New Worlds: Faithful (and Unfaithful) Servants

Servants and aristocrats: wildly different on the social scale, yet often found together.

Not that aristocrats are the only people with servants. Over the years of this Patreon I’ve made repeated mention of how labor-intensive things are in a pre-industrial society; well, who was doing that labor? If you could afford to outsource it to another person, you often did — and the threshold of affording it was a good deal lower than you might think.

Which is still true to some extent now. (We may have laundry machines, but the clothes don’t fold themselves, and I’m still waiting for a self-cleaning bathroom.) The scale, however, has shifted massively. I’m willing to bet that most of the people reading this essay don’t have more than maybe a cleaner who comes in once a week or once a month, and probably not even that. Regular staff are very much a luxury for the rich.

It’s always been a sliding scale, though. The household of an eighteenth-century European nobleman might include everything from stable-boys mucking out the horse stalls without ever seeing their lord and master up close to footmen whose job was to stand around in decorative livery and open doors when needed. Way down at the other end of the spectrum, a middling household in that time period might just have a single maid-of-all-work responsible for a wide variety of jobs.

In both cases, this isn’t just about practicality; it’s also about status signaling. Being able to hire that maid put you above your neighbors who had to empty the ashes from their own fireplaces. At the top end of the scale, being able to dress and pay those footmen showed you had so much money you could blow it on people being useless, and having hangers-on of any kind has always made you look more like a more important individual. But the requirements of such signaling can lead in some pretty stupid directions, producing elites who either don’t know how to perform simple tasks, or who refuse to do so because they feel it’s beneath them. Even the mistress of that middling household might put on airs about how she can’t possibly be expected to change her child’s nappies or even close the curtains with her own two hands now that she has “her girl” to do that for her.

At least having servants to perform those duties was a step up from using slaves instead. The list of domestic responsibilities, however, was and is much the same. Cooking, laundry, house-cleaning, child-rearing, grounds-keeping, maintenance of vehicles — even getting dressed, when clothing was elaborate enough that you couldn’t accomplish that on your own. Not all of these jobs still need doing today, especially as things like furnaces replace fireplaces, but quite a few remain. We might not describe the people who take care of them as “servants” anymore, because that word implies a hierarchy we’re supposedly past, but the core concept hasn’t really changed.

The dynamics around that concept, however, very much have. For one thing, different people tend to work as domestic help nowadays. We have laws against employing children, whereas girls in particular used to “go into service” quite young — even single-digit young — and frequently left that line of work when they married, because now they had to go do the same tasks at home. Also, servants used to be predominantly lower-class members of the same ethnic group as their employers, while the modern increase in immigration means there’s now a distinct division in who is working for whom.

Furthermore, there’s a greater likelihood now that even the very wealthy have their staff commuting in each day for work, rather than living in the house or elsewhere on the property. Motor transportation and the kind of automation that speed tasks up mean there’s less need to have someone right there at all times, ready to work from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep. (You don’t need someone to build up the fire for you in the middle of the night if you can just flick on a light switch or turn up the heat.) Servants who dwell with their employers have been always much more liable to be exploited: worked unreasonably long hours, denied privileges and comforts, physically and sexually harassed and assaulted. Those perils unfortunately haven’t gone away — especially for servants who are undocumented immigrants — but legal measures and the ability to escape to your own place at the end of the day have at least provided some small measure of protection.

Having servants around at all hours intensifies the dynamic that is, to me, the most interesting for fiction purposes: servants hear everything. They’re present when their employers aren’t performing for guests, so they see all the human foibles that are masked in public, witness the reactions normally hidden behind a facade of politeness. Even without actively eavesdropping, they overhear arguments and secrets being shared. Cleaning a room may turn up stashes of money, concealed treasures, letters from a lover. More than a few novels make use of this access, with characters being hired on as servants in order to investigate a house, or paying the staff for gossip and private information.

Of course, that’s a double-edged sword. While some employers treat their servants so much like inhuman furniture that they never bother to worry about being observed or overheard, others are fully aware of the security vulnerabilities walking around their houses. The magnanimous ones pay and treat their staff well enough to ensure their loyalty, but many resort to various forms of threat instead: of physical punishment, of docked pay, of being turned out without reference. That last is no joke (and poses a barrier, often ignored in fiction, to that “become a maid for investigative purposes” plan): precisely because you’re giving these people so much access to your person and belongings, it’s important to know who you’re hiring. Recommendations from previous employers or other trustworthy sources like a hiring bureau are vital for this, and a servant who can’t produce any such thing may have a hard time finding another job. Since even honest servants know they might be accused of theft the moment the mistress can’t find her favorite earrings, many of them will be chary of doing anything genuinely untoward.

Which means that elites and their servants are in a constant, fragile, contentious dance, with each depending heavily on the other in their own respective ways. That relationship can wind up as anything from the trope of the “faithful old retainer” who’s served the family for the last fifty years to households like that of the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle, whose wife Jane went through thirty-nine maids in thirty-four years (not counting temps) and complained endlessly of her inability to find good help. Whatever form the dynamic takes, it can be fodder for a good story!