Labours Lost
Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England

A unique account of the hidden history of servants and their employers in late eighteenth-century England.

Carolyn Steedman (Author)

9780521736237, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 12 November 2009

426 pages, 38 b/w illus. 8 tables
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.68 kg

'This highly readable book is remarkable for the level of detail unearthed about the daily experience of domestic service … Her overwhelming evidence and convincing analysis should call historians of labor, gender, and culture to attend to its claims and to set to work immediately on reconfiguring the larger historical narratives of the working classes; class consciousness; gender relations; the relationship between humans and animals; and conceptions of the self, privacy, and personal identity.' Dana Rabin, Journal of British Studies

This is a unique account of the hidden history of servants and their employers in late eighteenth-century England and of how servants thought about and articulated their resentments. It is a book which encompasses state formation and the maidservant pounding away at dirty nappies in the back kitchen; taxes on the servant's labour and the knives he cleaned, the water he fetched, and the privy he shovelled out. Carolyn Steedman shows how deeply entwined all of these entities, objects and people were in the imagination of those doing the shovelling and pounding and in the political philosophies that attempted to make sense of it all. Rather than fitting domestic service into conventional narratives of `industrial revolution' or `the making of the English working class' she offers instead a profound re-reading of this formative period in English social history which restores the servants' lost labours to their rightful place.

Prologue: the servant's dream
1. Introduction: a new view of society
2. Servants numberless: theories of labour and property
3. Frances Hamilton's labour
Necessity: 4. Lord Mansfield's women
5. In a free state
Horses: 6. The law of everyday life
7. Policing society
servant-stories: 8. Servants and childcare: Ann Mead's murder
9. Food for thought
10. An ode on a dishclout
11. A servant's wages
Stays: 12. Conclusion: the needs of things.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]