Notes
......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Notes chapter 1. the ‘‘servant problem’’ and the family 1. Race is obviously another key term in modern analyses of the eighteenth century , one that is perceptively deployed, for example, in the work of Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); and Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001). Early modern ‘‘discoveries’’ of racial differences and, most crucially, African chattel slavery brought a whole new set of terms to the process by which social identities come to be figured during this period. Another book needs to be written about the historical intersections and divergences of British domestic service and chattel slavery. I would have liked to add, for example, a chapter on the autobiography of Mary Prince to this study. I beg the reader’s patience in viewing this book as a first step in the direction of including relationships between servants and their employers within the, for now, privileged terms of class, gender, and sexuality. 2. On the matter of identity, see Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Dror Wahlman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Naomi Tadmor provides some solid historical framing for understanding the eighteenth-century family in Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For readings of the novel in relation to the history of the family, see Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) and Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Michael McKeon’s massive The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) integrates discussions of identity and the family into his comprehensive study of domesticity in this period. 3. Perry. 192 n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 – 7 4. McKeon, pp. 231–32. 5. Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 22. 6. Tadmor, p. 35. 7. Wahlman. 8. Perry, p. 2. For interesting work on the education of children, see Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003). 9. Wahlman. 10. McKeon, p. 691. 11. This observation is the starting point of Bridget Hill’s book on the subject, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). J. Jean Hecht also documents frequent complaints over the state of domestic servants in The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), a book which is still arguably the premier source of information about the perception and conditions of domestic servants in England during this period. In one of the best literary treatments of servants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bruce Robbins observes that ‘‘there was in fact a sudden and well-documented new anxiety on the part of masters and mistresses about the damage that servant spies and informants could do’’ (Servant’s Hand, p. 108). 12. Daniel Defoe, Religious Courtship (Oxford: D. A. Talboys for Thomas Tegg, 1840), pp. 290, 353. 13. Samuel Richardson, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum: or, Young Man’s PocketCompanion (London: J. Roberts, 1734). Reprint by the Augustan Reprint Society, Publication Numbers 169–70 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library , 1975), p. v. Subsequent references are to this reprint. 14. Ruth Perry’s study of the family in fiction situates the novel’s treatment of familial relations in the contexts of enclosure, urbanization, and the shift from a traditional agrarian culture to one driven by trade as much as agriculture. See her Novel Relations, pp. 1–42. 15. Thomas Seaton, The Conduct of Servants in Great Families (London: Tim. Goodwin, 1720). Reprint (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), p. 115. Subsequent references are to this reprint. 16. Daniel Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d; or, the insolence and unsufferable behaviour of servants in England duly enquir’d into...
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