The Problem

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW (298 pp.)--E. S. Turner--St. Martin's ($4.95).

The word "servant" dangles these days on the cliff of obsolescence; housewives have "help" when they have it at all, and are diplomatic about giving orders (not "Clean up the living room," according to one domestic counselor, but "Let's clean up the living room"). One of the most fictional characters in modern fiction is Jeeves, and his creator, P. G. Wodehouse. mourns the extinction of that noble breed of "butlers who weighed 250 pounds on the hoof, butlers with three chins and bulging abdomens, butlers with large gooseberry eyes and that austere butlerine manner which has passed so completely away."

But moderns who are tempted to look back to the Day of the Servant as a golden age will find remedial reading in a new book called What the Butler Saw: 250 Years of the Servant Problem, by E. S. Turner. Having too many servants was as bad in its way as having none at all.

Matched Footmen. A couple of centuries ago, writes Turner, a gentleman with a comfortable income of -L-2,000 a year "was betraying his class if he employed fewer than six women servants and five menservants; middle-class ladies in their 90s could boast that they had never made a pot of tea in their lives, a wealthy Englishman had a Frenchman to stir his soup, another Frenchman to comb his hair, an Italian to make his pastry, and half a dozen Englishmen to iron his Times, and his wife had a Frenchwoman to powder her back and an Englishman to carry her prayer book."

Domestic service in the 18th century was full of fun for any country boy or girl--there were so many of them that nobody had to work very hard. Sets of tall, matched footmen preceding one's sedan chair (the Countess of Northumberland had nine) were an 18th century equivalent of his-and-her Cadillacs. With little to do and plenty to drink, footmen frequently wrought havoc among the maids, cooks and nurses, but no one liked to break up a set of footmen when things got out of hand, so it was usually the seduced girl who was sacked. The elite of this species were the running footmen, whose duties were to carry messages--sometimes 50 miles or more across country--and to precede the master's carriage, heralding the approach of a man of substance.

The Amphibious Life. The difficulty maids had in defending their chastity was immortalized by Samuel Richardson in Pamela. In fact, so much uninhibited dalliance went on belowstairs that Hack Writer Daniel Defoe found the maids fair game. Nothing is more common, he wrote, "than to find these creatures one week in a good family and the next in a brothel. This amphibious life makes 'em fit for neither, for if the bawd use them ill, away they trip to service and if their mistress gives 'em a wry word, whip they're at a bawdyhouse again, so that in effect they neither make good whores nor good servants."

Toward the end of the 18th century, servants were so numerous and idle in upper-class houses that they became a grievous social problem. House guests and even dinner guests were cadged mercilessly for tips. "It was customary," writes Turner, "for the servants to line up in the hall in a double row, like musketeers, and to extend their palms quite openly. The guest would be expected to disburse sums from left to right alternately as he headed for the door."

Divine Drudgery. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, downgrading hand labor, raising up a new-rich middle class, and widening the gulf between servant and master. The reduced status of the servant combined with the mealymouthed piety of the 19th century to produce a quantity of parables and poems designed to convince the lower classes that drudgery was part of the divine order and should be performed with diligence and thanks. A New Testament text, very popular for framing and hanging in the servants' quarters, was Ephesians 6: 5-6.* Such sentiments persisted into the 20th century, even in the more egalitarian U.S.; as late as 1927, Turner reports, John D. Rockefeller Sr. declared his admiration for a poem that began:

Lord of the pots and pipkins, since I have no time to be

A saint by doing lovely things and vigilling with Thee,

By watching in the twilight dawn, and storming Heaven's gates,

Make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates.

World War I drained off many servants, and World War II all but finished the job. After World War II, the New York State department of labor checked on the maidservants who had gone to other work in the war effort and found that only one in 73 was willing to go back into domestic service. In Britain, as late as 1931, some 5% of British households had a resident servant; but in 1951 the figure had dropped to 1%, and it is still dropping.

Economist Michael Young predicts that by the end of the century, automation and technology will have shunted so much unskilled labor into the domestic market that a new Age of the Servant may dawn. But all signs still indicate that "help" is more likely to be electronic than organic.

* "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ. Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart."

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