Speaking with a friend, I was reminded of a frequent figure in 19th Century literature: the servant that has been in the family since one of the characters was a child.
Usually, this is an elderly person when we meet them. They are well loved in the family and it seems that they really care about the character they mainly relate to.
Generally speaking, it's someone who was there when the character was born, already an adult, already a trustworthy servant for the parents of the character. The parents died and this person kept working for the character, still very well regarded. They could even reach the grandchildren as a very elderly person but this is rarer.
An example I have from the top of my head is the servant of Mr. Noirtier in the Count of Monte Cristo, Barrois. This elderly man who even sleeps in the room of his disabled master and who cares for him so deeply that he disobeys the orders of the current master of the house, Mr. Noirtier's son.
Now, this is an important character for many reasons, more than in other stories where the figure is there to share wisdom or trust, or to show a poing in regards to the other characters. However, there is a detail missing: how old is he?
And more importantly: how old is Mr. Noirtier? Mr. Noirtier is also an old person. His grand daughter is about 18 if I'm not mistaken, she is about to get married. It is mentioned that Barrois has been in the family forever.
A thing that happened a lot when families had servants and child labor was legal was that servants could be (and frequently were) children. Barrois might be older than Mr. Noirtier but maybe not much older. He might have been a teen when Mr. Noirtier was born, which would make him only 12 to 17 years older than his master. He might have been the same age but long working days would make him look way older.
So I wonder what were Barrois tasks in the family before caring for Mr. Noirtier. And I do wonder if some of Barrois tasks include washing Mr. Noirtier or helping him go to the bathroom, since these tasks are more on the women field of "caring", but also he is a man too, and someone who had seen Mr. Noirtier grow up, so...
He doesn't seem to be a butler, but maybe he was before Noirtier's health issues. Maybe he was kept because Mr. Noirtier so wanted or because it was thought that caring for this man was an easier task for an elderly man (how easy it is to lift a dead weight that seems to be completely rigid, one has to ask).
Another example is Une Vie, by Maupassant. It is established (and it helps support the narrative) that Rosalie, Jeanne's servant, is her age. She was hired as a child to give company to Jeanne but also to care for her, to be her servant, and this was not a rare occurrence.
Since they were the same age, they got along great. When Jeanne comes back from the convent (at the beginning of the book, she gets out to get married), she is about 18 years old, and so is Rosalie. Jeanne spends some time showing her the drawings she did of the convent and telling her all her experiences there, the way two teenagers share stories about the holidays (except there is a power imbalance and who cares about what Rosalie did, she just worked the same in the family all those years).
In this case, Rosalie is there to show how two people of the same age but different upbringing can live their life and how you can change how life affects you depending on how you play the cards you are given. This does not mean that Rosalie gets rich and gets her own servant (overall, she barely even improves her situation), even if Jeanne does get poorer as the book progresses. It's more a character analysis, but with the help of the very normal and average situation of having a servant of your own age, you can show how two people evolve and how life is in different situations.
In many 19th Century books, there are servants all over. The moment someone has enough money to pay a laundress, there will be at least a laundress. You don't have to be rich rich, you just have to be able to pay some extra food and some salary to a kid that will be at home or come often.
If you are a bit more well off, like the Bennets, then you will have a couple of servants here and there. But often, they are background figures that don't really serve the plot. They are there because it would be meaningful if the Bennets didn't actually have a couple of servants (they would be poorer than they seem to be). In Dracula, it is very suspicious that he doesn't have servants in any way.
But any family with some money could hire some help. My family frequently had at least 1 girl (I will insist on this: a kid) to help with family affairs, take care of the kids, cook, clean or wash in the river. Or even go to the harvest. They weren't The Richest family. They even had the right to get some plot of land that was shared in smaller plots amongst "the poorest families of the village" (2/3s of the families in the village). But they had some land and some fortune, more than the family of the servants they hired. This girl didn't really sleep in the house, safe from special occasions, but she did spend a lot of time there.
I met the one that lasted longer and did more things and she was indeed this beloved figure of the 19th Century: we all liked her and loved her, everyone remembered her fondly and even when no work relationship was there, she would still come and visit or we would go visit her. When she became old, my family would ask her family about her and try to stay in touch.
She was a permanent figure in my father's childhood and they would speak about her with affection but also as the natural assumption that María was always there (because she was), the same way their mother was (or maybe more for some things).
[All of this is also interesting to keep in mind because when companies say "we are family", it's not only because there is some kind of reminder from when people were hired at 10 years old and stayed in the company until they were old. It's also because there is a memory somewhere along the line from when hired people were really inside of the family]
I know María wasn't the only one because others have mentioned they worked for my family, but some may have been hired when more hands were needed (during the harvest, for instance).
It is frequent to hear stories of old women who went to work for some family at the age of 10 or 12. My grandmother on the other side of the family worked as an in-house nanny when she was about 8 or 9, just a bit older than the babies and toddlers she was caring for. This is not something her children knew for a long time, but she required help at some point, when my mom was about 18, and she asked a favour to the man who hired her decades before.
Often, they would work in the same location where they lived, but often they would be sent to The Capital, because that way they could be living in the family so all the food and housing would be provided for, maybe even some education (and if not education, at least job experience). Not only it was a small salary for a poor family, it was literally one less mouth to feed.
Rosalie fits all these narratives of young girls working in-house for a family, and then also working in the farm or wherever they were hired. The old women who were servants in-house also worked in the harvest along with the men. She may be far away for many of us, but at the time of the book, she was an usual sight and a common experience. The years that Rosalie is not working for Jeanne (and therefore, disappears from the book), one can easily picture what she is doing.
It is true that I hear less stories of boys being hired permanently to live in-house although this does not mean it didn't happen. Often, they are already the old man who has always been in the family. But boys would have other jobs and they might have been more temporary. Interestingly, while many farm related jobs had an age (the harder jobs were for men, for instance, but the most boring or inconvenient were for women or children), house work had no age. A boy may not have been strong enough to carry certain materials, but a girl very well could carry a baby or a toddler of the same weight (or wash laundry in the river in winter).
I can't think of more examples right now, because as I said, servants are often just background characters, the same way a chair is there because it would be weird to have a house and no chairs. But it's interesting to think of what the servant that has a name and a voice is doing there and what is the social context for similar figures at the time the book was written.
