The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry . . . allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working class, and the conse-quent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a ser-vant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.

—Marx, Capital (1867)

The morning, when Sam drew the curtains, flooded in upon Charles as Mrs. Poulteney—then still audibly asleep—would have wished paradise to flood in upon her, after a suitably solemn pause, when she died. A dozen times or so a year the climate of the mild Dorset coast yields such days—not just agreeably mild out-of-season days, but ravishing fragments of Mediterranean warmth and luminosity. Nature goes a little mad then. Spiders that should be hibernating run over the baking November rocks; blackbirds sing in December, prim-roses rush out in January; and March mimics June.

Charles sat up, tore off his nightcap, made Sam throw open the windows and, supporting himself on his hands, stared at the sunlight that poured into the room. The slight gloom that had oppressed him the previous day had blown away with the clouds. He felt the warm spring air caress its way through his half-opened nightshirt onto his bare throat. Sam stood stropping his razor, and steam rose invitingly, with a kind of Proustian richness of evocation—so many such happy days, so much assurance of position, order, calm, civilization, out of the copper jug he had brought with him. In the cobbled street below, a rider clopped peacefully down towards the sea. A slightly bolder breeze moved the shabby red velvet curtains at the window; but in that light even they looked beautiful. All was supremely well. The world would always be this, and this moment.

There was a patter of small hooves, a restless baa-ing and mewling. Charles rose and looked out of the window. Two old men in gaufer-stitched smocks stood talking opposite. One was a shepherd, leaning on his crook. Twelve ewes and rather more lambs stood nervously in mid-street. Such folk-costume relics of a much older England had become pic-turesque by 1867, though not rare; every village had its dozen or so smocked elders. Charles wished he could draw. Really, the country was charming. He turned to his man.

“Upon my word, Sam, on a day like this I could contem-plate never setting eyes on London again.”

“If you goes on a-standin’ in the hair, sir, you won’t, neither.”

His master gave him a dry look. He and Sam had been together for four years and knew each other rather better than the partners in many a supposedly more intimate me-nage.

“Sam, you’ve been drinking again.”

“No, sir.”

“The new room is better?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the commons?”

“Very hacceptable, sir.”

“Quod est demonstrandum. You have the hump on a morning that would make a miser sing. Ergo, you have been drinking.”

Sam tested the blade of the cutthroat razor on the edge of his small thumb, with an expression on his face that sug-gested that at any moment he might change his mind and try it on his own throat; or perhaps even on his smiling master’s.

“It’s that there kitchen-girl’s at Mrs. Tranter’s, sir. I ain’t ‘alf going to . . .”

“Kindly put that instrument down. And explain yourself.”

“I sees her. Dahn out there.” He jerked his thumb at the window. “Right across the street she calls.”

“And what did she call, pray?”

Sam’s expression deepened to the impending outrage. “”Ave yer got a bag o” soot?’” He paused bleakly. “Sir.”

Charles grinned.

“I know the girl. That one in the gray dress? Who is so ugly to look at?” This was unkind of Charles, since he was speaking of the girl he had raised his hat to on the previous afternoon, as nubile a little creature as Lyme could boast.

“Not exackly hugly. Leastways in looks.”

“A-ha. So. Cupid is being unfair to Cockneys.”

Sam flashed an indignant look. “I woulden touch ‘er with a bargepole! Bloomin’ milkmaid.”

“I trust you’re using the adjective in its literal sense, Sam. You may have been, as you so frequently asseverate, born in a gin palace—“

“Next door to one, sir.”

“In close proximity to a gin palace, but I will not have you using its language on a day like this.”

“It’s the ‘oomiliation, Mr. Charles. Hall the hosslers ‘eard.” As “all the ostlers” comprehended exactly two persons, one of whom was stone deaf, Charles showed little sympathy. He smiled, then gestured to Sam to pour him his hot water.

“Now get me my breakfast, there’s a good fellow. I’ll shave myself this morning. And let me have a double dose of muffins.”

“Yes, sir.”

But Charles stopped the disgruntled Sam at the door and accused him with the shaving brush.

“These country girls are much too timid to call such rude things at distinguished London gentlemen—unless they’ve first been sorely provoked. I gravely suspect, Sam, that you’ve been fast.” Sam stood with his mouth open. “And if you’re not doubly fast with my breakfast I shall fasten my boot onto the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy.”

The door was shut then, and none too gently. Charles winked at himself in the mirror. And then suddenly put a decade on his face: all gravity, the solemn young paterfamili-as; then smiled indulgently at his own faces and euphoria; poised, was plunged in affectionate contemplation of his features. He had indeed very regular ones—a wide forehead, a moustache as black as his hair, which was tousled from the removal of the nightcap and made him look younger than he was. His skin was suitably pale, though less so than that of many London gentlemen—for this was a time when a suntan was not at all a desirable social-sexual status symbol, but the reverse: an indication of low rank. Yes, upon examination, it was a faintly foolish face, at such a moment. A tiny wave of the previous day’s ennui washed back over him. Too innocent a face, when it was stripped of its formal outdoor mask; too little achieved. There was really only the Doric nose, the cool gray eyes. Breeding and self-knowledge, he most legibly had.

He began to cover the ambiguous face in lather.

Sam was some ten years his junior; too young to be a good manservant and besides, absentminded, contentious, vain, fancying himself sharp; too fond of drolling and idling, lean ing with a straw-haulm or sprig of parsley cocked in the corner of his mouth; of playing the horse fancier or of catching sparrows under a sieve when he was being bawled for upstairs.

Of course to us any Cockney servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller; and it was certainly from that background that this Sam had emerged. But thirty years had passed since Pickwick Papers first coruscated into the world. Sam’s love of the equine was not really very deep. He was more like some modern working-class man who thinks a keen knowledge of cars a sign of his social progress. He even knew of Sam Weller, not from the book, but from a stage version of it; and knew the times had changed. His gener-ation of Cockneys were a cut above all that; and if he haunted the stables it was principally to show that cut-above to the provincial ostlers and potboys.

The mid-century had seen a quite new form of dandy appear on the English scene; the old upper-class variety, the etiolated descendants of Beau Brummel, were known as “swells”; but the new young prosperous artisans and would-be superior domestics like Sam had gone into competition sarto-rially. They were called “snobs” by the swells themselves; Sam was a very fair example of a snob, in this localized sense of the word. He had a very sharp sense of clothes style— quite as sharp as a “mod” of the 1960s; and he spent most of his wages on keeping in fashion. And he showed another mark of this new class in his struggle to command the language.

By 1870 Sam Weller’s famous inability to pronounce v except as w, the centuries-old mark of the common London-er, was as much despised by the “snobs” as by the bourgeois novelists who continued for some time, and quite inaccurate-ly, to put it into the dialogue of their Cockney characters. The snobs’ struggle was much more with the aspirate; a fierce struggle, in our Sam’s case, and more frequently lost than won. But his wrong a’s and h’s were not really comic; they were signs of a social revolution, and this was something Charles failed to recognize.

Perhaps that was because Sam supplied something so very necessary in his life—a daily opportunity for chatter, for a lapse into schoolboyhood, during which Charles could, so to speak, excrete his characteristic and deplorable fondness for labored puns and innuendoes: a humor based, with a singu-larly revolting purity, on educational privilege. Yet though Charles’s attitude may seem to add insult to the already gross enough injury of economic exploitation, I must point out that his relationship with Sam did show a kind of affection, a human bond, that was a good deal better than the frigid barrier so many of the new rich in an age drenched in new riches were by that time erecting between themselves and their domestics.

To be sure, Charles had many generations of servant-handlers behind him; the new rich of his time had none— indeed, were very often the children of servants. He could not have imagined a world without servants. The new rich could; and this made them much more harshly exacting of their relative status. Their servants they tried to turn into ma-chines, while Charles knew very well that his was also partly a companion—his Sancho Panza, the low comedy that sup-ported his spiritual worship of Ernestina-Dorothea. He kept Sam, in short, because he was frequently amused by him; not because there were not better “machines” to be found.

But the difference between Sam Weller and Sam Farrow (that is, between 1836 and 1867) was this: the first was happy with his role, the second suffered it. Weller would have answered the bag of soot, and with a verbal vengeance. Sam had stiffened, “rose his hibrows” and turned his back.