Servants
During the Victorian period, servants were ubiquitous. While in the United States only the most wealthy of families would have so much as a single servant, and he or she probably "lived out," in Great Britain, any family who could afford the extra help, hired it. And a good many families could afford this: the average wage was so low that a household with an income of a hundred pounds could afford a live-in servant. (Floud, pg. 141) It was the grander houses, however, which hosted large crews of servants, each with carefully assigned jobs and requirements. There were the jobs that one aspired to, that a maid might work her way up to through working in middle-class household. Being a Servant was a completely respectable job in Great Britain at this point. While servants in America were primarily newly-immigrated young girls waiting to marry, or their brothers waiting to get a better job, British servants turned serving into a career. One might start out as a footman and work one's way up to porter, and then to under-butler, until finally one is the butler of the house. It presented a much more profitable, not to mention more secure, job than farming, if one could get work in the field. This, however, was hard: a large house demanded the finest of staff.

Still, servants lived in a different world, both literally and figuratively, from their employers. There was the front part of the house, where the family lived in their aristocratic splendor, and then there was the back half: the servant's world. More important than this geographic separation was a separation into what can only be seen as an entirely different society, with its own hierarchy, mores, and customs. It is possible that servants took their hierarchy more seriously than their masters upstairs did. The Marchioness of Bath writes about the servants at Longleat that: "A strange ritual took place over the midday meal in the servant's hall. The under servants first trooped in and remained standing in their places until the upper servants had filed in in order of domestic status. After the first course the upper servants left in the following manner: When the joint, carved by the house steward, had been eaten and second helpings offered, it was ceremoniously removed by the steward's room footman, who carried it out with great pomp, followed by the upper servants, who then retired to the steward's room for the remainder of their meal; while the housemaids and sewing-maids scurried off with platefuls of pudding to eat in their own sitting-rooms." (Balsan, pg. 61) When asked what she sees as being "the reason of things that have nothing to do with reasons," such as why the servants have this particular hierarchy, the Dowager Duchess of Tintagel, in Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers, says "What would happen next, as I said to her, in a house where the housekeeper did take her meals with the upper servants?" Only a foreigner (the subject who the Dowager is speaking of is her daughter-in-law, Nan, modeled on Consuelo Vanderbuilt, the 9th Duchess of Marlborough) would question such an age-old ritual. It was unfathomable to the English mind that this order might be broken: it could only result in full-scale chaos.

Perhaps this is true. One in four households had servants of some sort, and it was considered to be a more than respectable job: one made a career out of being a servant, moving up in this sacred hierarchy. It took incredible amounts of organization to keep Blenheim Palace presentable with just six housemaids: if one of them were to become too problematic, it is likely that chaos would have indeed ensued. The house servants, the ones who kept the house running, can be divided into three main groups:

Explore: Menservants Explore: The Distaff Explore: The Kitchen Staff
This categorization excludes a number of other servants, especially the ladies' maids: each lady of the household would have her own maid, who was responsible for taking care of both the lady and her belongings. The master of the house would have had much the same thing in the form of his valet, who was in charge of keeping the master and his belongings in order.

It was the duty of the mistress of the household to watch over her servants, to keep them free from moral corruption. This was, of course, impossible, despite the fact that it was taken very seriously. Many women, particularly foreign-born brides not used to this constant concern and monitoring, despaired at this concept: Lady Curzon, nee Mary Leiter of Washington D.C., wrote her mother saying "English Servants are FIENDS. They seem to plot among themselves.... I should like to hang a few and burn the rest at the stake." (MacColl, pg. 199)

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