DECAY OF THE LIVERY SERVANT.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XX, Issue XIV, 2 April 1898, Page 407

DECAY OF THE LIVERY SERVANT.

The history of the livery servant would form (writes Sir Walter Besant) an instructive—l cannot say a pleasing —part of social history. He was a gentleman attached to the service of a great lord down to the civil wars of the seventeenth century. After that he became a flunkey. During the whole of the last century he was an insolent, lazy, over-fed brute. Noblemen had to keep a retinue of lackeys; they crowded his hall, the held out their hands for vails; they insulted the guests; the hung on to the coach half a- dozen at a time; they ran before the coach in white; they had their own gallery at the theatre, where they got in for nothing and made a horrid noise. Some of the evils were abated ; the system of vails was abolished; their gallery was taken from them; they were reduced in numbers; the process of reduction is still going on; our grandchildren, 1 believe, will wonder what was meant by the footman in plush and white silk stockings. Now the original meaning of the livery servant was protection; they guarded the coach against highwaymen, the house against robbers: if one of the ladies went out shopping the footman in livery marched behind her carrying a long stick; he protected her against footpads and pickpockets and gentlemen adventurers. I believed that he walked after her to church. He is gradually undergoing painless extinction. Think of the part played by footmen in Thackeray. Think of the immortal footman in Pickwick's Bath. 1 write these words in Bath. I have been walking about the streets, and I assure you that Mr.lohnSmauker no longer exists.