Life Below Stairs: The Real Lives of Servants, the Edwardian Era to 1939

by Pamela Horn

By the end of the 1920s domestic service remained the largest female occupation in Britain. We view it today as an undesirable job, owing to the class divide it has come to represent, and this is reflected in the portrayals of mistresses and servants in books and on the screen in such dramas as Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey. But what do we really know about how girls felt when taking up these positions in other people's houses, or how they were treated? Pamela Horn uses first-hand accounts and reminiscences, as well as official records and newspaper reports, to extract the truth about the lives and status of men and women in domestic service from 1900 to 1939.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

282 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2012

About the author

Pamela Horn is an historian specialising in Victorian social history. The author of acclaimed books on rural life, servant lives and childhood, she lectured on economic and social history at Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University, for over twenty years.

Reviews

[Mandee Massay]

thought I was getting below the stairs, a memoir.
this was okay, if you really want to learn the specifics about English servants. I don't, I just want an interesting story which would may teach me something along the way.
so not for me, but my mistake. (I dnf, but again, that's on me).
if needed to do research for a book or movie, this would probably be helpful.

[tara bomp]

I never got to finish this one because I was too slow and it was a library book, but the half I read I found fascinating. The thing about government programmes to try and make more people domestic servants because there was a shortage and they were so essential for the upper classes is fascinating - leading to things like them being excluded from unemployment insurance.

[Shelly Steffler]

A factual and sometimes disturbing account of servants in the UK prior to WWI. Non-fiction doesn't often hold my attention, but this book did!