Preferred time period in Gothics

[Penfeather]

manifold servants (including governesses and housekeepers!)

Many of those country estates had fifteen full-time gardeners. If you're wondering how they could afford it, the answer is they couldn't, and that's why the houses were falling to pieces which accounts for the Gothic atmosphere.

But seriously, the armies of servants in wealthy Victorian households were something to behold. Even middle-class homes would have a housekeeper, a couple of chamber maids, a cook, a gardener in their employ . . . The caste system was well ossified by this period and these people were essentially slaves. (Shades of Gosford Park.)

In Gothic novels it seems that the domestic help is often simplified, for the sake of narrative economy, to simply one housekeeper or a housekeeper and a cook. If there is any more staff they might be referred to but not seen. One simply assumes that such large houses would have "hot and cold running servants".

Speaking of servants, the figure of the sinister, matriarchal housekeeper is one that has haunted the minds of Gothic authors and readers ever since Mrs Danvers held Rebecca in her eerie spell. I wonder if there are characters like her before that. Certainly there have been since. The book I'm currently reading, 90 Gramercy Park by Priscilla Dalton (review forthcoming) contains a Mrs Danvers knockoff right down to her white-collared black dress and severe coif. Stephen King once said that Mrs Danvers is the scariest figure in literature.