Saturday, January 19, 2013

In Service

On my web travels i came across this article which exposes the reality of Dowton Abbey and the downstairs and upstairs divide.

 “We always called them ‘Them’,”
Margaret Powell wrote of the upstairs folk in her memoirs Below Stairs; “‘Them’ was the enemy … and to ‘Them’ servants were a race apart, a necessary evil.”  One employer thought “Margaret” too high-flown for a maid, and decided Powell ought to be the lowlier “Elsie” instead. “Servants were not real people with minds and feelings. They were possessions.”

The author of the article recalls that when the book was reissued in 2011, reviewers were surprised that Powell’s sense of injustice had not led her to socialism. "They didn’t understand that the intimate yet personally isolated nature of service precluded much solidarity, let alone insurrection: who choruses the Internationale on the back stairs while slopping out chamber pots? "

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