You in 1905

I've just realised that Manor House, as was chatted about last night on AIM, is the Edwardian Country House rebranded for PBS.

I haven't tested it yet, but I hope that EVERY SINGLE answer for females, regardless of what you enter, is "you are a kitchen maid. You are impreganted by your boss, fired, and would have died of the syph if cholera hadn't taken you first".

VILE to thread!

I like to think I would have been the D.H. Lawrence of the wax cylinder indie label scene. Probably would have died in the flu epidemic of 1919, though, or of tuberculosis.

oh, who am i kidding, i would have been some whitechapel broadsheet hack.

A Snapshot of your life as it might have been in 1905

Education
Your parents send you to a private school and despite the fact that you are bright and enjoy school you leave at 16.

Career Prospects
When you're young you do some household chores but don't do any work in the kitchen. When your mother dies you're left the house and a private income and your spinster friend comes to live with you. You believe strongly in the need to improve the quality of food and sanitation for the poor so you join a commission on public health and campaign for improvements.

Leisure Time
You eat your main meal (meat and vegetables) in the evening, except on Sundays. You support the church by sewing kneeler covers, arranging flowers and raising money for charity. You learn the piano and enjoy going to the theatre and musical concerts in the local town. Every week you make time to borrow books from the mobile library that passes through your village.

Living Conditions
You employ two servants who live in your house but are unimpressed with the quality of their work.

Marital Relations
The man from the parish you are engaged to is killed at war. You never marry which will set you apart from most of your contemporaries.

World War One
When World War One starts you join a women's auxiliary force and survive to be awarded a 1914 Star and a bronze Victory Medal.

Electrocuted, April 3rd, 1907.

Hey Madeleine - I wondered about that "living with a spinster friend" bit too. I expect we were the subject of much village gossip in those days. Unsubstantiated rumour, all of it ;)

This is me:

You work on a temporary basis
- A Snapshot of your life as it might have been in 1905

Education
You never go to school and start work when you're ten.

Career Prospects
You have temporary jobs, none lasting more than six months, as you keep having to take time out to rest your bad back. You join a friendly society to help you out. You take home a few shillings for a week's hard work and have to make sure it lasts a long time.

Leisure Time
You drink methylated spirits - it's the only alcohol you can afford at 4p a pint.

Living Conditions
You share various rooms in lodgings with other men. Some weeks you're unable to afford to pay the rent and you're often evicted.

Marital Relations
You don't marry but you make up for it by spending time with girls from the street.

World War One
You try to sign up to join the army when the war starts but after a medical examination, you're rejected on medical grounds.

Education
You go to the local school and at 16 you go into apprenticeship with a friend of your father's to learn your trade.

Career Prospects
You do well as an apprentice clerk. Wanting to go further, you join a well-respected firm where you enjoy the security and prestige. You go to work on the electric tram – an excellent new invention, which means that you can get more easily from your new house on the outskirts of the city into the centre to work.

Leisure Time
You read a newspaper every day and follow with interest the social reforms that the Liberals are proposing. You expound these new theories at the debating society that you're a leading member of. You try to have family holidays once or twice a year. When there's enough money, you take your family to seaside resorts at Torquay, Blackpool and Scarborough.

Living Conditions
You move from a crowded house in the centre to a pretty, detached villa on the outskirts of the city. You employ two servants who come by the day to help your wife with chores. You buy meat from the local butcher and other food from the grocer, who's a good friend of the family.

Marital Relations
You marry your wife at 17 to escape from humiliation when you realise that she's expecting your first child.

World War One
You join the army at the outbreak of World War One and rise to become a corporal. Narrowly escaping death, you return home with serious war-wounds that mean you can't work again. You are awarded a Victory Medal and a Star.

RESULT :)

You'll be in Service!
- A Snapshot of your life as it might have been in 1905

Education
You go to elementary school where you learn cookery and housework and occasionally a little arithmetic, history and geography although this is thought to be unimportant for girls.

Career Prospects
You go into service, working extremely long hours. You leave the job when you marry, but you supplement the family income by doing unskilled temporary work whenever you can get it.

Leisure Time
You escape when you can to meet friends at the music hall or in pubs.

Living Conditions
You're one of two servants working in a new villa on the outskirts of a city. You spend much of the time on your own in the house, working 14 hour days. When you marry and leave the house, you live in one gloomy room in a run-down house with your husband, children, your mother, father and brother. You share one smelly latrine between several families.

Marital Relations
You marry at the age of 25.

Education
You leave school at 16 and go straight into the job which you'll do for the rest of your working life.

Career Prospects
You work as a boilermaker. With your fellow union members, you strike to campaign for better working conditions and better pay but are disappointed by the slow rate of change.

Leisure Time
You spend a lot of time in the local pub – ale and porter (heavy beer) are cheap. You read the newspaper as often as possible – you enjoy reading stories about upper class extravagance and waste, they only confirm your worst fears. You join a football team made up of other workers and play matches every weekend.

Living Conditions
Your wife and daughters look after the home and do much of the shopping at the back door. Meat is a special treat on Sundays but otherwise you'll have a diet of bread, with cheese or butter, margarine or jam, lard or beef dripping.

Marital Relations
You're unfaithful to your wife whenever you get the chance.

World War One
You join the Navy as a stoker in the boiler room and will be killed at sea at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

ie you waste a lot of time logged onto the steam-powered Edwardian version of ILE.

You are a Secretary!
- A Snapshot of your life as it might have been in 1905

Education
You're sent to the local day school until the age of thirteen and then you leave to start learning your trade.

Career Prospects
You join a firm and have an income until you have your first child when you stop working. You support the Liberals and will campaign for better conditions for the working poor, especially for women in sweated labour. You are one of the first women to become a local councillor in 1907.

Leisure Time
At weekends you go into town on the electric tram and spend hours browsing in the fancy new arcades and the department store or visiting tea-shops. You're keen to read the newspaper whenever you can in order to learn about improving women's rights.

Living Conditions
You escape from the flat in a mansion block you share with five other families to live in a pretty villa on the outskirts of the city. The villa has a parlour for special occasions and a small garden. You employ two servants who come by the day to help you with chores, including nursing the children, and you buy meat from the local butcher and groceries from the local shop.

Marital Relations
You marry at 19 and have three children, (one who dies as a baby).

in the corner of some foreign field, mookieproof sleeps tonight

You are a Box maker!
- A Snapshot of your life as it might have been in 1905

Education
You go to elementary school until you're 11 years old. You particularly enjoy learning cookery and needlework, although you find laundry work tedious as you do too much of it at home. Your parents don't want you to stay there as they need your help at home.

Career Prospects
At 15 you start work as a box maker, a job that you have seen advertised on the hoardings near your home. Hours are long, the work repetitive and you hate your boss – he never seems to reward your hard work. You need to stay in this job though to bring in enough money to bring up your children. You and your husband find it hard to make ends meet from both of your salaries.

Leisure Time
You save up and buy a bicycle and in fine weather you go on trips to the park on Sundays. You love a good sing-a-long at the music hall.

Living Conditions
When you start work you live on the premises in a crowded dormitory. When you marry you escape from the dormitory and move to your husband's lodgings – a room in a terraced house. You find it cheaper to do most of the shopping at the back door – fruit, vegetables and fish from carts but occasionally you splash out on luxuries from the grocer's shop. As a treat you sometimes buy fish and chips from the parade of shops near your home.

Marital Relations
You meet your husband at work and marry at 17. You have four children.

World War One
Your husband is reluctant to leave you to go to war, but in 1916 he is obliged to as it's illegal not to sign up. Your husband dies in the trenches as a private soldier in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele.

Other Possible Occupations
Shopkeeper, Milk Seller, Waitress, Confectioner, Fishmonger

I prefer to see myself as having been apprenticed to a dressmaker, learning that trade, and eventually opening my own shop, selling "Parisian Modes" to women who can't afford to go to France for the real thing.

i find myself impressed by british people's ability to slide into these roles so easily, like it's in their bones somewhere just waiting for a venue to play it

I had a hard time picking my father's profession as it seems to change every 6 months.

You are in Service in a Country House!
- A Snapshot of your life as it might have been in 1905

Education
You go to school until you're 14 where you learn needlework, cookery and laundrywork. You become a member of the Girls Friendly Society when you're 14, which trains you in aspects of domestic service. You then become a servant.

Career Prospects
You start work in a country house, serving the housekeeper and doing other general work. You're often ticked off for insubordination – the senior servants think you're cocky. You strike up a relationship with a footman but like so many female servants of the time, you become pregnant and you're instantly dismissed from the house. You have nowhere to go as your family haven't got the room to take you back, so you're forced into a workhouse. You find employment in a sweatshop, putting the bristles into brushes sixteen hours a day.

Leisure Time
While you're working at the country house, you have to wear one of your four working dresses. You enjoy borrowing copies of The Illustrated London News and the Sketch, to look at pictures of actresses and ladies in pretty clothes. When you're thrown out, you long for the days when you worked in the country house and had a few hours a week to yourself.

Living Conditions
Whilst in Service, you have a small, simple room. After you leave, life in the workhouse makes even that room seem sumptuous. In the workhouse, up to 100 men and 60 women sleep in bunk-like beds. Your diet is made up of bread, milk, porridge, and gruel.

Marital Relations
With a child in tow, you're not great marriage material. You remain single, and continue to work into your old age, gradually gaining more and more benefits, as new forms of social security are introduced.

World War One
You carry on working in the sweatshop, as the brushes are for use by soldiers. Your boss becomes rich with all the orders he wins from the military.

You are a Lodging house keeper!
- A Snapshot of your life as it might have been in 1905

Education
You go to school until the age of 14 and then go into apprenticeship.

Career Prospects
You stay in the job all your life, you don't enjoy it. There's little prospect of promotion, but it's the only trade you know.

Leisure Time
You look forward to going away for a week once a year – you only get 10 days' holiday per year. Usually you take the train and stay in a boarding house by the sea. One day you go to church where you hear sermons about the importance of improving the conditions of the working poor. You get fired up by discussions in your dormitory about how campaigners are trying to improve women's rights and you join a march in London in 1907 to show your support.

Living Conditions
You board on your work premises in a dirty, cramped dormitory. This is a condition of the job. A severe system of "fines" for every minor offence at work takes money from your small salary and you have little left to spend on luxuries. You eat in the basement dining rooms, usually bread with cheese, jam or lard dripping. You don't usually have time to go outside in the day.

Marital Relations
You don't get married but are involved with various men throughout your life. When you get pregnant by a man you work with you have the baby aborted in secret.

That's pretty spooky, I do in fact come from a family of 2.4 kids (poor Ernestine), and we did in truth have a Volvo and a golden retriever!

The funny thing is, I considered this before you said it, Martin. But not from PBS!!

*Private* sector? My dad's not a freakin' mercenary!

Realistic no-effort answer = "illiterate farmer," though if I wound up living as long and looking as cool in a suit as my grandfather did, this wouldn't be so bad. Not that I'd have suits to look cool in at that point, but whatever. If I were really clever I could run up to London over the next few years and catch Virginia Woolf and her buddies doing their whole Abyssinian-royalty naval-inspection trick. I could be all like "That ain't no African! That's just Nicole Kidman with a prosthetic nose, a fake beard, and a robe over her shoulders! Seize her!"

48% snob.

67% Snob.

Good job, Tad, you're safely out of super-snob territory. But watch yourself -- a couple more sun dried tomatoes here and a few more trips to Dean & DeLuca there and you might be veering dangerously towards the stuck-up. Best go and touch some grubby sick people to keep your inner snob at bay.

Nostalgie de la boue is such an expression of snobbery -- you wouldn't enjoy it nearly so much if you had to stay in the slummy areas.

Fuck that, my dad's Navy. I fight at Jutland but nothing happens and otherwise I ride things out by dodging subs.

You might get stuck in a convoy with the Lusitania, Sailor Ned!

Yeah, but it was the LUSITANIA that got sunk. The rest of the boats sail on!

So how little things change, how little class mobility there is within British society, etc. etc. etc.

(What is a loding house keeper anyway? The job description doesn't seem to fit with tking in boardders which is whay I had assumed it meant.)

August Strindberg in 1905

Pure genius! (Flash plug-in required.)

Education
You go to the local school and at 16 you go into apprenticeship with a friend of your father's to learn your trade.

Career Prospects
You do well as an apprentice clerk. Wanting to go further, you join a well-respected firm where you enjoy the security and prestige. You go to work on the electric tram ? an excellent new invention, which means that you can get more easily from your new house on the outskirts of the city into the centre to work.

Leisure Time
You read a newspaper every day and follow with interest the social reforms that the Liberals are proposing. You expound these new theories at the debating society that you're a leading member of. You try to have family holidays once or twice a year. When there's enough money, you take your family to seaside resorts at Torquay, Blackpool and Scarborough.

Living Conditions
You move from a crowded house in the centre to a pretty, detached villa on the outskirts of the city. You employ two servants who come by the day to help your wife with chores. You buy meat from the local butcher and other food from the grocer, who's a good friend of the family.

Marital Relations
You marry your wife at 17 to escape from humiliation when you realise that she's expecting your first child.

World War One
You join the army at the outbreak of World War One and rise to become a corporal. Narrowly escaping death, you return home with serious war-wounds that mean you can't work again. You are awarded a Victory Medal and a Star.