Servants: Future Meets Past

(This edition of A Stone In Heaven has good internal illustrations, including one of Chives serving Flandry.)

Nicholas van Rijn has domestic servants, including a butler;

Dominic Flandry has Chives whom we take to be named after Jeeves;

James Bond has a Scottish housekeeper, May;

when Dornford Yates' Mansel and his two friends traveled abroad, they made a party of six because each, of course, was accompanied by a servant - and, when the doorbell rang in Mansel's flat, a servant went to answer it.

Poul Anderson imagines that the merchant princes of the Polesotechnic League and, after them, the upper echelons of the Terran Empire reproduce the wealthy lifestyles of earlier eras. Indeed, the Empire reintroduces slavery. I think that this happened, first, because in Anderson's pulp space operas, the Terran Empire was merely a futuristic Roman Empire, then, secondly, when the Technic History began to incorporate serious sociological extrapolations, Anderson rationalized this "slavery" as a way of getting some useful work out of convicted criminals. In his Draka series, SM Stirling imagines a slave-owning culture surviving and thriving into our period and beyond.

In Britain after World War II, there was an intermediate stage, not resident domestic servants but:

"Mrs Maggs was that element in Jane's economy represented by the phrase 'I have a woman who comes in twice a week.' Twenty years earlier Jane's mother would have addressed such a functionary as 'Maggs' and been addressed by her as 'Mum'. But Jane and her 'woman who came in' called one other Mrs Maggs and Mrs Studdock. They were about the same age and to a bachelor's eye there was no very noticeable difference in the clothes they wore."
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), CHAPTER 2, 3, p. 393.

(So a colleague mistakes Mrs Maggs for Mark Studdock's wife.)

In the 1950s, my mother had a "woman who came in," whom we knew as Mrs Strong, and our neighbor called her gardener "Smith."