Sites of Servant Memory in the English Country House: Frederick Gorst and the Gladstone Vase

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe everyday handling of objects is an often-overlooked aspect of an English country house servant's duties. However, the care of precious objects is occasionally recorded in servants’ memoirs, turning them into literary sites of personal and even cultural memory. In his 1956 memoir, Of Carriages and Kings, footman Frederick Gorst recounts his time in a country house near Liverpool in the late 1890s, where he worked for Richard and Walter Gladstone, nephews to the former prime minister William Gladstone. In an astonishingly rich descriptive passage, Gorst relays the provenance of a gold and silver vase that was gifted to Robertson Gladstone (elder brother of the PM) and was a relic of the family's uncomfortable history of slave ownership in the West Indies. Adopting Elaine Freedgood's ‘collector's approach’, this paper examines questions of provenance, origin and connection of the vase described in Gorst's account. This process unearths conflicting information between the historical record and Gorst's account of the Gladstones’ involvement in abolition. Conflicting versions of history raise the possibility of deliberate elision, corrupt group memory, and nostalgia for empire and the country house within Gorst's writing. While it is, at times, a frustratingly incomplete account, it can be read in terms of its belonging to a nostalgia-driven memoir in which empire and the country house intersect.