I've been interested in servants for years, and when I started writing historicals was always very conscious of how the masters of the house interacted with the servants. As an essentially lazy person, I figured out quite early on that servants were tremendously useful to fix plot devices--as the ears and eyes of the house they learned a lot about the people "upstairs." And they weren't always tremendously discreet, although of course employers wished they were.

I was also a little alarmed to read in NYT bestsellers about Regency households where the front door of the house was opened by a female servant (wrong!) wearing a late Victorian uniform (wrong! wrong! wrong!).

So I started reading, and before I go any further, let me mention that I'm presenting my workshop Doddering Butlers, Pert Housemaids, and Faithful Retainers: Busting the Servant Myths at Nationals at San Francisco (on Saturday August 2). If you have any specific questions, ask and I'll do my best to answer, here or off list.

One book I found tremendously useful--it is, in fact, one of those books that make you think you've died and gone to heaven--is The Complete Servant by Samuel and Sarah Adams, originally published in 1825. It has all sorts of amazing information like how many servants a household would employ, what they were paid, what their duties were, how to clean various things, recipes, menus, what vegetables were in season each month, and so on. Wow.

Everything you'd need for the Georgian/Regency household, right?

The Complete Servant is a fine example of how a book should be taken with a pinch of salt. The Adamses were career servants whose vision of the ideal household probably was not based on fact--as perfectionists who had risen to the top of their profession, they knew how things should be done and this is what the book is about, not how things actually were.

From other reading, I found that households, job descriptions, and master-servant relationships varied tremendously. The Adamses themselves gave some household "rules" that I'd hesitate to use in a book:

• The kitchen maid should make the stablemen's beds (well, I suppose someone has to do it)
• The housekeeper was summoned to carve the meat at dinner
• The valet waited at table behind the master's chair (dinner, according to the Adamses, is all hands on deck)
• One of the butler's tasks was to convert white wine into red

The Complete Servant is a fabulous resource, but you can't rely on just one book. In my presentation I use a lot of its material, but I also use other sources to balance it out: cartoons, for instance, like this typically rude one by Rowlandson. (There is a site, searchable by keyword, of Georgian prints and cartoons, at Yale's Lewis Walpole Digital Collection.)

I've also found servants' memoirs and servants' portraits very useful--the National Portrait Gallery in the UK had an exhibit on servants a few years ago and published a wonderful book of paintings and essays. Many of the historic houses in England are now featuring exhibits on servants and if you're planning a trip you'll be able to visit below stairs. And read between the lines in favorite books to see what roles the servants play--Mrs. Fairfax the housekeeper in Jane Eyre, for instance or the brilliant choreography of servants/masters in Mansfield Park.

Questions, comments?