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It’s probably a bad sign when I’m reading a historic romance and the thing that most grates on me is one heroine blithely boasting “oh, I don’t have a lady’s maid—I can dress myself!”
And I’m thinking of all the evidently invisible labor that lady’s maid should be doing besides dressing her mistress that the author doesn’t know enough to value.
Someday I may blog a bit of a rant on this topic. Because this isn’t the first time that I’ve yelled at a historic romance, “Where are the servants?”
@heatherrosejones when I was running =1879=, I leaned into that. One of the players was a minor noble and a remittance man. Just to run his townhouse, he had to have a downstairs maid, an upstairs maid, a cook, and a maid of all work. He had a driver and two footmen for his carriage and answering the door. The player had to keep up with the budget and the cook's demands, which he usually gave into because he was constantly bringing home more people than she'd been told to expect.
@heatherrosejones At some point, the household hired a groom for the horses and a stableboy, so they could maintain their own stables for security, and a scullery maid to do the washing up. The player hired a clerk the party rescued from the villains as his secretary. She had proven resourceful, improvising a molotov out of a perfume bottle when they first met her.The player rolled to write to his family for a slight increase in his stipend, hinting that he might have to come home otherwise.
@WanderingBeekeeper It sounds like that could be an entire game concept in itself!
@heatherrosejones The ttrpg had a section on household positions, what they did, what you could expect to pay for someone to do them, and why you needed all these people. There was also a mechanic for social conflict, which could lead to an entire scenario around trying to maintain your household staff while a rival is spreading poisonous rumours about you to the agencies, and making offers in ready coin to get your upstairs maid to switch sides.
@heatherrosejones I'd read that rant! I'm not *completely* ignorant on the subject but always interested in learning more.