Book

Labours lost : domestic service and the making of modern England

Steedman, Carolyn

Overview

\"This is a unique account of the hidden history of servants and their employers in late eighteenth-century England and of how servants thought about and articulated their resentments. It is a book which encompasses state formation and the maidservant pounding away at dirty nappies in the back kitchen; taxes on the servant's labour and the knives he cleaned, the water he fetched, and the privy he shovelled out. Carolyn Steedman shows how deeply entwined all of these entities, objects and people were in the imagination of those doing the shovelling and pounding and in the political philosophies that attempted to make sense of it all. Rather than fitting domestic service into conventional narratives of industrial revolution' or the making of the English working class' she offers instead a profound re-reading of this formative period in English social history which restores the servants' lost labours to their rightful place\"--Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Household employees Great Britain History 18th century. / Country homes Great Britain History 18th century. / Great Britain Social life and customs 18th century.
• ISBN: 9780521516372, 0521516374, 9780521736237, 0521736234

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
HD8039.D52 S74 2009	1	BOOK	BUSINESS