Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age

by Carolyn Steedman

Overview

Leading historian Carolyn Steedman offers a fascinating and compelling account of love, life and domestic service in eighteenth-century England. This book, situated in the regional and chronological epicentre of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, focuses on the relationship between a Church of England clergyman (the Master of the title) and his pregnant maidservant in the late eighteenth century. This case-study of people behaving in ways quite contrary to the standard historical account sheds new light on the much wider historical questions of Anglicanism as social thought, the economic history of the industrial revolution, domestic service, the poor law, literacy, education, and the very making of the English working class. It offers a unique meditation on the relationship between history and literature and will be of interest to scholars and students of industrial England, social and cultural history and English literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521697736
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/12/2007
Series:	Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories , #10
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Carolyn Steedman is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her previous publications include Strange Dislocations. Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1980 (1995) and Dust (2001).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: on service and silences; 2. Wool, worsted, and the working class: myths of origin; 3. Lives and writing; 4. Labour; 5. Working for a living; 6. Teaching; 7. Relations; 8. The Gods; 9. Love; 10. Nelly's version; 11. Conclusion: Phoebe in Arcadia; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"...brilliant piece of recovery..."
- Guardian

"...an important new lens for reading the now mythical story of the making of the working class.... Steedman's Master and Servant is a valuable addition to our understanding of work and domestic life in this cradle of industrial society." -Susannah Ottaway, H-Albion

"Although Steedman's essays in this book never quench the desire to know more about the 'real' people who inspire it, they contribute significantly to our understanding of the eighteenth century." -Patty Seleski, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Refreshingly comprehensive and attentive to the historiography on servants..." -Melissa M. Mowry, Eighteenth-Century Studies

From the Publisher