Description
London Weekend Television's multi- award-winning drama series Upstairs Downstairs, reflecting life above and below stairs in an elegant London household during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is proving compulsive viewing for countless millions in countries throughout the world. Its brilliantly conceived and portrayed characters have acquired a substance far transcending their screen image.
The novels, based on the 'lives' of five of them, have gained a matching popularity. In several languages they have achieved a sale of millions of copies. An accepted sequence of entrancing stories in their own right, they are now brought together in single-volume form for the first time, with only slight abridgement.
First, we read the story of the chief 'upstairs' figure of the series, Richard Bellamy, and his rise from an obscure childhood to marriage with an earl's beautiful daughter and political success. Such real-life figures of his time as Benjamin Disraeli and Oscar Wilde have their logical part to play in Mr Bellamy's Story.
All four other stories concern the principal servants at 165 Eaton Place. They are Mr Hudson the Scottish butler whose enigmatic rectitude overlays a background of conflict and romance; Mrs Bridges the forthright Cook, stern task-mistress in her kitchen but a warm comforter to anyone in distress or trouble; Rose, country-bred and transplanted to town to achieve the status of house parlourmaid and confidante of the above-stairs ladies; and lastly Sarah, the cockney orphan who survives the battle with poverty and low life to find a new family in the haven of the servants' hall.
These five stories together represent a skilful and authentic evocation of a period and its people and their fascinatingly contrasting attitudes towards life and to one another. ISBN:9780297769620 
