the servants he employed, when a guest expressed disapproval of having servants: "Well, we've developed a different tradition in space," Bell drawled. "That was necessary, back in the days when people used their hands because they hadn't any machine to substitute, maybe no machine had been designed for a particular job yet...except man himself, the all-purpose machine. And then, well look at it this way. The pioneers had to be self-reliant, or they died. But they also had to be mutually helpful, or they died. So they evolved, more or less unconsciously, the notion that anyone who did well was morally obliged to find jobs for the less fortunate; and that there was no disgrace in takin' those jobs, because every erg of work contributed to improvement. The disgrace would be in freeloadin'."
And I agree with that attitude, which also seems to have been Anderson's belief. And times have changed since Sarajevo? They certainly have and in many ways not for the better!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
My point was the massive change in values over little more than a century. And that Time Patrol agents easily pass back and forth between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.
In future, we can be served by technology. Every individual can do work that realizes their own potential.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I do understand that point. But I also got an impression of some discomfort from you about "servants." But I might well be wrong!
And some people, even in the future, might find that working as domestic staff achieves their potential.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Dornford Yates saw nothing wrong with past times and nothing right with present times. I find his whole value system completely alien but (again) am impressed by just how much society has changed (for good or ill) in such a short time.
Paul.
As late as 1914, domestic service was the largest single category of employment in Britain, and vastly the largest for women.
Textiles were less than half as important, and clerical jobs for women only really started to expand in the 1880's, and in 1914 the archetypical "clerk" was still male, though that was changing. In 1914, "typewriter" was still as likely to refer to the person who used it (often a woman) as it was to the machine itself.
WW1 shook this setup, and WWII more or less finished it off. Without the World Wars, the process would probably have happened -much- more slowly.
Note that the huge role of domestic service -- something like 1.2-1.5 million people, out of a total population of around 45 million -- had extensive knock-on effects.
Eg., it affected demographics. Live-in domestic servants didn't marry in Britain, which "sterilized" a high proportion of working-class women in their prime reproductive years, for substantial periods.
(Say 1.2 million women out of an adult population of 30-odd million, and a female adult population of around 16 million.)
Also note that houses of any size were virtually impossible to operate without servants; if you went down to the level of families with only a "tweeny" (teenaged maid-of-all-work) you penetrated right down to the lower-middle and upper-working-class level.
Some early adopters of central plumbing and hot and cold running water laid it on for the servants' quarters, but persisted in having hot water for family and guests (and their baths, etc.) carried upstairs by servants -- they were afraid of people thinking they couldn't afford staff on that scale.
I've lived in places where full-time servants were still common (Kenya in the 1960's, for instance) and it makes for a different 'lived experience'.
Also note that domestic service (which a substantial portion of working-class women did in their youth) was a primary way for middle to upper-class domestic manners, etc., to spread.
There was no mass media, but a -lot- of working-class wives and mothers had been maids. They often imitated what they'd experienced then in their own households, as far as their means allowed.
I have read that, in India, professional households still have domestic servants.
British TV had a series called UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS about domestic service earlier in the 20th century. When life began to change between the wars, a very conservative chief butler denounced a middle class woman as being "either too tight-fisted or too unsure of herself to hire domestic servants!" Meanwhile, of course, society continued to change around him despite his attitudes.
DOWNTON ABBEY does it even better than UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS, in my opinion. It catches the odd combination of closeness and distance that characterizes life if it's always lived among servants.
The best team in comics is Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth. They are friends while working fully within the master-servant relationship.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Again, I am impressed by the depth and width of your knowledge! In this case, about the use of domestic servants. I'm surprised they absorbed so much labor, because I thought the manufacturing industries would have employed more people.
Some employers of servants laid in hot and cold running water for THEM, but not for themselves? That surprised me, but I can see that being done for reasons of swank!
Yes, I can see both employers and domestic servants being both close and distant after many years together.
I think rising costs and crippling taxes and death duties imposed on estates led to a decline in domestic service in the UK.
Paul: And Alfred became a bit like a father to the orphaned Bruce Wayne after his parents were murdered.
I also recall the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Mr. Bumter in Dorothy L. Sayers' Wimsey mysteries. Or, for that matter, between Dominic Flandry and Chives.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: manufacturing employed more people in total, but domestic service was bigger than any single manufacturing -sector-, like texiles or coal mining or iron or whatever.
Agriculture was the biggest until roughly the 1870's, though. That was when agricultural employment started falling -- it had reached its absolute peak in 1851, though not its relative one since it had been expanding much more slowly than other sectors since the early 1700's. It was then stable for a generation and then began to drop.
Incidentally, while the number of farmhands dropped rapidly after that, the number of -farms- stayed quite stable, at a bit over 200,000, until after WW2.
British (and especially English and lowland Scots) farms were already much, bigger than on the Continent -- averaging about 5-10 times the size in the Netherlands or Belgium or France.
Individual British farms were often several hundred acres, and there was a core bigger than that, especially in places like Norfolk.
(That's farms, the units of management -- not estates, the units of ownership, which were larger still. Britain had a more concentrated pattern of landownership than anywhere else, more so than even Hungary. Basically about 5,000 families owned all the rural land.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As always, very interesting comments. Got it now, domestic service employed more than any SINGLE sector or kind of industry.
And I think one reason for the decline of the number of farmhands in the UK from the 1870's on would be the increased mechanization of farms, from things like the McCormick Reaper. Increased use of machinery lessened the need and demand for labor.
And I think mechanization encouraged UK farms to remain large, because machinery were most efficiently used on larger farms.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: though it was also a result of a drastic drop in -cultivated- land relative to -pasture-.
Land shifted from things like wheat to raising livestock, which needed fewer hands. By 1870, the remaining grain-growing areas (acreage shrank by about 50-60% from 1850 to the 1890's) were increasingly using horse-drawn reapers and reaper-binders too.
Only the very best and most climatically suitable areas in Britain could grow grain competitively once railroads had been built into the prairies around the world and transport costs dropped.
Also, transport costs for grain (and concentrated fodders like oilcake) dropped first, and faster, than costs for carrying meat or butter. The grain imports hit mainly in the 1870's, and the refrigerated meat and dairy products towards the end of the 1880's, when the kinks had been worked out of refrigerator ships.
That was not only because of the shrinkage of actual area, but also because the areas that did keep on growing grain were flatter and drier than those that didn't, which made mechanization easier.
Fattening cattle took a lot less labor than even reaper-harvested wheatfields. And you could sell liquid fresh milk domestically even after butter and cheese began to be imported in large amounts from Denmark and New Zealand.
Frozen and chilled meat imports mainly functioned to let people who hadn't eaten much meat before have more of it -- the top end of the market, affluent people, continued to eat meat from British-reared stock slaughtered locally, which was higher-priced and higher quality.
If you look at things in granular detail, what's striking is how early England (and a bit later, Scotland, after the Union of 1707) diverged from Continental Europe economically.
The bulk of England's population were wage-workers at least 200 years before the same was true of any European country, where the bulk of the population remained peasants down into the 19th and 20th.
England went over to a capitalist economy in the strict sense -- where the bulk of the population had no recognized right to access the land -- long, long before it industrialized.
Centuries before, in fact.
There were people who worked for wages as their primary source of subsistence nearly everywhere in Europe (even Russia, though to a small extent) but England was the only place where the bulk of agricultural labor was working for wages rather than as tenants, sharecroppers, etc.
That is how England was well placed to make the Industrial Revolution.
Kaor, Mr. Stirlings!
Very interesting comments. I should have remembered how the the Corn Laws, which were such a hot button issue in the firs half of the 19th century, affected UK agriculture. These laws were designed to prevent imports of foreign grown grain. Their repeal made imports much cheaper and grain growing in Britain much less competitive. Hence the greater focus on cattle raising.
Because of the problems you've mentioned elsewhere about quality control and the hygienic handling of mass imports of meat/grain, etc., those who could afford it would still prefer to eat British raised products, at least for special occasions.
The great bulk of the British became salaried workers by the early 1700's. Long before the rest of Europe. Presumably because there wasn't enough land for ninety percent of the population to remain rural tenants/share croppers, etc.?
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: and also to come up with it.
English wages were quite high, about the highest in the world.
And those wages had to be paid in cash.
This gave a massive, immediate incentive to invest money in labor-saving devices in all fields of production and trade.
It also made Englishmen, even aristocrats, conscious of profit-and-loss and relative costs in an immediate way that, for example, their French equivalents weren't.
It wasn't that the French didn't invent things: they did, quite frequently. But equally frequently, the inventions remained curiosities until an Englishman picked them up and ran with them.
Sean: it was more the way agriculture was organized.
By the late 1600's, virtually nobody in England was a subsistence peasant like most Frenchmen.
British farms were relatively large, they were rented at rates that were frequently adjusted, and in turn were commercially oriented.
Landlords insisted on it, and put money into enclosure, consolidation, fencing and hedging, drainage, and farm buildings to attract good tenants with plenty of working capital.
British farmers were entrepreneurs, in a larger or smaller way. Most of them employed wage labor, and they were raising crops and livestock to sell, even if they ate mostly from their fields.
Continental peasants often treated labor - mostly family labor - as a 'free good'. English farmers were much more oriented towards optimizing returns on capital. They had to be; otherwise they'd go broke and get sold up.
You know the trouble with the French: they are so unenterprising that they don't even have a word for "entrepreneur" in their language! (As someone said a while back.)
The fact that England was compact and had good water transport helped; so did the precocious enormity of London, and the demand it provided for cash cropping.
Paul: grin.
More a matter of incentive structures. The merchants of Bordeaux were just as enterprising as those of Bristol, but they and others were islands in a sea of village self-sufficiency and aristocratic -rentiers-.
England was a single market -- in France, the price of something basic like wheat could vary substantially from one part of the country to another; in Britain it had been uniform since late Elizabethan times. England had its last famine in the 1500's; France was having regional ones down into the early 19th century.
French travelers recorded with amazement how ordinary people in rural England -bought- most of their food; they found that astonishing.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Understood, no real subsistence farming in England/Wales by 1700. Agriculture was focused on cash crops and optimizing returns.
France was a much larger country than England, so it makes sense to think prices for things like grains would vary in different parts of the country.
And didn't Paris served a role similar to that of London, as a source of demand for cash cropping?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Paris did, but only for its local region with anything like the intensity that London did. London held a much higher proportion of the total population; and something like 10% of every generation after the early 1600's moved to London. (Which had 5x as many burials as baptisms, and had to import people wholesale to avoid vanishing.)
(From SM Stirling.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I do get that a catastrophic disease environment and high infant mortality made it necessary for so many of the English, every generation, to repopulate London, but didn't that also apply to Paris? I doubt medical knowledge or care was significantly different in France than in England!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Paris was just as bad, but relatively and after 1700 or so absolutely smaller than London, and France was much bigger and more populous. Paris didn't dominate France economically and demographically the way London did in England.
Incidentally, London was a big part of why English people were so ready to emigrate to risky places. They were used to the concept, because it was like moving to London.
Kaor, Mr. Stlrling!
Understood, what you said about Paris. I had, somewhat vaguely, thought it was as large as London. But, not after about 1700.
And the dangers and perils of London hardened the English to the idea of moving to other risky places.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yup. Moving to London was insanely risky -- both for you and especially for any children you had or would have -- but the potential payoff was big too.
Prominent men in London were often "self-made", from an early period, if only because families tended to die out at a much higher rate than elsewhere. It was -the- place to go for an energetic, ambitious youngster with an eye for the main chance, tho' as time went on places like Bristol or Liverpool became rivals.
It was also much more 'lively' than living out your days shoveling muck and knuckling your forehead to the squire in a village in West Scratchbumshire.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, as the Scientific and Industrial revolutions started really getting underway after 1700, cities like London, Bristol, Liverpool, even Edinburgh would be the places for ambitious young men to GO to. Despite the notorious filth, crime, violence, and diseases of London. And some of these successful New Rich rose into the peerage as well.
Dickens gave us an interesting picture of one of these successful entrepreneurs in BLEAK HOUSE. And this man had a brother who, by contrast, was content with a quieter life in service with a country peer.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: London had been playing that role well before the Industrial Revolution -- since the late Tudor period at least.
Smaller towns tended to be much more socially stable, if only because family survival (and hence inheritance of assets) was much more likely there. The dangerousness of a city went up geometrically as it got larger -- and so did the internal economic complexity and the opportunities that went with that.
London was a giant from the late 1500's in both senses of the word.
You might call it a "commercial revolution" that predated, and made possible, the "industrial revolution" later.
It had other consequences. Note that London occupied an outsized role in the social life and thought of the rural elite, too.
You went to London for Parliament and/or attendance at court, and the London Season became a crucial social event too, where landowners from all over Britain met, mixed, made marriages and exchanged ideas. Then they took them back to the provinces, where they lived the rest of the year, and passed them on to the lower ranks of the upper order, and also more generally through service in their households.
The very strong and very early sense of English national identity owes a fair bit to that.
And the form it took. London was always a trading/commercial city as well as an administrative center, and it wasn't dominated by the monarchy the way Paris was; it had its own life and its own elite, which was of national importance because of the amount of money that passed through its hands.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As always, very interesting comments. Yes, London became very dominant from late Tudor times on, say from about 1570. Yes, commercial/financial/trading wealth enabled the industrial revolution. Yes, leaders from the rest of Britain would go to London for political/social reasons, and return home to spread what had been thought/decided during the London Season. And so on.
Ad astra! Sean
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