Book Review: “Mind Your Manors” by Lucy Lethbridge

Mind Your Manors: Tried-and-True British Household Cleaning Tips by Lucy Lethbridge

I’ve always been interested in how people actually live; not just the ones who make the history books. Most people never make the history books. Most people are support staff for history-makers. After all, do you really think that Queen Victoria washed her own laundry or scrubbed her own chamberpot?

She did not. She had servants.

Lucy Lethbridge, our intrepid author, wrote a fascinating, in-depth book a few years back titled “Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times”. That was a much better book than this one.

Mind Your Manors distills out the first-person reports, the drudgery, the endless scutwork, the attitudes of our betters towards their servants (no modern devices “because we don’t want you being lazy, now do we?”), the resentments, and finally, the slow, forced changes because the servant class found alternatives that paid better, required much less work, and didn’t subject you to the “attentions” of the master.

Servants went into great detail on all those subjects. Without that immense attention to detail, Mind Your Manors is a skimpy book.

It also doesn’t contain nearly as many household tips as you would expect from the subtitle. There should be a lot more pictures and diagrams, too, along with a bibliography for further reading.

So who is this book for? I’d have to guess someone being introduced for the very first time to the reality of servant life. This same someone doesn’t really care about the immense day-to-day drudgery an English country house requires to keep it clean, properly fed, clothed, and staffed. That someone wants a quick overview and nothing more.

Don’t misunderstand me. Minor Your Manors is an amusing little introduction to the subject; quick and easy and enjoyable to read. Another tip for you: this book was originally published in Great Britain as Spit and Polish: Old-Fashioned Ways to Banish Dirt, Dust, and Decay so don’t be deceived into thinking Ms. Lethbridge wrote three books on the servant class.

If you are interested in learning how a mansion is maintained and the lives of the army doing the work, read Servants instead. My copy is heavily underlined throughout with one amazing tidbit after another. When I was reading it over many breakfasts, I would read passages aloud to my long-suffering husband. I was particularly taken with servants’ memories about their upper-class suffragette employers railing on about the rights of women while completely oblivious to the laboring housemaids who made it possible for them to go out and march for the vote. As with Queen Victoria, those ladies didn’t beat their own carpets or brush down their own clothes or scrub the soot off their light fixtures.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Servants provides plenty of raw material for background and even plots for all you writers out there. It comes with an extensive bibliography too, for further education. I would give it five sparklers.

If you’re still interested in Mind Your Manors, get your copy from the library.

If you want a good, involving, genuinely useful resource, get Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times.