Servants of Diplomacy: A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office by Keith Hamilton (review)

A housekeeper’s dog threatened with execution for barking and making messes, a library clerk who joined the Salvation Army and sang hymns at work, a mountaineer stuck on the Weisshorn who later suffers from scalp wounds, foul odors of unknown origins, and several lift accidents are just a few interesting details included in Keith Hamilton’s well-researched Servants of Diplomacy: A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office. He provides a thick description of the office: clerks, librarians, messengers, and domestic staff are the primary actors in his story, while events like Fenian terror, civil service reform, the Crimean War, the Near Eastern crises of 1875 through 1878, and the scramble for Africa haunt the margins. As Hamilton puts it in the introduction: he “offers a view of life in the Office as seen from a rather different perspective, one in which the more decorative aspects of diplomacy were tempered by dilapidated buildings, malodorous kitchens, malfunctioning lifts and sewers, smoking chimneys and disease-ridden basement apartments” (11). This perspective makes for an enjoyable read, showing how various personalities, material constraints, and contingencies shape the development of the Foreign Office.

The book focuses on three aspects of the Foreign Office—accommodation and domestic staff, the librarian’s department, and messengers—over two periods: the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century to 1914. The structure allows readers to see both continuity and change. For instance, the office moves to a new building more suited to receptions, but domestic staff still struggle to keep it clean and find the necessary space for required daily office work. In turn, the King’s or Queen’s Messengers become foreign service messengers and the invention of electric telegraphy and the expansion of the postal network transform the job. Even so, messengers “remained gentlemen,” thus requiring higher pay (194).

Hamilton’s eye for interesting details and talent for crisp biographical portraits animates his story of this nineteenth-century office. Yet the book does more than tell a story: there are several implicit arguments made over the course of the narrative. Most notably, the author demonstrates just how much work it takes to understand abstractions like archive or institution. Hamilton shows that the Foreign Office is shaped as much through personalities as policies. The library and archive are very much the work of one family, the Hertslets—namely Lewis Hertslet, who worked in the library from age thirteen onward, and Edward Hertslet, his youngest son who became librarian when his father retired. When the sheer volume of papers exceeded the pace with which the library could register and index them, one official lamented that the Foreign Office “depends entirely upon the memory, fortunately extensive, of Sir Edward Hertslet and his staff” (Julian Pauncefote qtd. in Hamilton 167). Not surprisingly, perhaps, Edward Hertslet retired six years after the compulsory age of retirement for civil servants in part because the office so heavily relied on his knowledge of treaties and institutional memory.

In Hamilton’s hands, an archive is not an inert space, but material rooms that staff negotiate. Capturing the labor that the abstract concept of archive can sometimes obscure, Hamilton notes that the arrangement of rooms and an unsuitable lift meant that a library messenger spent the day traveling up and down stairs to connect the manuscript library to the registry. The ongoing struggle to keep the offices clean raised questions about the public and private: are housemaids more diligent when they serve a private family rather than work in a public building? One of the key elements of Hamilton’s story is how individuals sought proper remuneration for this labor—whether by appealing to precedent, differentiating Foreign Office work from the labor in other offices, or taking up side hustles like editing and selling Hertslet’s Commercial Treaties (1822–1925).

At times I did find myself desiring a little...