Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [5]
The struggles of servants, their right to be respected as distinct individuals, and their dependent and often vulnerable status, were a particular focus for the eighteenth-century English novelist – even if sometimes viewed as tragicomic. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) begins with a pretty young woman taken into service as a companion, prior to her seduction by one of the sons of the house, which leads to her extraordinary and picaresque career.
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741) describes the efforts of an attractive maid to resist being compromised by her young master after the death of his mother; she holds out for marriage and in the end succeeds. Henry Fielding considered this tale so pious, and its outcome so unlikely, that he wrote a parody, Shamela, and the perhaps better known sequel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), about her fictional and equally virtuous brother.
The hero of Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771) is a worthy young man who is taken on as a footman and serves his master faithfully until he finds eventually that he is his employer’s long-overlooked natural son. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8) hums with the curious intimacy of the lives of both servants and employers. One of the central figures, the clever but flirtatious governess, Becky Sharp, is contrasted with the more traditional, long-serving, country-house servants of her baronet master, Sir Rawdon Crawley, whose younger son she successfully marries.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) offers another vivid portrayal of the path of the educated single woman in the role of a governess, this time in a remote country house, working alongside a housekeeper and a staff, often in the absence of their master. The same is true of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), although he can hardly have had the first-hand insight that Charlotte Brontë brought to her novel.
John Galsworthy’s The Country House, set in 1891 and published in 1907, opens with a description of the coachman, first footman and second groom, the latter two in ‘in long livery coats with silver buttons, their appearance slightly relieved by the rakish cock of their top hats’, waiting for a train bringing guests for a house party,23 a defining feature of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century country-house life.
How realistic were these portrayals? We cannot be sure. In 1894 the novelist George Moore published the fictional – and improbable – account of a maidservant, Esther Waters, seduced and made pregnant by another servant. She is disgraced and cast out, but later returns to marry her seducer and even to care for her original, pious mistress who has been financially nearly ruined and is living in a few rooms of her once-opulent country house.
Despite his own upbringing in an Irish country house, making him familiar with being waited on by servants, George Moore is said to have paid his London charlady to fill him in on a maidservant’s life while he was writing the book.24 Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930) paints a brilliant portrait of country-house life, in which the young duke derives considerable emotional security from the servants who have brought him up, is an essential part of his character, based on her own memories of a childhood at a very well-staffed Knole.
It is perhaps the novels of the interwar years that contribute most to our imagined version of a servant-supported lifestyle. Think of Daphne du Maurier’s chilling portrayal of a sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in Rebecca, or Evelyn Waugh’s mysterious butler Phibrick in Decline and Fall (1928), or his depiction of Lord Sebastian Flyte’s touching pre-war visit to his nanny in Brideshead Revisited (1945). In contrast, whilst Agatha Christie’s novels teem with companions, secretaries, maids, cooks, butlers and gardeners, they are rarely more than cut-out characters.
Famously, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960) focused