Writing in 1925, one retired servant recalled how early in his career he had had to light a fire, polish twenty pairs of boots, and clean and trim thirty-five lamps, all by the time the rest of the household began to stir. As the novelist George Moore wrote from experience in his memoir Confessions of a Young Man, the lot of the servant was to spend seventeen hours a day “drudging in and out of the kitchen, running upstairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water, or down on your knees before a grate.… The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognized you as
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