Historical servants did recall a few of the individual circumstances dramatised in Downton Abbey. There were employers who loaned books to the servants, in the manner of Lord Grantham, and Lethbridge notes there was general agreement that chauffeurs “acquired a reputation for being cavalier with servants’ rulebooks”. The warm friendship between Lady Mary and her maid Anna, which becomes so close that Anna gives birth in her employer’s bed, however, does not appear to reflect the experiences of generations of servants who were expected to “know their place”.

The recollections of early 20th-century domestic servants demonstrate that even when they spent years in close proximity with their employers, they were not asked for their opinions. Rosina Harrison, who became lady’s maid to Lady Astor – the first female member of the parliament to take her seat in the United Kingdom – wrote a memoir entitled Rose: My Life in Service. In it, she recalled that when she waited on the daughter of her first employer, “My opinions were never sought or given on her music, on the people we met or on anything that was personal to either of us, nor did I expect it or miss it at the time.” The Dowager Countess of Grantham asking her butler for his opinion in front of her dinner guests would have been notable at a time when servants were expected to fade into the background while their employers conversed with visitors.

• Read more | A guide to the life of an Edwardian servant

In-house relationships: did they happen?

While the fictional Crawleys were supportive of marriages between their servants, including the valet John Bates and the housemaid Anna Smith, and, later in the series, the butler Charles Carson and the housekeeper Elsie Hughes, such relationships were often discouraged by actual early 20th-century employers of servants.

In 1917, Evelyn Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire considered dismissing her lady’s maid Miss Stiles because the maid was in a relationship with the Duke of Devonshire’s valet, Mr Taylor. The Duchess of Devonshire wrote to her mother-in-law: “We feel sure they are living together. It is a bad example in the house even if the worst has not happened.”

If the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had been resident in the United Kingdom at the time, Taylor and Stiles would likely have been dismissed and replaced by new servants. But the duke was Governor General of Canada from 1916 to 1921, and sending disgraced servants back to Britain and arranging for the transatlantic passage of new British servants was not practical during the First World War. As Dorothy Anne Philips writes in Victor and Evie: British Aristocrats in Wartime Rideau Hall, “As far as we know, both Stiles and Taylor stayed on.”

Relationships between servants and potential partners outside the houses where they were worked were also discouraged by their employers. In her 1975 analysis of 20 accounts of domestic service by women who were servants between the First and Second World Wars, historian Pam Taylor quoted a 1930s kitchen maid who observed: “It seems natural to the mistress that her daughter should have boyfriends and invite them to the house, but of course, we are only maids, and everyone immediately thinks our boyfriends have dishonest intentions.” The degree of concern that the Crawleys demonstrate for the personal fulfilment of their servants throughout Downton Abbey is unusual for the time that the series is set.

The reminiscences of former domestic servants suggest that even the potential for friendship and sociability within the servants’ hall was shaped by the hierarchy that existed below stairs. Margaret Powell, who wrote about her experiences as a teenaged kitchen maid in the 1920s in her memoir, Below Stairs, recalled the awkwardness of her first meal in the servants’ hall, stating, “No one bothers to introduce a kitchen maid. You’re just looked at as if you’re something the cat brought in.”

The lively conversations in the Downton Abbey servants’ hall, which bring together ladies’ maids, footmen, kitchen maids and sometimes the butler, housekeeper and cook do not necessarily reflect the experiences of most servants in large houses. The potential opportunities for lasting friendships were limited even below stairs.

A modern view?

Historians analysing the treatment of social class in Downton Abbey have concluded that the close friendships and relationships between members of the Crawley family and their servants are in keeping with the expectations of modern audiences, particularly in the United States, rather than the usual attitudes of the landed aristocracy in early 20th-century Britain.

In Exploring Downton Abbey: Critical Essays, edited by Scott F Stoddart, Stoddart and Michael Samuel observe: “The way that series intertwines the upstairs family with the downstairs crowd becomes a hallmark of the series, perhaps the most obliging nod to American audiences who do not always understand separation based on class and service.” Nicoletta F Gullace analyses the “progressive plutocracy” of Downton Abbey, concluding that: “While the table settings and tapestries of Downton were no doubt meticulously recreated, the euphemistic depiction of class, sexual and religious inequalities seemed remarkably tailored to modern audiences.” Downton Abbey reflects certain aspects of the worldview of 21st-century audiences, shaping the depiction of the social hierarchy more than one hundred years ago.