I have long been interested in the details of the lives of English and Continental servants from the Glorious Revolution through the present. In English country houses, the three Ancient Universities, and the Royal Palaces, archaic traditions live on in daily life. As a historian of social class, stratification comes up in nearly everything I research, but perhaps nowhere as dramatically as the sharp divide between ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs.’ Popular television series like ‘Downton Abbey’ and other offerings from PBS over the last several decades tend to demonize or idealize class relations, but if we look at the ways physical objects contributed to hierarchies of class and gender below stairs, we will see how the demarcation of class is enforced through the material and spatial layout of the household.
The domestic spaces and rituals of status relied on servants to facilitate them, and servants needed to be simultaneously respectable and genteel enough to add to the grandeur of the moment and yet know their place in a hierarchy with themselves at the bottom. The pioneering historian of material culture, Lorna Weatherill, famously promoted the idea of a staged division of labor in the household, and this was reinforced through a number of architectural details. The presence of two staircases-the grand central staircase to be used by the family and the back stairs reserved for the servants, permitted the undignified and unsightly from public view. Whereas the lady of the house would walk up the grand stairs from the hall, replete with balusters and newel posts, the servants toting cans of water for a bath, full chamber pots, or cleaning materials could keep these necessary but undignified activities under wraps. A gentleman or lady did not wish to confront their bodily fluids on their way down to dinner or breakfast.
Emery powder, brick sand, and other natural corrosives were employed by servants in the kitchen to scour brass and copper pots, but these servants did not have rubber gloves or any protection, and though their hands did not succumb to quite as much damage as laundresses, they were forced to endure painful and bleeding hands as a matter of course.