The EconomistPublished: December 17, 2011THE cook was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went. Sakis epigram, from Reginald on Besetting Sins, has lasted well, but when it was published in 1904, readers would have felt not just its wit but its bite. This was the era of Britains Servant Problem: middle-class dinner parties buzzed not with school admissions and house prices but with the shortage of decent help, and its tendency to stalk off at the slightest provocation. (The cook in question drank, and on a raw Wednesday morning, in a few ill-chosen words, her mistress had said so to her face.)Cooks always drank. Too often tyrant, virago and frequently heavy drinker, all in one, they get their own chapter in The Servant Problem: An Attempt at its Solution, published in 1899. The description of the problemcases of disease and deformity caused by the inefficiency and carelessness of nurses and nursemaids, bold-faced girls in employment agencies with the cheek to question prospective employers about hours and perksis more convincing than the solution: homes where ladies would be cared for by apprentice maids. Servants have broken my spirit and ruined my health, one friend tells the author, who went under the name of An Experienced Mistress. They are necessary evils, another moans.In this sectionThe Company that ruled the wavesFrog-hunters of the Western GhatsThe gameA path through time immemorialHow Luther went viralThe faith (and doubts) of our fathersThe servant problemWhy have servants?Pirate, colonist, slaveA Riche historyLittle red cardSun Tzu and the art of soft powerThe one-shot societyRetail therapyBrewed forceThe wisdom of crowdsPortrait of the artist as an entrepreneurSeven seconds of fireReprintsRelated topicsUnited StatesSao PauloBrazilEuropeUnited KingdomMistresses have always complained about servants: employment inevitably creates difficulties, but the relationship is trickier when the workplace is the employers home. The combination of physical proximity and class difference offers a wealth of dramatic possibilities, as the writers of novels and television programmes discovered long ago. The Help, a novel of black servants and white mistresses in the American south in the 1960s, has sold 5m copies and has spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; this year Downton Abbey, a British soap based on relations between aristocrats and servants in a grand Yorkshire house, has gripped many millions around the world and garnered five Emmy awards. The drama is set around the time of World War I, when the servant problem was shifting the balance of power, and heightening tensions, between those above and below stairs.In 1881 the British census had found 1.25m women, in round numbers, working in domestic service, by far the largest category of employed women. The demand for skivvies, or maids-of-all-work, went on rising for decades, as a newly created professional middle class looked for the servants their betters had always had. But the supply of uneducated village girls such households would have employed was drying up. From 1880 to 1918 the school-leaving age rose in stages from 10 to 14.Meanwhile, new options were becoming available for working women, in shops, offices and factories.