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

Near the end of this fascinating yet frustrating book, Steedman wonders, “[W]ho will notice that this is not just another social history of life, love, labour and religion in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1786–1806?” (228). Readers will certainly notice. In fact, Steedman never answers the questions that most social historians want answered about her subjects. The information that Steedman provides at the beginning of the book—that Phoebe Beatson, Reverend John Murgatroyd’s servant, became pregnant by George Thorp, who refused to marry her, and that Murgatroyd retained Beatson (and her infant daughter) in his service and left them both an inheritance after his death—does not increase at the end. Steedman never explains why Murgatroyd—whose diaries, notebooks and other papers provide the bulk of the documentary evidence about the situation in his household—did not turn Beatson out or why Thorp refused to marry her in the first place. Did Phoebe love Thorp? Was Beatson embarrassed or ashamed when required to give evidence to the magistate? Steedman does not say. None of the types of documentary evidence that social historians generally employ to fill in the details in such cases—settlement and bastardy examinations, depositions, affiliation orders, etc.—still seem to exist in this case. What kind of social history is this?

This frustrating lack of answers about the Murgatroyd/Beatson/Thorp relationship inspires Steedman to write, instead, a series of essays about the nature of history and historical narrative. The fact that Beatson is silent, existing primarily in Murgatroyd’s writings about her, allows Steedman to ponder the changing nature of the master-servant relationship in itself and as a metaphor for domestic life in general.

That the events in Steedman’s book occurred at the same time, and on the same ground, as those in Edward P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964) (without Murgatroyd ever noticing the agitation around him) prompts Steedman to reconsider the iconic status of Thompson’s work. Steedman finds that Thompson’s foundational myth of English class creation—depending as it does on narratives about Methodism, industrial work, and gender—has drowned out other voices and other experiences. Steedman attends to this issue in a series of deft and nuanced essays that reconsider the content of Enlightenment Anglicanism as social thought, attempting to reintegrate domestic service into the story of class creation and explore the belief systems of ordinary people.

A last essay on Wuthering Heights, in which Nelly Dean seems to speak for Beatson, illuminates modern identity formation through the relationship between history and literature. Although Steedman’s essays in this book never quench the desire to know more about the “real” people who inspired it, they contribute significantly to our understanding of the eighteenth century.