It's also worth remember that a lot of things we take for granted were very time intensive back in those days, so you genuinely needed those servants if you had a family and wanted to send the children to school. Consider clothing: washing them involved scrubbing against a board by hand, old clothes were mended extensively by hand (factory cloth existed, but was still expensive), non-wrinkle fabrics didn't exist so everything had to be ironed with hot coal irons, etc. No refrigeration or ready meals, so food had to be prepared from scratch all the time.

Of course, the poor had to deal with all this and scratch out a living, which is a major reason why their children were enlisted to help around the house as soon as practical.

Some of it still applies to me. I pay a maid for washing clothes and house cleaning, I go to a tailor for mending clothers, don't iron the clothes though (and they are not wrinkle free), don't have a refrigerator, etc.

Don’t have a refrigerator? How is this possible? I can’t imagine that. That and having a stove are almost as essential in my mind as having a bed.

Do you buy food daily?

I do have an induction stove (for heating milk, cooking rice, etc). I get lunch delivered and rest of the time I cook and sometimes eat out. Plenty of grocery shops here within 5-min walking radius. Refrigerator for me alone would be a huge waste.

Not just 19th century; this persisted well into the 20th as well.

Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography about in post Great War Britain a servant being a necessity but that she wasn’t likely ever going to be rich enough to afford a car.

https://fullstackeconomics.com/why-agatha-christie-could-aff...

>They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.”

The space afforded seem pretty substantial. Even if it was fourth floor. That is still 6+ rooms.

Makes it all the more notable she thought they would never afford a car and how much of an inversion we’ve had between the price of manufactured goods and labour in under a century.

My understanding is this is still true in India, where live-in domestic servants remain relatively common:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/07/28/a-con...

I'm sure others on HN have more firsthand knowledge.

Live-in servants are very uncommon and maybe only the ultra rich have them. What is common is to have someone come everyday for an hour or so to do chores like cleaning, cooking.

In Singapore, approximately 20% of households have a live-in maid ("helper"). Often this is not really a "luxury", simply the most cost-efficient way of providing childcare or eldercare if both parents are working, since the maids are imported from much poorer countries and paid far less than minimum wage ($600/mo, basic meals and a mat on the kitchen floor is typical).

I recall reading somewhere that American expats in central and south america usually employ many household servants (even paying somebody to do their grocery shopping) as it's part of the "deal" of being allowed to live in a low cost-of-living country: you can live there, but you have to spread the wealth around by employing some of the natives.

Just me or the use of the word "natives" there just a little too reminiscent of how the term was often used in centuries past where there was no ambiguity as to the view that indigenous peoples were inferior to settlers?

Just you.

Humans are pretty good at seeing in the world whatever is on their mind or that they have fears or insecurities about. Sometimes that's the face of Jesus on a piece of toast, sometimes that's a scary figure that turns out to be a shadow, sometimes it's interpreting an innocuous word as reminiscent of injustices centuries in the past.

Still, I'd avoid probably avoid using "natives", even if it was meant purely as a neutral label. "Locals" would be better - if it really was important to mention their cultural/ethnic background, I'd use whatever term they prefer for themselves.

"Locals" would mean anyone living there, though, including immigrants. "Natives" implies people who were at least born there, and possibly the long-term traditional inhabitants of a place. "Native" is not a bad word.

Why's it important to distinguish though? It may not be an inherently bad word but given its use historically I'd still be wary of using it in the wrong context.

If child labor wasn’t illegal I imagine a lot of people would be able to retain a child as a servant.

My labor was extremely cheap until I turned 18 and had to be given minimum wage.

14 year old me could be had for €500/month. Come to think of it, I’m not quite sure why that’s fine in a supermarket. Maybe you can actually have a servant?

Here (NL) it is legal to work from 13 years old (non industrial work). There are also no minimum wages for certain ages

Depending on how liberally we want to define "employing a servant", it is still a sign of social status today in the developed world.

Anyone who has hired a professional to do something for them can tell you the bill was quite tall, certainly not something someone living paycheck-to-paycheck could afford.

> even when reduced to (at least to a British person) abject poverty

I think there's a lot more to this one than meets the eye. The £225 pension she was apparently entitled to was a lower middle class salary at the time, and if her rent was £17 a year then some of that money is going on something other than feeding kids and a servant girl animal food on alternate days...

Keep in mind that food as a percentage of one's budget was considerably higher 150 years ago. For that family size she probably paid at least 1/3 and maybe up to 1/2 of her income on food, plus clothing for growing children and school. Seems unlikely she'd be able to afford significant vices of any kind, if that is your implication.

Here are some family budgets from the 1880's, just to get a general idea of the type of expenses she might've incurred:

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5754/

I'm also keeping in mind her husband's pension gave her income equivalent to a fairly typical lower middle class salary in Britain at the time, when families of seven children were not uncommon, and most families lived on a quarter of that income. Most people spent up to half their income on food, but most people didn't have a combination of well above average income and claimed inability to afford more than intermittent consumption of animal food even after cutting back on all other areas of expenditure and supplementing income by selling off old valuables.

"Vice" is one reason why somebody receiving well above average family incomes for the time could have a well below average ability to feed her family, indebtedness a more likely one, not actually receiving her pension [consistently] is a third. But the most logical reason for her reporting conditions of extreme poverty (in between gripes at loss of middle-class privilege) despite being entitled to a pension worth 4-5x the average wage of the time is that she is exaggerating the hardships in a letter which is essentially begging for help.

It is simply because class divide used to be a lot wider. We perceive things as going down only by comparison with unhealthily equal 1960s society brought about by 91% top marginal tax rate of the day. Pre-WWI world was extremely unequal and it was seen as normal. Anyone from the middle class could hire a servant.

In fact, even in the Soviet Union, engineers and even highly qualified workers (!) had full-time domestic servants in 1930s. Not after the war though.

> We perceive things as going down only by comparison with unhealthily equal 1960s society brought about by 91% top marginal tax rate of the day.

Interesting. You feel that the 1960s were too egalitarian?

Read the guy’s past comments…

>91% top marginal tax rate of the day

it's worth noting that even though the top marginal rate today is only 37%, tax as % of GDP stayed mostly the same since the 1960s. The difference can be explained by the fact that the 91% tax rate was accompanied by a plethora of deductions, which reduced the effective tax rate.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S