From Salon 291 - interesting stuff on stately homes:
'Thus our Fellow Pamela Sandbrook (in her paper on ‘“The Servants’ Friend”? Country house servants’ engagement with new technology’) tells the story of Virginia Woolf’s inept attempts to sack her cook. Woolf’s use of modern technology in order to achieve a servant-free life at Monk’s House in Sussex reflects her personal desire for privacy, but in a minor way it also stands for the impact of new technology, which was to make redundant an army of servants: whereas in the early days of technology it was cheaper to use servants than to install modern plumbing, by the 1920s and 1930s, technology had reversed that formula.
Pursuing the Woolf theme, another insight into the impact of technology on country houses was the way that electric light changed the appearance of houses built in the era of candle, oil and fire light — as at Knole, for example, where Vita Sackville West wrote in 1922 about the restless flickering of candle flame accentuating the textures of furnishings and textiles, adding lustre to gilding or silk textiles, lending depth to plasterwork or picture frames. It was Victoria (Vita’s mother) who began the introduction of electrical light at Knole in 1902, and unusually, Maureen Dillon points out in her case study on lighting technology at Knole, this included the servants’ rooms at a time when the prevailing opinion was that this was undesirable as ‘it encourages reading there’. Borlas Matthews, in Electricity for Everybody (1909), advised (ironically given the book’s title) that if the servants’ bedrooms were to be lit, there should be a master switch in the dressing room ‘so that the consumer can extinguish their lights when he goes to bed himself’.'
'Thus our Fellow Pamela Sandbrook (in her paper on ‘“The Servants’ Friend”? Country house servants’ engagement with new technology’) tells the story of Virginia Woolf’s inept attempts to sack her cook. Woolf’s use of modern technology in order to achieve a servant-free life at Monk’s House in Sussex reflects her personal desire for privacy, but in a minor way it also stands for the impact of new technology, which was to make redundant an army of servants: whereas in the early days of technology it was cheaper to use servants than to install modern plumbing, by the 1920s and 1930s, technology had reversed that formula.
Pursuing the Woolf theme, another insight into the impact of technology on country houses was the way that electric light changed the appearance of houses built in the era of candle, oil and fire light — as at Knole, for example, where Vita Sackville West wrote in 1922 about the restless flickering of candle flame accentuating the textures of furnishings and textiles, adding lustre to gilding or silk textiles, lending depth to plasterwork or picture frames. It was Victoria (Vita’s mother) who began the introduction of electrical light at Knole in 1902, and unusually, Maureen Dillon points out in her case study on lighting technology at Knole, this included the servants’ rooms at a time when the prevailing opinion was that this was undesirable as ‘it encourages reading there’. Borlas Matthews, in Electricity for Everybody (1909), advised (ironically given the book’s title) that if the servants’ bedrooms were to be lit, there should be a master switch in the dressing room ‘so that the consumer can extinguish their lights when he goes to bed himself’.'
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