Customer Reviews

The Complete Servant (Southover Historic Cookery and Housekeeping)

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This is a reprint -sadly not a facsimile- of the 1825 text, written by two servants who, between them, had over 50 years experience in domestic service, Samuel and Sarah Adams. They had begun life as menial and lowly household servants but rose through the ranks to become butler and housekeeper respectively. It is this shared practical experience that makes the book so vital and informative.

It is crammed full of wonderful, yet elusive detail about the role of every possible household servant - indoors and outdoors-together with helpful calculations of the type of income then needed to support different sized households. They were inspired to write the book in order to proffer advice to the rising number of nouveau riches households, where there was no long standing tradition of apprenticeship for servants.

Each servants duties and wages are considered in fine detail, and the advice to female servants often has conduct book -like instruction on the standard of morals/lifestyle they were meant ideally to adopt. The role of the housekeeper boggles the mind with its complexity and responsibility. The role of the governess, as described by the Adams team, fills one with quiet dread.

The foreword by Pamela Horn, who is a leading social historian of English domestic life and author of the acclaimed book, Flunkeys and Scullions, sets the text not its proper social context, and is invaluable.

If you are only going to purchase one book on servants in this era then this is the one I would most highly recommend.

The Complete Servant is not only a great resource for writers of historical fiction, but it's an entertaining read and even an attitude-changer -- after experiencing the typical day of an upper housemaid in 1825, I pitched into my own household chores with gratitude!