Master and Servant
Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age

A fascinating account of love, life and domestic service in eighteenth-century England.

Carolyn Steedman (Author)

9780521697736, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 12 July 2007

276 pages, 2 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.41 kg

'This is microhistory at its best. Taking as its subject a clergyman and his maidservant, it sheds lights on both the personal histories of these two individuals and on many topics and debates of broader historical interest.… Steedman sets out to establish for herself how these scattered archival records can be reshaped into a coherent and truthful historical account, openly and carefully discussing with the reader her acts of reconstruction, and the processes by which she transforms the historical documents into historical narrative.' English Historical Review

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.

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.

Subject Areas: British & Irish history [HBJD1]