Eighteenth Century Fiction

In 1785, Phoebe Beatson, aged nineteen, entered the service of Rev. John Murgatroyd, a retired Anglican curate, who had practised all his life around Halifax, peacefully manning the ramparts of a woefully under-resourced Church of England seeking to maintain its position against a rising tide of Methodists and nonconformists. In 1802, Phoebe gave birth to an illegitimate child, Eliza. The father was George Thorp, about whom nothing is known, and who, for reasons [End Page 468] equally unknown, refused to marry Phoebe. Rev. Murgatroyd kept Phoebe in his service, and she and the baby continued to live in his house, by Slaithwaite, a village near Huddersfield. He died in 1806, leaving almost half his property to Phoebe and her child, £150 for Phoebe and an equal amount in trust for Eliza. His watch and much of his furniture went to Phoebe; a globe went to Eliza. Three months later Phoebe married John Sykes, from Huddersfield, leaving a mark, not a signature, in the register. That is all we know about Phoebe. She was aged 36 when she had a child, about ten years later than the average for a first child, legitimate or not. She was 42 when she married. We know rather more about Murgatroyd: born in 1719, he was in 1785 a sixty-six-year-old retired curate and schoolmaster, and still acted as a peripatetic preacher for the churches within a twenty-mile radius of his home. He kept voluminous diaries, which were mostly about his devotions, routines, and studies. Eliza and her mother’s non-routine behaviour are hardly mentioned in his diaries. Phoebe could not write herself. Out of this Carolyn Steedman has managed to write a 263-page book; the prospect might have defeated lesser talents. This book is published by Cambridge University Press, which alone speaks for a certain level of success. Conceptually the book is highly original, and the literary and historical ambitions are far-reaching. The question is, does it succeed?

Such unpromising material might be handled at various levels. One way is to hang a narrative of domestic service upon it. As a servant (albeit not as a mother) Phoebe was in quite a typical situation— the single servant looking after the elderly single man, in this case childless and widowed. As an unmarried mother of an illegitimate child, let alone as a mother who continued her living-in domestic service, Phoebe was anything but typical. John Murgatroyd was not originally intended to be a subject of this book, but he has his chapters, notably chapter 5 on “Working for a Living” (as a clergyman) and chapter 6 on “Teaching,” where what Murgatroyd would have taught, and the books he would have taught from—books on the whole as pedantic and tedious as would be expected in eighteenth-century classrooms—are discussed in some detail.

Steedman is about to publish a larger book on domestic service in the eighteenth century (A Society of Servants: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England ) and has published various articles on the subject. Chapter 4 of this book deals with servants’ work, contracts, and settlement. Chapter 7, “Relations,” is partly about contracts and partly about employers’ attempts to get their servants to behave as good servants should—an uphill struggle traditionally carried out by brute force or by books of instructions such as Eliza Haywood’s popular [End Page 469] and constantly republished A Present for a Servant-Maid; Or, the Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem. By the late eighteenth century, there were occasional efforts to achieve these results by seeking to explain to servants how an employer would actually feel about a servant dressing too like her mistress, behaving to the children in a certain way, and such-like misdemeanours, a process explained in this chapter.

Those readers already acquainted with Steedman’s style—inserting herself into the narrative—will be...