Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England

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.

Author: Carolyn Steedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/12/2009
Pages: 428
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780521736237

About the Author
Steedman, Carolyn: - Carolyn Steedman is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her previous publications include Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (2007) and Dust (2001).