Summary of Lucy Lethbridge's Servants

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In 1902, Queen Alexandra invited 10,000 maids-of-all-work to tea parties across London to celebrate the coronation. The girls were allowed to wear their own clothes rather than their usual uniform of cap and apron.
#2 The English middle-class ideal was reflected in the home, which was full of servants who represented the nation’s sense of natural and social order.
#3 The English country estate was a microcosm of the natural and social order, and servants were used to maintain it. The idea that the country estate constituted a nostalgia captured in the pages of Country Life, a weekly magazine, was widespread by 1900.
#4 The English aristocracy was able to preserve its superiority through the patronage of rich Americans who were eager to marry into the aristocracy. The aristocracy rarely encountered or had to work with those who did the work for them.

Sujets

• Social History
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 08 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822501485
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Lucy Lethbridge's Servants
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1902, Queen Alexandra invited 10,000 maids-of-all-work to tea parties across London to celebrate the coronation. The girls were allowed to wear their own clothes rather than their usual uniform of cap and apron.

#2

The English middle-class ideal was reflected in the home, which was full of servants who represented the nation’s sense of natural and social order.

#3

The English country estate was a microcosm of the natural and social order, and servants were used to maintain it. The idea that the country estate constituted a nostalgia captured in the pages of Country Life, a weekly magazine, was widespread by 1900.

#4

The English aristocracy was able to preserve its superiority through the patronage of rich Americans who were eager to marry into the aristocracy. The aristocracy rarely encountered or had to work with those who did the work for them.

#5

The English classes distanced themselves from the pursuit of technological progress, preferring to maintain the superiority of traditional elbow grease over brash, modern contrivances. The most basic technological amenities were not seriously to take root in English country houses until well after the First World War.

#6

The English stately home was completely dependent on lamp men, who would patrol the corridors and light the oil lamps or candles that were the only source of light. Gas was despised because it was seen as a middle-class luxury.

#7

The keeping of servants was not necessarily an indication of wealth, as many families did not consider themselves wealthy without them. The records on servants are often unclear, as they were simultaneously visible and invisible.

#8

The family, who also had a London house in Ladbroke Grove, seemed to spend weeks at a time in Brighton. The boys came home for the school holidays bringing piles of clothes to be washed and mended.

#9

The servant-master relationship was extremely intimate, but it was also distant and suspicious. The middle classes were beginning to feel awkward about their relationship with their servants, who were becoming more and more integrated into society.

#10

In the last year of the nineteenth century, Mrs Alfred Praga, a working journalist and author of self-improving guides for the struggling housewife, published Appearances: How To Keep Them Up on a Limited Income. It was an upbeat book designed to give hope to those women who, like Mrs Praga, were teetering on the abyss of genteel poverty.

#11

The English middle class, which consisted of business, professions, and commerce, had tripled in size by 1900. They had been challenged by the landed classes for decades, but now they were beginning to take over.

#12

The lower-middle class was the backbone of the commonwealth, and they were hard pressed to afford help in the house. They were allowed to enjoy a few pennies to cover the occasional employment of a laundress and a woman to help with the rough.

#13

The Cornhill magazine published a list of budgets for different levels of middle class families. For a family that could afford an annual income of between £1,000 and £3,000, it was recommended that they employ a butler, two maids, a cook, and a governess or nanny.

#14

The villa is the best example of how Victorian and Edwardian domestic life was protected from the outside world by hedges, walls, windows, and blinds. The proliferation of small passages separated the kitchen, pantries, and scullery regions from the main rooms of the house.

#15

The importance of maintaining discretion and the separation between the family at the center of the house and the servants behind the scenes was emphasized in the mid-nineteenth century. This idea of privacy took root.

#16

The design of the home was also rigorously divided between women’s space and men’s. The servants, of course, had their own warren of sculleries, washhouses, attic bedrooms, kitchens, pantries, larders, and store rooms.

#17

The home became a laboratory for the new science of hygiene and health in the late nineteenth century. The work of nineteenth-century scientists and supporters of germ theory, such as Joseph Lister, had led to a mania for sterilisation, which was increasingly interpreted as a key to public health and inner purity.

#18

The gulf between the rich and the poor was marked even more clearly by the gulf between their abilities to keep themselves clean. The poor were viewed as spreaders of disease, while the rich were seen as pure and clean.

#19

The new subject of Domestic Science was taught in state elementary schools from the 1890s, serving the dual purpose of giving women training in hygiene and giving a scientific gloss to the job of domestic service.

#20

The front door was the portcullis of the Edwardian house, and the only people allowed to step over the threshold were the initiated. The footman only opened the door if there were more than one footman, and the parlourmaid opened the door if there were neither a butler nor a footman.

#21

The caste rules of admission were complex and only the properly bohemian or aristocratic could flout them convincingly. The romantic novelist Elinor Glyn was advised early on by her prospective mother-in-law how to treat guests: Army or naval officers, diplomats, clergymen, doctors, and solicitors could be invited to lunch or dinner, but never to lunch or dinner with the servants.

#22

The practice of paying social calls was largely confined to the period between three and six in the afternoon, although they were still generally known as morning calls. The parlourmaid had to change out of her standard print or plain dress and into a dark-colored dress with white cuffs and collar to serve lunch.

#23

The rules on calling were extremely complex. If the lady or gentleman making the call arrived by carriage, they had to send their servant to ask if the lady of the house was at home. If they arrived on foot, they went themselves to the door. If they were told that the lady was not at home, the visitors left cards.

#24

The art of the dinner party was crucial for the aspiring middle classes, as it was a major expenditure. The simplest Edwardian dinner party included two kinds of soup, two fish dishes, two or three meat dishes, two or three savouries, and the same number of sweets.

#25

The dinner party was an important part of the British aristocracy’s life. It allowed them to show off their wealth, and it helped the Pragas, who counted the cost of each daily mutton chop, balance their budget.

#26

Servants in large houses had meals that were beyond their imagination. They would see the food being served in the servants’ hall, and they would just stand and cry wondering if their parents had any food.

#27

The rich have always had a penchant for whimsical requirements out of season and out of sense. The lack of any practical common sense, and the batty obsessions that were nourished and exaggerated by time and leisure, were sources of amusement as well as irritation for many servants.

#28

The American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, trapped from 1895 inside a chilly marriage to the ninth Duke of Marlborough, left a memorable portrait of her early years at Blenheim Palace, in which the maintenance of display had become an end in itself.

#29

The well-run home was a hallmark of the wealthy. The servants had to adhere to strict time-keeping, and there were daily prayers for the family and servants.

#30

The Edwardian child was monitored by an army of nannies and nursemaids.