Instead, Ishiguro’s take encouraged audiences to mourn all of those lost lives, spent invisibly and fruitlessly serving ordinary fellow humans with ordinary human foibles, and far too much influence for everybody’s good. Unlike its super popular predecessor, Ishiguro’s novel did not serve as escapism, and did not encourage audiences to look back on the servant era as cosy and quaint. Kazuo Ishiguro’s T he Remains of the Day appeared two decades after Upstairs, Downstairs first broadcast. British audiences were plagued by problems caused by economic turbulence of the 1970s, and were struggling to adapt to a new, individualistic era. Writers of Upstairs, Downstairs believed the show to function as escapism. Basically, as soon as this ostentatiously hierarchical way of life disappeared, the hegemonic culture began to romanticise it. It’s worth noting that Upstairs, Downstairs appeared on televisions as soon as the servant life disappeared in the real world. Upstairs, Downstairs was an English TV series which ran from 1971 for five seasons total.

Where does The Remains of the Day fit in the category of servant-master fiction set in big, aristocratic houses?

Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants gives them a voice in this discerning portrait of the complex relationship between the server, the served, and the world they lived in, opening a window on British society from the Edwardian period to the present. SERVANTS: A DOWNSTAIRS VIEW OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN BY LUCY LETHBRIDGEįrom the immense staff running a lavish Edwardian estate to the lonely maid-of-all-work cooking in a cramped middle-class house, domestics were an essential yet unobtrusive part of the British hierarchy for much of the past century, required to tread softly and blend into the background.

The remains of the day meaning