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The inherent worth of this charming book does not require the added note of interest that its author is the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. In the account of her experience “in service” Miss Dickens fulfills all the interest attaching to special observation clearly realized and well told; besides giving a record of activities not frequently reported with the psychological incision and candor which she commands. The publisher's note states in part that “at the age of twenty-three she wanted to earn her own living. She knew a little, not much, about cooking, but she liked it, so she went into domestic service. … She missed nothing of what went on above or below stairs … no personality failed to excite her imagination.”
The book makes highly amusing reading. It is also a competent record of a particular individual experience which consciously grasped the significance of what it comprised and touched upon. Written with wit and verve, it has a sharp eye for many of those character traits of rationalization, meanness, hypocrisy, etc., often obscured by abstractions of “station” and “class” but occasionally shown, as here, jutting out against the light of a broad and concretely detailed human base. For similar humanitarian soundness respecting the special question of servants it would be necessary in several points to go back to Charles Dickens, in whose tradition the present book belongs: and, on the negative side, still farther back to De Foe, whose splenetic discharge regarding domestics in Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business finds here a hearty and delightful antidote.