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Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age: 10 (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, Series Number 10)

Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age: 10 (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, Series Number 10)

by Carolyn Steedman (Author)

  • New

    Paperback 2007

    $32.14
Synopsis

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.

$32.14

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10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 276
 Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12 Jul 2007
ISBN 10: 0521697735
ISBN 13: 9780521697736
Book Overview: A fascinating account of love, life and domestic service in eighteenth-century England.

Media 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 ...' 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.' Social History
'Master and Servant is a novel and compelling book. ... It roves across a fascinating 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.' 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, 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.' English Historical Review
...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
Author Bio
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).