Description
Book SynopsisA
New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
"Beautifully written, sparkling with insight, and a pleasure to read,
Servants is social history at its most humane and perceptive." —Paul Addison,
Times Literary SupplementTrade Review"A lively and complicating account of British social history seen through the eyes of the workers who made it possible." -- Andrea DenHoed - The New Yorker
"Vivid…Household service provides Lethbridge with a window into almost every corner of social history." -- New York Times Book Review
"Thorough and vastly entertaining…[Lethbridge’s] style is elegant, detached and slyly witty…Richly complex and enjoyable." -- Sue Gaisford - Financial Times
"Spirited…Lethbridge’s book rings with the voices of those on both sides of the divide between upstairs and downstairs." -- Kate Tuttle - Boston Globe
"Absorbing history, much of it in the words of servants…[Lethbridge’s] subject is many-branched and full of pressing issues." -- Economist
"In this excellent addition to the history of domestic service in the 20th century, Lucy Lethbridge has swept the existing archive and added new sources of her own. The result is a richly textured account of what it felt like to spend the decades of high modernity on your knees with a dustpan and brush." -- Guardian (UK)
"As a panorama,
Servants is a great success. Enthusiasts of bonnets and waistcoasts will find Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey all the more enjoyable after reading this nuanced and elegantly written account of the wider context. And in tracing the history of servants throughout the whole of the 20th century, Lethbridge offers a new vantage point from which to reassess British social history." -- Observer (UK)
"Lethbridge writes with sympathy about her subject…. Evenhanded to the end, [she] stresses the inherent dignity of domestic service." -- Matthew Price - Newsday
"Move over
Downton Abbey, Lucy Lethbridge portrays life below stairs as it really was. Absorbing, highly entertaining, and impeccably researched,
Servants is so much fun to read that it’s practically a guilty pleasure." -- Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana and A World on Fire
"Lucy Lethbridge turns servants into stars, offering a colorful and compelling social history about the men, women, and children whose occupation rendered them invisible. Buoyed by substantial research, engaging anecdotes, and a lively narrative, the book places generations of overlooked domestics center stage, where, finally, they receive the attention they have always deserved." -- Deborah Davis, author of Strapless and Gilded
