The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant by Pamela Horn

England has long had people in the job of servants, both to royalty and nobility and the upper classes. However, servants in Victorian times were different from the servants which preceeded them, and with the passing of Queen Victoria and the coming of the first World War, the institution would be forever changed and eventually die out as the young people who once spent their lives in servitude to the royals, upper class and middle class grew less and less interested in toiling away their days in the service of another family and left for jobs working in shops and factories, where they had more free time and they felt their lives were their own.

Today, you can still occasionally find people doing the same jobs that servants once did, but the institutions of servants as you found them in the Victorian era are dead. The English royal family may employ a butler, but he will be different from those of an earlier age, and he will probably not be living in the castle. Nor will his life be as constrained.

This book sets out to show us what servitude in the Victorian era was like, by contrasting it to eras before and after. Before Victorian times, most servants were male, a hand-me-down from medieval times, where noblemen had male followers who served as their private armies. Even after this, male servants were prized because they added to a family's consequence, and you were not considered of high class if you didn't have a footman or two following you everywhere, or a valet to dress you and so on.

However, thanks to a tax on male retainers to pay for the costs of the American Revolution for the British, families found it was more cost-effective to pay for female servants instead of male, and within a hundred years or so, the number of men in service declined precipitously, and the number of women in service rose dramatically. Whereas before a family might have had two or three women in service, by the start of the Victorian period, women outnumbered men by two or three to one, or perhaps even more, depending on the household. Male servants became more nominal, from retainers to butlers, footmen and valets. Male servants were still the highest positions in a house, but there were less of them. Families that might once have had 20 or 30 footmen reduced the size of their footmen servants to five or six at the start of the Victorian, and perhaps only one to three by the end of the period.

There were problems with employing more female servants, of course. Some fell prey to seduction by either the master of the house or another male servant and were usually turned out with nothing more than the clothes on their back when they became pregnant. And since the women of the house would not hire a servant with such a stain of fallen morality, once a woman lost her position, she would usually end up on the streets as a beggar. Though this was not uncommon, there were other bad things about servitude to a family, including the other servants who could take a dislike to someone and make their life hell.

As the period went on, there came a similar tax on female servants, and with the greater number of jobs opening up outside the traditional duties of servitude, many young people came to view the service profession as something to be avoided at all costs. Working in a shop or a factory may pay less than being a housemaid, maid of all work or tweeny, but many felt such work allowed them to retain their dignity, and such employers made less demands on the lives of their workers than working as a servant for a family did. For example, a servant position may allow a woman a half-day holiday, but require she be in by 10 PM that night, whereas a factory worker's employer did not care when she came home, as long as she was able to get to work on time the next day.

The book also covers the time after the Victorian era, when servitude as an institution finally died, mainly slain along with the many men who entered World War I on the British side. Many of those who marched off to war and returned later, or the women who took male jobs and roles while the men were away, saw no use in returning to the service profession. And with advances in machines that did the jobs once done by servants (Washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners, and so on), it became cheaper by far to buy the machine and do it yourself.

Victorian servitude was a strange institution, but this book covers it well, as well as the types of servitude that came both before and after. But the attitudes that led to the end of servitude still exist, and even if it were brought back this instant, I doubt you could find that many people who would apply for such jobs. It was fascinating, though, seeing how the times and attitudes of people changed, and reading the words of those who served and those of the people they served.

This book was probably required reading at some college course, but as a writer, I found it deeply fascinating in its own right, as I had never thought much about the institution. I also find that several writers have gotten it wrong when writing of servants in their books, and I know that after reading this, I will be paying more attention to how servants are written in future books I read.