- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: The History Press Ltd; New Ed edition (15 Feb 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 075093560X
- ISBN-13: 978-0750935609
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 321,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
In 1851 there were over a million servants in Britain. This book reveals first-hand tales of put-upon servants, who often had to rise hours before dawn to lay fires, heat water and prepare meals for their employers, and then work into the small hours. Yet there are also heart warming stories of personal devotion, and reward, and of how the servants enjoyed themselves in their time off. There are moments of great poignancy as well as hilarity: a steward's dawning realisation that the house keeper he befriended is a thief; a young footman chasing a melon as it rolls through a castle's corridors into the moat; the smart mans servant weeping at the station as he bids farewell to his mother. This was an era when footmen were paid extra for being six foot or over, and female servants had to wear black bonnets to church. Drawing on letters, diaries, and autobiographies "Keeping Their Place" provides a vivid insight into the day-by-day lives of country house servants between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
About the Author
Pamela Sambrook is a freelance lecturer, writer and consultant to the Heritage Industry and is a Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University. She is the co-editor (with Peter Brears) of The Country House Kitchen: Skills and Equipment for Food Provisioning, 1700-1900 and the author of The Country House Servant, both for Sutton Publishing.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
There is some fascinating material in this well-researched book, drawing on servants' letters and autobiographies (diaries unfortunately are rare - they wouldn't have time to write them!) from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.
This is life behind the baize door in detail ... food, rules, liveries, lists of Christmas gifts, accounts of servants' balls and entertainments, drunkenness and misbehaviour, fears for their insecure futures, a manservant's tears at bidding goodbye to his mother after a brief holiday at home and fun as a melon rolls off a platter and is pursued by a young footman as it careers down a long corridor and into the castle moat.
Unfortunately, Sambrook is not a gifted writer and this book is less than the sum of its parts; it reads like an academic dissertation, or a shopping list ... one quotation after another. Most irritatingly, quotations are not always dated which gives a muddled feel to the book ... surely we need to know if something happened in the 1830s/70s/90s or was it as late as the 1920s. Sometimes you can work this out for yourself by flipping back to the index/bibliography ... but can the general reader be bothered?
No explanation in my paperback edition as to who Pamela Sambrook is; a university academic, I'd guess, rather rather than a writer. If only her research material could have been handed over to someone like Kathryn Hughes who would have made a better book of it.
This is life behind the baize door in detail ... food, rules, liveries, lists of Christmas gifts, accounts of servants' balls and entertainments, drunkenness and misbehaviour, fears for their insecure futures, a manservant's tears at bidding goodbye to his mother after a brief holiday at home and fun as a melon rolls off a platter and is pursued by a young footman as it careers down a long corridor and into the castle moat.
Unfortunately, Sambrook is not a gifted writer and this book is less than the sum of its parts; it reads like an academic dissertation, or a shopping list ... one quotation after another. Most irritatingly, quotations are not always dated which gives a muddled feel to the book ... surely we need to know if something happened in the 1830s/70s/90s or was it as late as the 1920s. Sometimes you can work this out for yourself by flipping back to the index/bibliography ... but can the general reader be bothered?
No explanation in my paperback edition as to who Pamela Sambrook is; a university academic, I'd guess, rather rather than a writer. If only her research material could have been handed over to someone like Kathryn Hughes who would have made a better book of it.
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