Carolyn Steedman. Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 262 pp. $91.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-87446-5; $32.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-69773-6.
Reviewed by Susannah Ottaway (Carleton College)
Published on H-Albion (February, 2009)
Commissioned by David S. Karr
Domestic Servants, Anglican Clergymen, and Happy Endings in the English Industrial Age
Forty-five years after E. P. Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and thirty-five years after the appearance of his seminal article on “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” social historians are still quite evidently engaged with his analysis of class relations in industrializing England, and particularly concerned to add the perspectives of groups (especially women) who were neglected in Thompson's account.[1] Carolyn Steedman’s Master and Servant joins this crowded field, bringing into view two important categories that Thompson had ignored: female domestic servants and Anglican clergymen. In doing so, she offers an important new lens for reading the now mythical story of the making of the working class. Equally important, she introduces some new methodologies for understanding these people, who have suffered not only from the “enormous condescension of posterity” but also, and more specifically, from the condescension of Thompson and the generations of new social historians that his work inspired.
Steedman’s approach to this topic mingles the traditional tools of social historians with a more innovative cultural-literary approach. Using the copious diaries of the Halifax Anglican clergyman John Murgatroyd, she unfolds the fabric of his relationship with his long-time domestic servant Phoebe Beatson. In 1802, Beatson gave birth to an illegitimate daughter whom Murgatroyd loved and protected until his death in 1806, when he left mother and child a significant legacy in his will. Steedman then embroiders this carefully woven tale with a more speculative chapter that mingles an analysis of master-servant relations in Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights (1847) with recent theories regarding the development of the sense of the "self" in the eighteenth century. Significantly, the setting for both the novel and the life of Beatson is the industrializing, cloth-producing West Riding of Yorkshire, which also served as a center of Thompson’s analysis.
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