The Servants' Hierarchy
domestic order
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In a great Victorian household, the servants formed a strict hierarchy as graded as the army. The butler and housekeeper ruled below stairs; beneath them came the valet, lady's maid, cook, and footmen; and at the bottom, housemaids, kitchen maids, and scullery maids rose before dawn to light fires, blacken grates, and vanish before the family appeared.
The rules were invisibility and deference. Servants used back stairs and service corridors, answered bells from every room, ate separately in the servants' hall, and were expected to be seen only when needed. A good servant was, in the ideal phrase of the day, 'seen and not heard' — the machinery of comfort made human.
Service was one of the largest employments in Victorian Britain, drawing well over a million people — mostly young women — into other people's homes. The hierarchy below stairs mirrored the class system above it, and the whole comfortable edifice of middle-class life rested on its shoulders.
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