Other assistants lived in the boarding house for longer periods, but seldom for more than four years.
They also allow us to paint a picture of boarding house life by telling us something about those who lived in these places and why.
At one point he records a conversation with a tenant of a particularly run-down boarding house who claims that drinking is the only way to tolerate life amid such conditions.
In an age before restaurants were plentiful and eating out commonplace, boarding house proprietors sold meals to non-residents living in the local area.
That is not so for the normal kind of holiday accommodation; there is no demand for investment in the boarding house and the small hotel.
The towns will remain overdependent on the holiday trade, in their cases a boarding house trade rather than a hotel trade.
But it is not the case that every servant in a boarding house or hotel is necessarily a domestic servant.
They made an industrial concern out of any four-bedroomed boarding house.
