Book #13 "Life Below the Stairs: Domestic Servants in Edwardian England"

I am speeding my way through books so needed to catch up on some blogging before I got too far behind. I started one more silly Jojo Moyes book "The Last Letter from Your Lover" and dumped it after the first two chapters. 

However, I have been meeting my goal of reading one non-fiction book to learn something new and alternating it with one fiction. A few times I have read novels back to back, but in this case I read non-fictions back to back. The one for this blog is "Life Below Stairs" by Alison Maloney.

Servant life in England is not something that is, well, my cup of tea. I'm not an Abbey Downtown fan, or Downtown Abbey...whatever it is called. I don't really think of servants that much. My grandma has had the same faithful housekeeper for the last 40 or 50 years in Mexico, but she is more family than housekeeper. She is treated with the utmost respect and treats the family with formal respect as well. She played with me as a little girl and would let me watch the water from her mopping swirl down the drain in the yard. As I grew older she began keeping her distance. This is the only real experience I had with any "help". My aunts all had maids come and go. Some lived with them or had their own separate house on the family property. But in Mexico, it is pretty common to have servants. I never understood why until I read this book.

People are very poor in some countries. Poverty doesn't ruin a person though, it doesn't have to in most cases. In many countries where there is wide spread poverty the option of being a servant is a decent way to earn a living. In Edwardian England it was like this. Here are 5 things I learned from this book:

1. Female servants had to save to buy their aprons, hats, collars and cuffs. They were expected to look sharp and clean at all times. If they didn't have the uniform they would often work till they had enough. Having money for the uniform itself was an achievement.

2. There was hierarchy within the servants: the top of the chain was the housekeeper (for the women) who had all the keys to the house. She must be a very trustworthy woman. The top for the men was the butler. He kept all the silverware and the liquors in the house in order and slept at the foot of the wine cellar to protect the booze.

3. The lowest servant was the scullery maid who cleaned the toilet pots, the chimney and usually got beaten around by the cook.

4. Female servants were not allowed to meet with any suitors. It was considered inappropriate. However the only socially acceptable reason to leave a masters house was marriage. I'm not sure how they were supposed to fall in love with the cheese delivery guy if they couldn't really speak to him? "Hallo Harry, would ye mind bringing a strong cheddahr if ye luv me?" 

5. Some servants did marry their masters. But rarely was the case. Marriage out of class wasn't accepted. However, most masters did take advantage of the teenage girls that worked for them. And if the girl got pregnant she was sent packing with no hope of employment, usually left to prostitution. Many girls tried very sad ways to end their pregnancy.

6. Servants in England were harder to find as factory positions opened paying much more money and allowing servants one day off a week. If they worked in a home they had 18 hour days and one half evening off a month.

Ok, so the way this book was written wasn't the best. It was scattered in each chapter with tales of this and that and tidbits of facts. I feel as though it could have been better structured to focus on various aspects of domestic life. It also could have had some more fact based evidence, especially since periodicals from "The Times" are so readily available online to backtrack advertisements for servants, articles of servants and so forth. It seems as though this book was tossed together to capitalize on Downtown Abbey fans. 

I would give it a 7/10.