3
THE KIND OF
MIND IT TAKES
About halfway through Jane Austen's Pride and
Prejudice, the heroine Elizabeth and her relatives are given a tour of
the house and grounds at Pemberley, the vast estate of her proud
acquaintance and spurned suitor Mr. Darcy. The place is grand ("The
rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the
fortune of their proprietor") and promises pleasures thus far unfamil-
iar to Elizabeth ("To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!").
Being no social historian, Elizabeth is more interested in the many
delights of owning these commodious apartments and lush gardens
than in the hard work involved in maintaining this kind of household.
She lives Upstairs and does not talk much about (or even consider)
what happens Downstairs.
But a lot happened downstairs. The efficient running of large house-
holds like Pemberley, with stables and fields, gardens and kitchens,
guest rooms and dependents' quarters, required the execution of pre-
cisely defined tasks distributed among dozens of specialists—house
steward, housekeeper, groom of the chambers, butler, valet, lady's maid,
chef, footman, underbutler, young ladies' maid, housemaid, stillroom
maid, scullery maid, kitchen maid, laundry maid, dairymaid, coachman,
groom, postilion, candleman, oddman, steward's room man and ser-
vants' hall boy, to name but a few. These specialists all had a precisely
defined position in a hierarchy (there were several castes of servants,
such as the Upper Ten or the Lower Five, which dined separately) and
specific duties. The chef cooked but had no control over wine. The but-
ler decanted wine but the stillroom maid handled the china. With this
complex division of labor came a complex chain of command. The
housekeeper hired and directed all the female servants but not the lady's
m a i d s a n d n u r s es; the steward, not the butler, could give orders to the
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