The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant

by Pamela Horn

Victorian England measured social acceptability in terms of the number of servants employed in a household. This frequently overlooked body of workers actually formed the largest occupational group in the country by the end of the 19th century. In this account, the author draws on contemporary sources, including "servants' books" and personal reminiscences of servants and employers, to offer a record of recruitment and training; the duties expected of servants; and the range of conditions under which they worked - some of which led to happy retirement, others to prostitution or squalid death. Complemented with photographs, "Punch" illustrations and other ephemera, the book offers a picture of this vanished social system.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, 19th Century, Research, British Literature

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Pamela Horn is an historian specialising in Victorian social history. The author of acclaimed books on rural life, servant lives and childhood, she lectured on economic and social history at Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University, for over twenty years.

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entertaining and informative book about servant life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with annexes that are worth reading. This is one for my keeper shelf!

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the past several decades a steady stream of books has been published about the men and women who labored in in the country houses and townhouses of Great Britain. While Pamela Horn's book was among the first to benefit from the burgeoning interest in the subject, it has endured thanks to its clear writing and straightforward overview of the subject. Drawing upon a range of diaries, contemporary publications, official reports, and other sources, Horn supplies readers with an introduction to the lives of those who served.

Horn's book provides a systematic description of its subject, examining in topical chapters such subjects as how servants found employment, their daily tasks, and the crimes which they committed. She demolishes one key stereotype early on by noting that many servants were not part of the retinues of large manors, but often worked instead in the homes of upper-middle and even middle class homes. Though their circumstances varied considerably, she shows how they were united by the drudgery of their work, which extended from dusting to cooking to hauling pails of hot water upstairs for baths. With larger staffs, the duties were often segmented into a number of tasks and handed out to servants who specialized in those roles, but even the most specialized servant faced a day of often arduous tasks and often condescending treatment.

As Horn demonstrates, the fall of the Victorian servant was a consequence of this drudgery, as women (who made up the majority of those "in service") began gravitating towards other occupations. The First World War only accelerated this trend, so that by the 1920s domestic service was withering for lack of participants, forcing the wealthy and well-to-do to find expedients to compensate for the unavailable labor. This trend continued to the point where by the time Horn wrote her book the live-in domestic servant had gone from an indispensable component of a well-to-do household to a rarity. No doubt it is the very novelty of such servants today which makes them the object of such interest, and for those seeking to learn more about them this book is an excellent place to start.

[Transjester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly a really informative and enjoyable read. It helped me understand the real lived lives of these Victorian domestic servants as opposes to their sensationalized prescence in period pieces. Before this I had only an inkling of how difficult it was to maintain a middle class and upper class household of the time. Studying the Victorian domestic servant is studying an important part of British labor history, especially women's labor history.

The only places I struggled reading this book was where my knowlege of English history was lacking. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

[Robert Monk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. What I really wanted was a combination of a social history of the serving class, and an exploration of the cultural effects that led to its decline in the 20th century. There's a bit of that here, but mostly it just talks about what servants did, and how they got along with their employers. It could be fabulous as background research for one writing a story set among British servants in the late 19th century, but it's not really all that big on analysis. Fine for what it is, though.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clear, concise, and illuminating.

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This not-huge volume has become the basic work on the life of the servant class during the 19th century. (I believe it’s based on the author’s graduate thesis.) After a brief chapter on the origins of domestic service in Britain (and why it was so much different from the equivalent situation on the Continent), she delves into the daily round of both male and female servants (whose functions were very different, and for largely economic reasons), the nature of social life (such as it was) below stairs, relations between master and servant, how training and discipline was handled, and how it all came to an end in the decade following 1914. She includes a number of statistical appendices and quotes frequently from the memories of those who lived the servant’s life. And the bibliography is very extensive indeed. An important work in modern social and domestic history.

[Louise Culmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book on the lives of servants in the Victorian era. The chapters cover subjects such as getting a place, the daily routine of servants, master-servant relations, social life, the decline of domestic service as an occupation etc. There are lots of illustrations, and many quotes from accounts of their lives by former servants. Keeping a servant became essential for anyone who could afford it in the victorian era, and over a million women were in service during this period. I would recommend this to anyone interested in daily life in the Victorian era.

[Kressel Housman · Rating 3 out of 5]

For research, this is top-notch, but it's not one of those history books that reads like a novel. I recommend it to Regency/Victorian history buffs. The fashionable life of the Ton gets lots of attention, but where would the upper class be without their servants to dress them?

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like a thesis. Lots of statistics. Used letters, diaries etc from servants for good first person reports.

[Ava · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got just past half way... Interesting stuff but a bit of a slog to read.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good for research, as another reviewer says, but a bit tedious to read cover to cover like a novel.