Keywords
women history
domestic servant
life writing
How to Cite
Abstract
A translated chapter of Carolyn Steedman’s book Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age. This text reconstructs the experience of a 18th-century servant, Phoebe Beatson, on the basis of a diary of John Murgatroyd, her employer. Confronting this testimony with other documents of social life, Steedman constructs a history of a class overlooked by traditional Marxist historiography – female domestic servants.
References
Allen, Margaret. 1983. “Frances Hamilton of Bishops Lydeard.” Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset 31: Part 317.
An Assessment of the Township … for the Taxes on Male, Female Servants, Coaching Horses, Waggons, Carts. April 1786. Shrewsbury: Shropshire Records and Research. 3365/374.
Appeals before Commissioners. 1770–1785. Appeals heard determined at Meeting of the Commissioners held at the George Inn Battel the 21st day of January 1785. Hastings: Sussex. PRO, IR 83/131.
Assessed Taxes and Inhabited Houses Duties. Judges Opinions. 1805–1830. Vol. III. February 1810–June 1830. PRO, IR 70/3.
Beckett, John V. 1985. “Land Tax or Excise. The Levying of Taxation in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century England.” English Historical Review 100.
Beckett, John V. i Michael Turner. 1990. “Taxation and Economic Growth in Eighteenthcentury England.” Economic History Review 43:3.
Blackstone, William. 1775. Commentaries on the Laws of England. In Four Books. orig. pub. 1765. 6th edn. Dublin: Company of Booksellers.
Clifton JP, Sir Gervase. 1785. 1772–1812, M8050, Notebook [b. d.; prawdopodobnie listopad 1785]. Nottingham: Nottinghamshire Record Office.
Colquhoun, Patrick. 1806. A Treatise on Indigence; Exhibiting a General View of the National Resource for Productive Labour. London: J. Hatchard.
Commissioners of Excise. 1781. Abstract of Cases and Decisions on Appeals Relating to the Tax on Servants. London: Mount and Page for T. Longman and T. Cadell.
Craven, Paul i Douglas Hay. 2004. Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire,1562–1955. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.
Davidoff, Lee. 1974. “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England.” Journal of Social History 7:4.
Doncaster Window Duty. 1789. Doncaster: Metropolitan Borough Council Archives. AB6/2/17.
Earle, Peter. 1989. The Making of the English Middle Class. Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730. London: Methuen.
Eland, G. [Red]. 1931. The Purefoy Letters 1735–1753, 2 vols. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Eley, Geoff. 2005. A Crooked Line. From Cultural History to the History of Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Emsley, Clive 1979. British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Gilbert, Susan M. i Susan Gubar. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hall, Catherine. 1990. “The Tale of Samuel and Jemima. Gender and Working Class Culture in Nineteenth-century England.” W E.P. Thompson. Critical Perspectives. Red. Harvey J. Kaye i Keith McClelland. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hamilton, Frances. 1794. Bishops Lydeard Farming Accounts. Taunton: Somerset Country Record Office (28 September 1794, 20 January 1799). DD/FS 5/8–7/3.
Hecht, J. Jean. 1956. The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth Century England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Higgs, Edward. 1987. “Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenthcentury Censuses.” History Workshop Journal 23.
Hill, Bridget. 1989. Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-century England. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hill, Bridget. 1996. Servants. English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Honeyman, Katrina. 2000. Women, Gender and Industrialisation. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Hudson, Pat i Steve King. 2000. “Two Textile Townships, c. 1660–1820. A Comparative Demographic Analysis.” Economic History Review 53:4.
Joyce, Patrick. [Red.] 1995. Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keeling, Frederic. 1914. Child Labour in the United Kingdom. London: P. S. King.
Kent, D.A. 1989. “Ubiquitous but Invisible. Female Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenthcentury London.” History Workshop Journal 28.
Landry, Donna. 1990. The Muses of Resistance. Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lane, Joan. 1996. Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914. London: UCL Press.
Laurence-Anderson, Judith. 1981. “Changing Affective Life in Eighteenth Century England and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 10.
McBride, Theresa. 1976. The Domestic Revolution. The Modernization of Household Service in England and France, 1820–1920. London: Croom Helm.
Meldrum, Tim. 2000. Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750. Life and Work in the London Household. London: Longman.
Minutes of Evidence taken before the Commissioners, to whom the Bill, respecting the Laws relating to the Woollen Trade, is committed, Parliamentary Papers. 1803 III (Part 3).
Morris, Robert J. 1979. Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution, 1789–1850. London: Macmillan.
Neale, R.S. 1981. Class in English History, 1680–1850. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
O’Brien, Patrick K. 1988. “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815.” Economic History Review 41.
O’Brien, Patrick K. 1989. “Public Finance and the Wars with France, 1793–1815.” W Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815. Red. Harry Thomas Dickinson. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Parkyns, Thomas. 1724. A Method Proposed, for the Recording of Servants in Husbandry, Arts, Mysteries, &etc. Offer’d by Sir Thomas Parkyns, Bart., One of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the Counties of Nottingham and Leicester. London: Privately printed.
Murgatroyd, Reverend John. 1794. Diaries. Kirklees District, Huddersfield: West Yorkshire Archive Service. KC242/2.
Robbins, Bruce. 1993. The Servant’s Hand. English Fiction from Below. orig. pub. 1986. Durham and London: Duke University Press
Rule, John. 1981. The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-century Industry. London: Croom Helm.
Schwarz, Leonard. 1999. “English Servants and their Employers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Economic History Review 52:2.
Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. “Women in The Making of the English Working Class.” W Gender and the Politics of History. Red. Joan Wallach Scott. New York–London: Columbia University Press.
Sewell, William H. 1990. “How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-class Formation.” W E. P. Thompson. Critical Perspectives. Red. Harvey J. Kaye i Keith McClelland. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Snell, Keith. 1985. Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Steedman, Carolyn. 2003. “Servants and their Relationship to the Unconscious.” Journal of British Studies 42.
Steedman, Carolyn. 2005. “Poetical Maids and Cooks Who Wrote.” Eighteenth-century Studies 39:1.
Carolyn Steedman. 2009. Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge–New York: Cambridge University Press.
The Parliamentary History of England. 1814. London: T. C. Hansard. Valenze, Deborah. 1995. The First Industrial Woman. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press.
Verdon, Nicola. 2002. Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England. Gender, Work and
Wages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Vickery, Amanda. 1998. The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Heaven–London: Yale University Press.
Ward, William R. 1953. The English Land Tax in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press: London.
Wood, Andy. 1999. The Politics of Social Conflict. The Peak Country, 1520–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wrigley, Edward A. i Roger S. Schofield. 1989. The Population History of England, 1541–1871. A Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
License
“Theoretical Practice” seeks to put into practice the idea of open access to knowledge and broadening the domain of the commons. It serves the development of science, thinking and critical reflection. The journal is published in open-access mode under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license (detail available here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Articles published in the journal may be freely distributed, stored, printed and utilized for academic and teaching purposes without restrictions.
They should not be, however, used for any commercial purposes or be reconstructed into derivative creations. Access to the journal may not be limited or offered for a fee by any third party.
Prospective authors are obliged to fill in, sign and send back the publishing contract compliant with the CC licencing. [PL.pdf, PL.doc, EN.pdf,EN.doc].
According to this contract, authors grant the journal a non-exclusive right to publish their work under the creative commons license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) without any financial obligation on both sides of the contract.
Before submission authors should make sure that derivative materials they use are not protected by copyright preventing their non-commercial publication. Authors are responsible for any respective copyright violations.