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  1. Home
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  3. Master and Servant
  • Cited by 52
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2010
Print publication year:
2007
Online ISBN:
9780511618949
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618949
Subjects:
Social and Population History, British History: General Interest, British History after 1450, European History: General Interest, History
Series:
Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories (10)
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Book description

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.

Reviews

'Steedman is as interested in the stories we tell about the past as she is in what actually happened in that faraway country. Her concern in Master and Servant is not merely to rescue Phoebe Beatson from bad melodrama, but to show how even the best-intentioned historical writing can end up making us see things that aren't there …'

Source: The Guardian

'… this book is hugely innovative in its literary and historical ambitions. … It is also a welcome reconstruction of the life of a single individual of a class, of a sort and of an occupation that has left only the faintest traces in the archive, whose silence has been for too long allowed to excuse the criminal neglect of historians.'

Source: Social History

'Master and Servant is a novel and compelling book. … It roves across afascinating array of topics, including pagan gods, classical didactic works, and (a very interesting and insightful) discussion of the philosophy of labor and its value. … Many research students will find the insight into the process of research very useful.'

Source: Journal of British Studies

'… 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 Source: H-Albion

'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.'

Source: English Historical Review

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