The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, by Pamela Horn (St. Martin’s, 221 pp., $10.95). These days, the inhibition and hypocrisy quotient in popular attitudes toward cleaning women is about as high as it was in attitudes toward prostitutes a century ago. Guilty desires . . . bravado self-justifications (“I never ask her to do anything I wouldn’t do myself”) . . . hidden hatreds . . . The syndrome is very familiar. Many people, indulging their fantasies of devoted old retainers who do wash windows and do not demand to be driven to and from the bus stop, will be disappointed to discover that even the golden age wasn’t 18 karat. Pamela Horn’s thoughtful history of domestic service in Victorian England provides, to be sure, numerous examples of servile devotion, but it also describes the complexity of forces—legal, economic, religious, and social—that were required to produce servants and keep them below stairs. However, this is no one-sided indictment of the Haves for what they do to the Have-Nots. Though it describes the institutionalized tyrannies and illicit brutalities visited upon servants by their masters, the book gives equal time to the wrongs perpetrated by the employee upon the employer—a considerable number of thefts and not a few murders. And as a final demonstration of scholarly impartiality, there are even accounts of situations in which everybody was happy.

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Anne Crutcher

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The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, by Pamela Horn (St. Martin’s, 221 pp., $10.95). These days, the inhibition and hypocrisy quotient in popular attitudes toward cleaning women is about as high as it was in attitudes toward prostitutes a century ago. Guilty desires . . . bravado self-justifications (“I never ask her to do anything I wouldn’t do myself”) . . . hidden hatreds . . . The syndrome is very familiar. Many people, indulging their fantasies of devoted old retainers who do wash windows and do not demand to be driven to and from the bus stop, will be disappointed to discover that even the golden age wasn’t 18 karat. Pamela Horn’s thoughtful history of domestic service in Victorian England provides, to be sure, numerous examples of servile devotion, but it also describes the complexity of forces—legal, economic, religious, and social—that were required to produce servants and keep them below stairs. However, this is no one-sided indictment of the Haves for what they do to the Have-Nots. Though it describes the institutionalized tyrannies and illicit brutalities visited upon servants by their masters, the book gives equal time to the wrongs perpetrated by the employee upon the employer—a considerable number of thefts and not a few murders. And as a final demonstration of scholarly impartiality, there are even accounts of situations in which everybody was happy.