Servants and travel

Sophie Dunn

We primarily see country house servants as connected to the country house, vital as they were in the daily work of running these large estates. However, servants were much more often exposed to travel and geographical mobility than we might imagine.

Perhaps the most famous form of travel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is the Grand Tour, a journey of education and entertainment that led young noblemen, gentlemen, and some gentlewomen to France, Switzerland, or Italy in pursuit of cultural and social refinement. As the eighteenth century progressed, more people of middling ranks and entire families travelled abroad, although it remained generally an expensive and exclusive endeavour.

James Gillray (1756-1815), An Old Maid on a Journey (1804) – courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

For this purpose, these elite travellers hired servants to allow them to live the lifestyle of their social rank, even on the road and abroad. These servants, therefore, had to be well-versed in all the skills that a country house servant in England would have possessed.

Finding travelling servants in contemporary sources is not easy. With some notable exceptions, the majority of travelling servants did not leave elaborate travel journals like their elite employers. Nor are they easily traceable in other sources. Contemporary images that depict servants, let alone travelling servants, are few and far between. Often, they are satirical in nature, such as this 1804 print, showing an elderly lady at an inn, with two servants carrying her luggage behind her.

The innkeeper is showing the travelling lady to her room, the innkeeper’s wife is standing in the background holding a long bill. The travelling lady carries a fan and a lapdog, her luggage includes an embroidery frame, and a bird in a cage. These items suggest a fashionable life of leisure that she was not prepared to give up on the road. The innkeepers and the travelling lady are corpulent, indicating no want for food. By contrast, the two servants appear gaunt and wear ill-fitting clothes. They are portrayed as joke figures, burdened with an assortment of luggage, mindlessly following their employer around. The caricaturists’ decision to include the servants in the picture highlights the travelling lady’s status as well as the way she is treating her servants. James Gillray invites the onlooker to laugh at all of them: the greedy innkeepers, the self-indulgent lady, the hapless servants. His depiction acknowledges the vital role servants played in making travel pleasurable, but it also uses the servants mercilessly to ridicule their employer, they are only a means to an end.

So, how can we get closer to the servants’ own perspective? One way to learn more about their experience of travel is through newspaper advertisements. These short and condensed adverts highlight how servants broadcast their skills to potential employers. A representative advert for a servant willing to travel might read like this:

“As servant, to travel with a single gentleman or family, a person, who can be well recommended; he has travelled over the greater part of the Continent, and speaks the German language.” (Morning Post, 4 August 1815)

“Wants a situation, a young person as lady’s-maid, or to attend upon an elderly lady. She fully understands her business, and has no objection to travel.” (Morning Post, 1 March 1815)

While female servants such as this sometimes advertised their skills and willingness to travel, the majority of travelling servants were male. Some decided to travel, even actively seeking out opportunities to go abroad, but others lost their jobs because their employers set out on a journey without them:

“As house maid, a young woman from the country, […] can have an undeniable character from the family she has just left, on account of their going abroad.” (Morning Post, 23 January 1815)

As these adverts illustrate, servants encountered the practice of travel more frequently than we might assume. Whether or not they personally travelled, their employers’ decision to go abroad impacted on servants’ lives. By considering these financial or geographical implications we learn more about the lives of country house servants, and their interdependent relationships with their employers.

Servants and travel

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