Menials

Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 16501850

By (author) Kristina Booker

Not available to order

Publication date:

20 November 2017

Length of book:

208 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611488647

Menials argues that British writers of the long-eighteenth century projected their era’s economic and social anxieties onto domestic servants. Confronting the emergence of controversial principles like self-interest, emulation, and luxury, writers from Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson to Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray used literary servants to critique what they saw as problematic economic and social practices. A cultural history of economic ideology as well as a literary history of domestic service, Menials traces the role of the domestic servant as a representation of the relationship between the master’s ideal self and the cultural forces that threaten it.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Becoming Nothing: Writing the Domestic Servant
Chapter 1: Literary Servants and the Trouble with Self-Interest, Part 1
Chapter 2: Literary Servants and the Trouble with Self-Interest, Part 2
Chapter 3: “Within Proper Bounds”: Domestic Servants and Emulation Anxiety
Chapter 4: Domestic Idylls, Exotic Fruits: the Luxury of Foreign Servants
Coda: Downstairs at Downton Abbey
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Booker condenses a wealth of knowledge into one slim volume, and the ambitious scope of the broad timespan announced in the title is fulfilled, resulting in a well-informed snapshot of textual representations two-hundred-year period. It is rare to find in a single book material that is useful for scholars of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I came away from this text wanting to interrogate the ulterior motivations for the depiction of every servant in fiction (and drama), and this is something to be thankful for.