An Interesting Whatsit
Nov. 14th, 2010 03:04 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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indeedsir_backupSorry, not an update, but a little snippet I just had to share. I bought Bill Bryson's "At Home" the other day (a history of "the ordinary things of life as found in a comfortable home"). I haven't started reading it yet, but when I was skimming through it, I found a very interesting paragraph about servants:
"It was unquestionably a strange world. Servants constituted a class of humans whose existences were fundamentally devoted to making certain that another class of humans would find everything they desired within arm's reach more or less the moment it occurred to them to desire it. The recipients of this attention became spoiled almost beyond imagining. Visiting his daughter in the 1920s, in a house too small to keep his servants with him, the tenth Duke of Marlborough emerged from the bathroom in a state of helpless bewilderment because his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put the toothpaste on the brush for him, and the Duke was unaware that toothbrushes didn't recharge automatically."
So, as helpless as Bertie may seem on occasion, when compared to some others in his class, he might be a genius.
"It was unquestionably a strange world. Servants constituted a class of humans whose existences were fundamentally devoted to making certain that another class of humans would find everything they desired within arm's reach more or less the moment it occurred to them to desire it. The recipients of this attention became spoiled almost beyond imagining. Visiting his daughter in the 1920s, in a house too small to keep his servants with him, the tenth Duke of Marlborough emerged from the bathroom in a state of helpless bewilderment because his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put the toothpaste on the brush for him, and the Duke was unaware that toothbrushes didn't recharge automatically."
So, as helpless as Bertie may seem on occasion, when compared to some others in his class, he might be a genius.
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Date: 2010-11-14 10:40 pm (UTC)I sometimes wonder about servants. It's such an odd job, really! I can't imagine what it must've been like, to spend your whole working life pampering someone richer than you. Did they get a lot of holidays? Or just once a year? Were they well paid? I'm assumig they have pretty nice benefits because it must've been really trying profession (especially if your bosses were as thick as described in that quote :') )
Did children 'inherit' their parents' professions, or could someone (for example; the son of a priest) just decide "this is what I want to do with my life" and become a valet?
The whole "upper class-lower class" thing is so very hard for me to grasp.