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Career servants in houses like Downton identified passionately with the families they served; the family’s status was their status. The servants lived surrogate lives vicariously through the aristocratic families; they had none of their own. Married servants were rare, and a bit awkward, and married live-in servants with children were unimaginable.
Upper servants enjoyed their own pecking order that, in the phrase of the time, “aped their betters.” The butler and lady’s maid and housekeeper had the best seats at the servants’ table. Lowly maids might have to serve tea to the higher servants the way their upstairs masters were served.
Not all servants were treated anything like decently. Servants in middle-class households, maids-of-all-work, submitted to a dawn-to-dusk drudgery very different from the stratified and specialized servant jobs in aristocratic houses. And wages so low that into the 20th century, even middlingly prosperous families could afford at least one servant
In this country, the rich families of the Gilded Age sought desperately to copy the English aristocracy. That’s one reason that Cora, the Countess of Grantham, is American. The daughters of the plutocracy became “dollar duchesses,” bringing million-dollar dowries to impoverished aristocrats who, in turn, endowed these new-world ladies with old-world titles. It was usually a cold-blooded business. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s mother trained her from childhood to marry well, beating her with a whip when she disobeyed and locking her in her room when she refused to marry the exalted Duke of Marlborough. Once the new duchess had provided her husband with “an heir and a spare,” as she coined the phrase, they went their separate ways and eventually split. It was a diamond-studded tragedy.
Even middle-class Americans had at least one servant. In the 1940s, Emily Post was still writing advice columns about managing in "a servantless house," and Julia Child’s cookbook was likewise for "the servantless American cook."
A lot of things changed that: war, labor-saving devices, access to higher education.
The same thing would happen in Britain, too. I haven’t seen the upcoming season of “Downton Abbey” (which has already aired across the pond), but knowing a bit of the history of the age, I can predict that plunging land values, changing labor markets and an altered political landscape will mean a Crawley comeuppance.
But the aristocracy has survived in Britain in some form for centuries. It can be clever and more adaptable than you might think. It might be poor compared with its forebears. Its offspring might be heroin addicts and naff tattooed layabouts. But it is still its lordly self. Don’t count His Lordship out yet.
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Facebookers, get over yourselves
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Upper servants enjoyed their own pecking order that, in the phrase of the time, “aped their betters.” The butler and lady’s maid and housekeeper had the best seats at the servants’ table. Lowly maids might have to serve tea to the higher servants the way their upstairs masters were served.
In this country, the rich families of the Gilded Age sought desperately to copy the English aristocracy. That’s one reason that Cora, the Countess of Grantham, is American. The daughters of the plutocracy became “dollar duchesses,” bringing million-dollar dowries to impoverished aristocrats who, in turn, endowed these new-world ladies with old-world titles. It was usually a cold-blooded business. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s mother trained her from childhood to marry well, beating her with a whip when she disobeyed and locking her in her room when she refused to marry the exalted Duke of Marlborough. Once the new duchess had provided her husband with “an heir and a spare,” as she coined the phrase, they went their separate ways and eventually split. It was a diamond-studded tragedy.
Even middle-class Americans had at least one servant. In the 1940s, Emily Post was still writing advice columns about managing in "a servantless house," and Julia Child’s cookbook was likewise for "the servantless American cook."
A lot of things changed that: war, labor-saving devices, access to higher education.
The same thing would happen in Britain, too. I haven’t seen the upcoming season of “Downton Abbey” (which has already aired across the pond), but knowing a bit of the history of the age, I can predict that plunging land values, changing labor markets and an altered political landscape will mean a Crawley comeuppance.
But the aristocracy has survived in Britain in some form for centuries. It can be clever and more adaptable than you might think. It might be poor compared with its forebears. Its offspring might be heroin addicts and naff tattooed layabouts. But it is still its lordly self. Don’t count His Lordship out yet.
ALSO:
Facebookers, get over yourselves
California’s new laws: guns, cars, dogs
David Horsey and 2012: The year in cartoons
