Upstairs, Downstairs was an English TV series which ran from 1971 for five seasons total. Where does The Remains of the Day fit in the category of servant-master fiction set in big, aristocratic houses? Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants gives them a voice in this discerning portrait of the complex relationship between the server, the served, and the world they lived in, opening a window on British society from the Edwardian period to the present.

SERVANTS: A DOWNSTAIRS VIEW OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN BY LUCY LETHBRIDGEįrom the immense staff running a lavish Edwardian estate to the lonely maid-of-all-work cooking in a cramped middle-class house, domestics were an essential yet unobtrusive part of the British hierarchy for much of the past century, required to tread softly and blend into the background.

She interviewed people who had worked in service as well as people who had employed domestics. Lethbridge is the author of a book called Servants, published 2013. I highly recommend listening to what Lucy Lethbridge has to say about England’s servant class. However, these days there is more to be found about servants. There wasn’t all that much to be found about the life of servants anyway, which is unfortunate given how very many people worked as servants. (This author can also take ten years to write a book.) He didn’t do much research to begin with. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the draft in a flurry of activity it only took a month, while he asked his wife to relieve him of all life duties for the duration. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper. In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country.

Novel the remains of the day