Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815-1914.

Add Gerard's to the legion of English country house books, but recognize that it is surely a cut above most. Certainly, it is not the coffee table variety. This is also to say that it is not about architecture or the decorative arts but about people. If any thing, its structure and substance are reminiscent of the television show, "Upstairs, Downstairs," although it is grossly unfair to author and book to push this analogy. This subject is one covering a limited time span and recent enough that the book's illustrations are photographs, fascinating ones, and not Reynolds' portraits or paintings of elegant country houses. Then, too, it is not just a narrative about Whiggish aristocrats; rather the author treats all kinds of people - right down to the gentry and, of critical importance, the servants.

Gerard shows remarkable disciplinary dexterity, shifting nicely from quantitative chapters on landed family and country house servant demography to those on country house childhood, courtship and marriage, parenthood, and women. Staff size, the nature of gentleman's service, and downstairs life are features of servant life examined; the most original chapter deals with employer/employee relations. For documentation the author relies on contemporary records, autobiographies, diaries, letters, and childhood recollections of living descendants.

What is the merit of this book? Certainly, the focus on servants is atypical, although not without precedent. Much, much more space is devoted to women, children, and families than in most works of this sort. The author takes particular pains to demolish old stereotypes such as authoritarian patriarchy, fawning and idle women, and oppressed servants. If anything, she presents the country house community in rather wholesome if not idyllic terms, notwithstanding its problems. Country house masters were considerate husbands and fathers; children enjoyed a loving childhood; and servants had decidedly a better life, certainly, than their counterparts in the city. Generalizations such as these are systematically derived from the prevailing behavior in a majority of those samples studied.

Gerard's examination of the country house community is more than a portrait of country house life: she seeks to change the ground rules for studying country life in nineteenth-century England. She takes issue with Lawrence and Jeanne Fawtier Stone's findings about an "open elite" and patriarchy and chides Beckett for ignoring women and Cannadine for concentrating excessively on status, wealth, and power instead of people.

The country house community is, however, wider-based than the author has made it. In defining the "leisured gentleman" (p. 7) she has excluded the well-situated of the rural middle class. Budding professionals like country lawyers and doctors and, of course, prosperous farmers often kept substantial houses staffed by more than a handful of servants. In so doing they certainly aped and occasionally mingled with the gentry and great landed aristocrats.

This is a study which begins when England's aristocracy was in fine fettle and concludes with their torturous decline. Studying this class is important not just for a re-creation of country house life but for the insights it provides into the lifestyle of those who were the arbiters of political life in England.

Gerard embellishes the narrative with useful demographic tables in addition to the pictures mentioned above. The author supports her narrative with copious notes and has appended an extensive bibliography. In short, she has breathed new life into a subject, generally thought to have been overworked and resistant to new ideas.

Albert J. Schmidt George Washington University