Keith Thomas, former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and now a fellow of All Souls, edited The Oxford Book of Work.
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Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997
pages 7-8 | 2798 words
Hugh Dalton to the rescue
Keith Thomas
- The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home by Peter Mandler
Yale, 523 pp, £19.95, April 1997, ISBN 0 300 06703 8
- Ancient as the Hills by James Lees-Milne
Murray, 228 pp, £20.00, July 1997, ISBN 0 7195 5596 5
- The Fate of the English Country House by David Littlejohn
Oxford, 344 pp, £20.00, May 1997, ISBN 8 0 1950887 2
The stately home is England’s most characteristic contribution to international tourism. Many countries have old houses which are open to the public. But neither the châteaux of the Loire nor the Palladian villas of the Brenta nor the antebellum homes of Natchez can offer the spectacle of an ancient house, set in its own gardens and park, surrounded by its agricultural estates, crammed with furniture, books and paintings from the past and, best of all, still occupied by a descendant of the family which built it. It is this irresistible combination of architectural distinction, aesthetic display and genealogical continuity which has made the English country house so crucial a national icon.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
From Andrew Adonis
‘The Second World War,’ Keith Thomas writes in his review of Peter Mandler’s The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (LRB, 13 November), saw ‘the introduction of heavy taxation and the disappearance of domestic service.’ Disappearance? After weeks of obsessive interest in the trial of a British nanny in Boston, working for a double-income professional couple, who can be oblivious of the extent of domestic service? The employment of servants in steadily greater profusion is a defining feature of today’s rising super-class of top managers and professionals. Nannies, cleaners, cooks, gardeners, housekeepers – all are back, thanks partly to the sharp reversal of the formerly-heavy taxation of the rich. The Fall and Rise of Domestic Service is a fine book waiting to be written.
Andrew Adonis
<em>Observer</em>, London EC1
