Glimpses Of Our Ancestors In Sussex - online book

With Sketches Of Sussex Characters, Remarkable Incidents &c

	Social Changes in Sussex. N SERVANTS AND THEIR WAGES.
	HERE are few things in existence at the present day in which the revolution has been so great, even within living memory, or which has been brought home so completely to us, as the relations of servants to masters. We mean more especially domestic servants—the servants of indoor life, whose office it is to wait on the person or minister to the daily wants of their masters or mistresses: such as the cook, the housemaid, the footman, &c. To listen to the lamentations of a modern mater-familias, we might infer that the age of domestic service in England had come to an end, or was about to do so. There is no such thing as a decent cook or well-conducted house­maid to be got for love or money, or, if got, they cannot be kept. "Love," indeed, as a means of retaining domestic servants, has passed away altogether. That once-powerful tie between master and man, maid and mistress, personal attachment, has ceased to be felt at all. Money is the sole consideration, and in a market where the demand seems to be continually increasing and the supply to be falling off, this money-value rises so fast that it threatens to limit the luxury of domestic servants to the higher classes altogether—that is, to those who can alone afford to give very high salaries. Perhaps, after all, this disappearance of domestic servants in our households would only be a return to the normal state