Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (review)

The title of Carolyn Steedman’s book promises to explain the relationship between masters and servants in the industrial age. Service, as Steedman demonstrates, was all but ignored by theorists from Smith to Marx, as well as modern historians of the working class, yet it was a crucial part of the class structure. Yet this aspect of service is theorized here in a tantalizingly brief fashion—the reader will have to wait until Steedman’s promised magnum opus on service in the eighteenth century. This book is really about a relationship between a Yorkshire parson, the Rev. Murgatroyd, and his pregnant servant, Phoebe Beatson, and the fictional relationships of master and servant in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Above all, it is about religion and the formation of the self.

The relationship of service underwent a major change during the industrial revolution as domestic service became disentangled from waged industrial labor. Theorists such as Adam Smith and Marx denigrated service as unproductive labor because it did not produce commodities. Steedman points out, however, that in the eighteenth century and earlier, servants sometimes carried out both domestic tasks—cooking, cleaning and washing—and productive labor such as farm work. By the late eighteenth century, service and production were becoming more differentiated legally, if not in practice. But Phoebe Beatson still kept Murgatroyd’s house and also spun wool in Yorkshire’s flourishing putting out industry.

In this book, Steedman asks how could servants become persons in law, religion, the economy, and in actual relationships. Servants, as Steedman argued, had been long considered part of the master’s “self” being subordinated members of the family household; the master was to treat them with “common humanity” (137) and discipline. In Locke, people become possessive individuals by creating things through their labor—but when servants do the actual labor, they are absorbed into their masters’ personage. By the late eighteenth century, servants were emerging as separate legal persons. In 1777, servants were taxed as a luxury if they performed indoor domestic tasks and lived in the employers’ household. According to the law of master and servant, servants contracted with their masters for a particular period of time, which gave them certain rights such as a poor law settlement.

Given the lack of sources, it is difficult if not impossible to get at the subjectivity of servants. Instead, Steedman is able to examine the subjectivity of the master. The central question of the book is actually why did John Murgatroyd, an Anglican cleric, not throw out his pregnant servant and denounce her as a sinner? Why did he instead keep her and support her and her child, and leave them a generous bequest? We cannot know directly, because Murgatroyd’s diaries and other writings do not survive for the years 1801–2, when his servant Phoebe became pregnant.

To answer this question, Steedman examines Murgatroyd’s voluminous theological writings and practices. Steedman makes a profound case for taking religious belief seriously on its own terms, rather than just as a reflection of socioeconomic structures, or as a delusion. While most studies of late eighteenth century Anglicanism emphasize its stodgy conservativism, its advocacy of the established order, Steedman finds a much more compassionate religious perspective in Murgatroyd. He read the accounts of other clergymen who advocated a form of enlightened Christianity, in which the soul exercised will, reason, and observation of creation. The ideas of Locke are filtered through this Anglicanism; the soul is defined in terms of what it could know, feel and will. Unlike Evangelicals, Murgatroyd did not emphasize individual sin or the atonement. Instead, Murgatroyd focuses on forgiveness, compassion, and the duties of people toward their neighbors, but he also deeply sensed the “soul’s connection to God.” (169)

Murgatroyd’s sexual morality also differed from strict Calvinism. He advocated chastity on its own terms, but also because he feared that women who yielded to seduction would...