Directions to Servants

Cooks brushing their hair into the stew; candlewax dripping into the expensive headdresses of dinner guests; maids carrying their mistresses' chamber pots in full view down the back stairs, and the whole cohort of servants watching and laughing as people slip over on the frozen contents of those same chamber pots, tipped outdoors on frosty nights -- Swift's satire is packed with these vivid and hilarious images of servants who are mischievous, lazy and downright larcenous. Directions to Servants takes the form of a handbook of manners, addressed to each servant in turn, and depicting what must be the ultimate upstairs/downstairs battle. With scathing wit, Swift pits master against servant in an endless struggle for order, frugality and the best bits of the roast. Written in the author's final years of sanity, Directions to Servants is a last hilarious outpouring of cynicism at a lifetime's accumulation of poor service.