Servants
Subtitle: a downstairs history of Britain from the nineteenth century to modern times
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York; London
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 385
ISBN-13: 9780393241099
Description: A compassionate and discerning exploration of the complex relationship between the server, the served, and the world they lived in, Servants opens a window onto British society from the Edwardian period to the present.
Table of contents: title: Preface; title: The symbolic pantomime; title: "A sort of silence and embarrassment"; title: The dainty life; title: "A seat in the hall"; title: Centralising the egg yolks; title: Popinjays and mob caps; title: The desire for perfection; title: "Some poor girl's got to go up and down, up and down"; title: The sacred trust; title: The ideal village; title: "Silent, obsequious and omnipresent"; title: Bowing and scraping; title: The age of ambivalence; title: Out of a cage; title: "Don't think your life will be any different to mine"; title: "It was exploitation but it worked"; title: "Tall, strong, healthy and keen to work"; title: The mechanical maid; title: Outer show and inner life; title: A vast machine that has forgotten how to stop working; title: Bachelor establishments are notoriously comfortable; title: The question of the inner life; title: "Do they really drink out of their saucers?"; title: "Of alien origin"; title: A new Jerusalem; title: A new and useful life; title: The housewife militant; title: "The change : it must have been terrible for them"; title: The shape of things to come; title: "We don't want them days again"; title: "We've moved to the front"; title: "I'd never done what I liked, never in all my life"; title: "We like it because the past is not so worrying as the news"; title: Notes; title: Bibliography