What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem

by E.S. Turner

This is a lively foray into a world where a gentleman with £2,000 a year was betraying his class if he did not employ six females and five males; where a lady could go to the grave without ever having picked up a nightdress, carried her prayer book or made a pot of tea. It is the story of the housekeeper and the butler, the cook, the lady's maid, the valet and the coachman. Their duties are described in detail, and the story is told of the strife and even pitched battles that ensued between servants and the served. Here is social history from a fascinating angle, packed with droll information lightly handled, with many a moral for our own times.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, 20th Century, 19th Century, 18th Century, Victorian

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2005

Reviews

[Lauren Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting look at the life of servants and the employers who sometimes took care of them and sometimes tortured them. When a tax was placed on servants to pay for their healthcare there were two kinds of protesters--the ones who said it wasn't necessary because they provided their servants with much better healthcare and those who said it wasn't their problem. Turner shows the problems of each kind of employer. He also discusses slavery and indentures. One odd thing was the confusion over the country he is discussing--it seems to be England but he has chapters on America and mentions other places.

[Lucinda Elliot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is light reading, which contains far more salacious gossip about exceptional circumstances than it does about the day-to-day drudgery and unrelenting toil of the majority of the 'Servant Class'. The author's sympathies are at least in general with the servants.
I should have known that it was light and a bit scurrilous from the title; for those in search of light reading on history, it makes an entertaining, easy read. There are some very amusing anecdotes in the book, particularly on the blackmailing demands for tips in prestigious households, of the aggressive demands of footmen for free access to London theatres in the early eighteenth century, and so on.
It does contain some facts and figures about wages,etc, but the historical reasons which forced so many working class people, former peasants and artisans, into becoming servants in households of varying affluence is only slghtly touched upon, ie, the forced enclosures of the common land,etc.
It certainly contains some information that I did not know, but I wish it had more facts and figures, ie, on the changing proportion of the servant class compared to those of rural laboroures throughout the eighteent century, etc.
One outrageous story surrounding a footman has somehow escaped the author's notice; the scandal over Arthur Grey, footman to Griselda Murray's family circa 1720, who went to her room in the dead of night armed with a pistol and sword, possibly with rape in mind (though some have suggested that he may have intended to find her entertaining a lover and use blackmail). The story inspired at least one poem from her former friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Awaiting trial and facing possible execution, he was finally exiled and became a footman in a prestigous household abroad, I believe that the Governor to the Leedward Isles. After that, he 'disappears from history'.
One sentence did annoy me: the author says that feminists made 'impossible claims'. He does not say that the female role as defined by men was impossible. He indicates that the drudgery of the servant in the less affluent households was hard; he does not say in so many words that the demands of their employers were impossible.

[Mike Pinter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book that explains a lot about how society's dependence on the balance between masters and servants has changed over the last 250 years (and figuring it was written 20 years ago, 270 years!) and how this influenced the economies of nations in the British Empire and the North American continent, and the european countries from whose lands citizens migrated seeking a better station in life. As I write I realise that it doesn't touch too heavily on how service in Africa and Asia changed as nations moved away from slavery and sefdom and copied "First World" fashions.
Interesting too, are the references taken from classic literature, including some roman texts.

Very much worth reading!

[Bryn]

I don't know *anything* about Turner except for what he says in this book, but he seems to gladly accept a lot of past ideas about how terrible things happening to women and children were their own fault for being dissolute or depraved or whatever, so after about 70 pages I decided to stop reading this! It's certainly possible he was putting on that voice as a form of humour, I don't think this book is meant to be very serious social history, but I still wasn't enjoying it or actually learning anything. [Oct 2023]

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that this book would be a great resource for anybody trying to get in the mood for writing, say, a historical romance, or steampunk something-or-other. That said, it is clearly not a stringent academic work, as it cites both fiction and nonfiction without always clarifying for the reader which is which. I also have serious reservations about any book that has an entire section devoted to speculating that enslaved people in America in many ways had better lives than their white, free contemporaries working as servants in England. I get that this is an old book, but I just don't have any patience for that kinda nonsense.

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the very first book I read about the history of domestic service in England, following the introduction of Upstairs, Downstairs back in the ‘70s, and it’s still a very good survey, both informative and entertaining. Turner was a journalist, not an academic historian, but he had already produced a series of books on various aspects of upper-level British social history, from life at the Court of St. James to a history of the country’s military officer class. He begins here in the mid-18th century, when the Victorian notion first took form of what a proper servant was supposed to be. (Before the Hanoverian era, master-servant relations were still essentially feudal.) Then he settles in to describe how the servant class was established, why it grew so large, and the sources of friction between those who issued orders (and considered it their natural, God-given right to do so) and those who took them (and generally weren’t as thankful for the opportunity as their employers expected them to be). Even though he frequently finds fault on both sides, it’s obvious that Turner’s sympathies lie with the under-paid and downtrodden servants, not with the overbearing and self-righteous folk they served. He goes into great detail about the roles and functions of the various sorts of servants, from underworked footman and deeply conservative housekeeper to the maid-of-all-work who put in sixteen hours a day, could not leave the house to post a letter without permission, and slept in a corner of the kitchen. He discusses the problem of maintaining the virtue of female servants (though if they got pregnant by the Young Master, it was automatically their fault), and the eventual replacement of menservants by women (who did more work and could be paid less), and how service in a grand house (with perhaps a hundred servants of all types) differed from service as the sole employee in a middle-class home (the latter was far lonelier). He also considers the difference between being in service in Britain and in the United States, where there was no tradition for such a thing and deference was, consequently, heavily looked down upon. The demise of live-in domestic service, of course, resulted from the confluence of rising wages, the availability of industrial and commercial jobs for young women, the introduction of labor-saving home technology, and the great shaking-up the country was given by the Great War. The author’s literate but readable style depends heavily on anecdotes to illustrate the points he makes, mostly taken from contemporary works, so the reader will likely come away with a list of further reading.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I've seen a lot of this information before, scattered across various works, this is a nice summary of how the relationship between masters and servants in Britain's notoriously rigid class system has changed over history. There's a little bit contrasting American situations as well, although almost nothing about how any of this played out on the Continent, let alone elsewhere. Also, the blinkers of the 1960s (when this was originally written, for all that a few lines tacked on have tried to update it) gives this writing its own historical value.

There's a lot of interesting tidbits, from tables of wages to Great House servants' tea rituals to ladies' maids' duties extending to pimple removal. Quite a lot of this is presented through anecdotes, which keeps the text from becoming too dry, but often leads to it being rather rambling. The author has tried to organize his thoughts, but they do have a way of escaping from him at times.

Certain racial attitudes, including referring to all Irish maids as a uniform block of dull "Bridgets", are a little grating (although he tries--not really successfully, but tries--to handle the fashion of the "black boy" sensitively).

It's the kind of topic that can be very interesting if you're already interested, and a valuable resource to armchair historians. If your ears did not immediately perk up upon hearing the topic, it's not absorbing enough to drag you in, though.

[Tiago Domingues · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want to read if the servants of a big manor house know where the butler kept the key to the wine cellar, or if they threw large parties when the master was not at home, read this book.
English Social History at its best.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It was informative and easy to read. Anything you need to or want to know about servants is here.

[Templehurst · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative and thorough; awkwardly (and delightfully) full of nostalgic snobbery.