Up and Down Stairs

Country houses were reliant on an intricate hierarchy of servants, each of whom provided an essential skill. Up and Down Stairs brings to life this hierarchy and shows how large numbers of people lived together under strict segregation and how sometimes this segregation was broken, as with the famous marriage of a squire to his dairymaid at Uppark. Jeremy Musson captures the voices of the servants who ran these vast houses, and made them work. From unpublished memoirs to letters, wages, newspaper articles, he pieces together their daily lives from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century. The story of domestic servants is inseparable from the story of the country house as an icon of power, civilisation and luxury. This is particularly true with the great estates such as Chatsworth, Hatfield, Burghley and Wilton. Jeremy Musson looks at how theses grand houses were, for centuries, admired and imitated around the world.

ISBN 184854300X   Pages 384 ISBN13 9781848543003 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 670 Publisher John Murray General Publishing Division   Published in London Imprint John Murray Publishers Ltd   Height (mm) 241 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 164 Publication date 12 Nov 2009   Spine width (mm) 35 DEWEY 941   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

		Introduction		1
1		The Visible and Glorious Household: From the later Middle Ages to the end of the Sixteenth Century		16
2		The Beginning of the Back Stairs and the Servants' Hall: The Seventeenth Century		51
3		The Household in the Age of Conspicuous Consumption: The Eighteenth Century		90
4		Behind the Green Baize Door: The Eighteenth Century		117
5		The Apogee: The Nineteenth Century		141
6		Moving Up or Moving On: The Nineteenth Century		181
7		In Retreat from a Golden Age: The first half of the Twentieth century		224
8		Staying On: A Changing World: The later Twentieth Century		265
		Acknowledgments		303
		Notes		307
		Bibliography and Sources		343
		Illustration Acknowledgments		355
		Index		357

This is Gosford Park as non-fiction, and utterly fascinating -- Times Literary Supplement 'Entertaining saga of the class divide' -- The Daily Express 'Intimate and absorbing study' -- The Sunday Times 'Architectural historian Masson brings alive the symbiotic relationship between the houses, their owners, and the workers.' -- Financial Times 20101112 'Musson is excellent on the changing face of service in the twentieth century' -- Spectator 20101112 'Personal anecdotes bring this well-researched book to life' -- Mail on Sunday 20101112 'A brilliantly readable book full of human history and entertaining anecdotes' -- Lancashire Evening Post 20101112 'An ideal read' -- Field Magazine 20101112 'Packed with quotes from memoirs and letters, as well as first hand accounts, a fascinating social history' -- BBC Who Do You Think You Are Magazine 20101112 'He retells the story at a cracking pace... we are reminded that all kinds of likely lads, including Chaucer, started out as paper pushers and cup bearers' -- Guardian 20101112

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