As an ardent reader of Jeevian literature—those sorts of parlor novels where a crisp and efficient butler repeatedly saves his master’s hide—I’ve often wondered if the mental acuities of real-life servants were central to their employer’s success. I confess to liking the idea—the heroic, string-pulling majordomo for whom the job well done was its own reward, the onus of discretion and undetection being a special challenge of the game.

Any literary work that features a butler is apt to feature a bumbler, and this historical account of the Earl of Kinnoull’s travails as a diplomat in Constantinople—with his man Samuel Medley by his side—is no different. The marked departure is that Medley decided to document his observations in a diary, a pursuit normally as distant from the ways of a butler as tossing white gloves aside and making a bid for a peership. For starters, he’d have to educate himself, which entailed raiding the master’s library, and stepping out of his station.

The diary is a recent literary form—there was little sociological precedent or impetus to write one’s thoughts down on the pages of a personal journal, save for some utilitarian purpose (perhaps as a record of how many cows had been bought and sold or a shopping list for the greengrocer). It wasn’t until the publication of Samuel Pepys’s diaries in 1825 that a private pursuit morphed into a literary fad.

Remarkably, Samuel Medley began his record in 1733; as Nigel and Caroline Webb