The show you are watching is playing with the term a bit I should think. There wasn’t a dedicated librarian in most country houses (to my knowledge). Rather, it was traditionally the role of the third footman to take care of the library. So when he was in that role perhaps he could be called ‘the librarian’, but his duties were not about collecting and categorising texts, but rather dusting and cleaning the room and lighting the fire in it along with cleaning the front hall, coat of arms, serving food to the housekeepers, and acting as a low tier lunch servant under the first and second footmen. So as you can see he has a low status and would not have been employed for literacy or book familiarity. In fact, being a librarian in late nineteenth century England fell across gendered lines, where more and more recently educated women took on the role in national and public settings with ‘gender imbalances amongst the privileged class causing more women to not be married’ but as they were not well off enough financially to stay idle they thus took on the ‘ladylike form of paid employment [that] involved little physical strain’ that being a librarian offered (along with mental breakdowns as the above link showed).

The library in county homes was more of an entertaining room than a space for study, with the books acting as set dressings, hence putting a lowly third footman in charge of the space. Books in country homes were deemed expendable. As Peter Reid argued in his article ‘The Decline and Fall of the British Country House Library’ (Libraries & Culture, Vol. 35.2 [Spring 2001], ‘even though these libraries are among the most important examples of private library collections in the world...the collections have been dispersed and sales of books from these libraries have occurred with monotonous regularity’. He argues that Lords of the Manor viewed their inherited book collections as “expendable resources”, not a prize of the estate that would dictate having a dedicated staff member to watch over as a ‘librarian’. The agriculture depression of the 1870s and 1880s massively decreased the wealth of the landed gentry and as they ‘divested themselves of their treasures’, books were the first thing to go (fancy painted family portraits on the walls were the last thing to go- as it is always about putting up appearances. These paintings were ‘exercises in Aristocratic iconography’, books were not). Book sales, Reid tells us ‘were an easy and relatively painless way for the impoverished nobleman to raise cash when times were hard’. In short books were not sacrosanct items and it was more about having a nice appointed room to show off- not one where anyone needed to pull rare texts from the shelves and thus not one that needed a librarian.

But fear not, the books did get librarians and the noblemen gained cultural status from them... when they gave the books to universities. You can read this wonderful extract from Mark Purcell’s book here where he talks a bit about the books within the county house being mere objects (for example a leaflet was circulated during the 1880s Land Wars in Ireland that advised the gentry to use ‘heavy ancestral books to barricade windows’). By bequeathing book collections to universities, the upper class could buy a status of learned scholarly appreciation for books that would have otherwise sat untouched or been sold in harder times (of course the university libraries were guilty of the same. Purcell writes of Oriel College, Oxford commissioning a new building to house a donated library, whist simultaneously selling a rare Shakespeare collection from it to a private collector).

It seems that when the lord in the show you were watching refereed to his third footman as the ‘librarian’, he was merely putting on airs, in much the same way the books themselves were to meant to put on airs.