Servants and their relationship to the unconscious

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 316-350

  Steedman, Carolyn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 1442330013     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/374293     Document Type: Review

References (123)

1. Recurring to the imagination is Samuel Richardson's formulation, made to describe how his servant figure Pamela came into being. In the middle of composing a letter-cum-writing manual, a particular story about a servant girl avoiding "the snares laid against [her] virtue . . . recurred to [his] thought; and hence sprung Pamela." Samuel Richardson to Johannes Stinstra, 2 June 1753, in The Richardson-Stinstra Correspondence, ed. Wilhelm C. Slattery (London and Amsterdam, 1969), p. 28
2. The "presumptuous task" was James Boswell's and what he called his various tellings of Samuel Johnson's life. Adam Sisman, Boswell's Presumptuous Task: Writing the Life of Dr Johnson (London, 2001)
3. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, eds., The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784-1821 (formerly Mrs Thrale), vol. 1, 1784-1791 (Cranbery, N.J., 1989), p. 191
4. Sisman, Presumptuous Task, p. 140
5. For an example of contemporary reactions, see Joseph Baretti, "On Signora Piozzi's Publication of Dr. Johnson's Letters: Strictures the First," European Magazine and London Review 13 (May 1788): 317, and how "in the great wisdom of her concupiscence, she has degraded herself into the wife of an Italian singing-master."
6. But there have been many, more opaque accounts in circulation since 1784. For the most recent, see Beryl Bainbridge, According to Queeney (London, 2001), pp. 221-31
7. Mary Hyde, The Thrales of Streatham Park (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1977), p. 35
8. Katharine C. Balderson, ed., Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale Thrale (Later Mrs Piozzi), 1778-1809, 2 vols. (1941, reprint, Oxford, 1951), 2:709
9. iozzi Letters, 2:14-15
10. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, originally published 1905, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 6 (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 239-302
11. Sigmund Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," originally published 1905, in Case Histories I, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 8 (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 29-164
12. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution: Essays in Feminism, Literature and Psycho-Analysis (London, 1984), p. 288
13. for the most felicitous account of this process. Or there's W. H Auden's elegant and moving perspicacity in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," in W.H. Auden, Poems Selected by the Author (Harmondsworth, 1958), pp. 68-71, stanzas 9 and 10
14. See also Samuel Clapham. A Collection of the Several Points of Sessions Law, Alphabetically Arranged, 2 vols. (London, 1818), 2:83-86
15. Many household account books that were used to detail hiring agreements noted "A Months Wages or a Months warning, on either side." See, e.g., East Sussex County Record Office, AMA 6191, Household Account Book of Thomas Cooper of New Place Farm in Guestling, 1788-1824
16. Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," p. 150
17. Steven Marcus, "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case-History," in his Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 1976), pp. 247-310
18. See also Charles Bernheimer and Claire Bemheimer, eds., In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism (New York, 1990)
19. For the main part, the progress of this self has been charted by nonhistorians. Landmarks include Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London, 1987)
20. Robert Elbaz, The Changing Nature of the Self (London, 1988)
21. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, 1991)
22. Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individual Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591-1791 (Cambridge, 1997)
23. All of these accounts implicate writing in the making of the modern self. Mascuch moves the argument forward by relating it directly to the practice of autobiography and biography, as they emerged in the early modern period. For the Italian philosopher Adriana Caverero. self is impossible without its narration by another. See Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (1997; reprint, London, 2000)
24. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books, originally published 1765, 6th ed. (Dublin, 1775). bk. 1. p. 422
25. A Familiar Summary of the Laws Respecting Masters and Servants, pp. 14-15
26. John Locke, An Essav concerning Human Understanding (1689; reprint, London, 1961), pp. 156-71, bk. 2, chap. 27
27. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690; reprint, Cambridge, 1970), pp. 304-7, bk. 2, chap. 5, sees. 26-28
28. James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 116-24
29. Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1991), pp. 78-81
30. Locke, Two Treatises, p. 319, chap. 5, sec. 49
31. Elizabeth Heckendom Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, Calif., 1991), pp. 162-63
32. Freud's is still the best - the funniest - account of this particular "species of the comic," i.e., play with body parts. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 248-50
33. However, though there is much mileage in philosophical and comic readings of these passages, we should also probably take into account Locke's intention - or rather lack of intention and deliberation - in the famous turf-cutting example. Jeremy Waldron, "The Turfs My Servant Has Cut," Locke Newsletter 13 (Autumn 1982): 1-20, 10
34. J. G. A. Pocock, "The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology," in Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present, ed. Anthony Parel and Thomas Flanagan (Waterloo, Ontario, 1979), pp. 154-55
35. Tully, Discourse on Property, pp. 21-25
36. W. M. Spellman, John Locke (Basingstoke and London 1997), p. 111
37. Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor, pp. 18-21, 85-86, 102, 105
38. For time as the thing contracted for, see Tully, A Discourse on Property, p. 139
39. discussing Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York and London, 1974), pp. 54, 59-83
40. For the substantial changes in popular understanding of what a domestic servant was brought about by taxation law (the tax on male servants was inaugurated in 1777). see Carolyn Steedman, "The Servant's Labour: The Business of Life, England, 1760-1820" (unpublished manuscript, University of Warwick, 2003)
41. See Carolyn Steedman, "Lord Mansfield's Women," Past and Present, no. 176 (August 2002): 105-43
42. Failed attempts to police and manage service were as many as those that made it to statute form in the middle years of the century. J. Huntingford, The Laws of Masters and Servants Considered: With Observations on a Bill Intended to Be Offered to Parliament (London, 1790), pp. 89-96
43. See Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750 (London and Harlow, 2000), p. 53, for earlier attempts
44. For an account of the tax on employers of servants, see Leonard Schwarz, "English Servants an Their Employers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Economic History Review 52, no. 2 (1999): 236-56
45. and Carolyn Steedman, "Smuggling Servants" (unpublished manuscript, University of Warwick, 2003)
46. Linguistic theorists of comedy note that there is no technical term for the punch line, though it has been named as paesis by Charles F. Hockett, "Jokes," in his The View from Language: Selected Essays, 1946-1964 (Athens, Ga., 1977), pp. 257-89
47. and locus by Walter Nash, The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse (London and New York, 1985). pp. 33-53, as the central element in the formulaic joke
48. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books I-III (1776; reprint, London, 1986), p. 430; see also pp. 133-40
49. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978). 5:76-78, 175-79
50. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767: reprint, Edinburgh, 1966)
51. John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances Which Give Rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society (originally published 1771; 3d ed., London, 1779). Pocock, "Mobility of Property." pp. 141-66: "It may have been the injection into the debate [on commodities] of a concept of barbarism, that social or pre-social condition, in which there was neither ownership nor exchange - or so it was thought - which helped occasion the still imperfectly understood appearance in Western theory of the famous four-stages theory of human society."
52. Robert Wokler, "Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment," in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley, Calif, 1995), pp. 31-52
53. The century's most famous conjectural history was Rousseau's: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality (1755; reprint, Harmondsworth. 1984), pp. 118-37
54. The Laws Relating to Masters and Servants: With Brief Notes and Explanations to Render Them Easy and Intelligible to the Meanest Capacity. Necessary to Be Had in All Families (London, 1755), preface
55. Huntingford, Laws of Masters and Servants, preface
56. A Present for Servants, from Their Ministers, Masters, or Other Friends, 8th ed. (London, 1768), pp. 14-15. This was last reprinted in 1787
57. See Matthew Adams, ' 'Imagining Britain: The Formation of British National Identity during the Eighteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 2002), for the people as the repository of a true history of England
58. Sarah Trimmer, The Servant's Friend: An Exemplary Tale, Designed to Enforce the Religious Instructions Given at Sunday and Other Charity Schools, by Pointing Out the Practical Implications of Them, in a State of Servitude, 2d ed. (London, 1787), p. 66
59. John Trusler, Truster's Domestic Management; or, The Art of Conducting a Family with Economy, Frugality and Method (London, 1819), p. xv
60. See Janet Thaddeus, "Swift's Directions to Servants," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 107-23, 108-9
61. Trusler, Truster's Domestic Management, p. 65
62. Bruce Robbins, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986; reprint, Durham, N.C., and London, 1993), p. 50
63. Carolyn Steedman, "Service and Servitude in the World of Labour: Service in England, 1750-1820," in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London. 2002), pp. 124-36, p. 135, n. 43
64. Carl Hill, The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud (Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1993), pp. 11-63
65. James Beattie, "On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition. Written in the Year 1764." in his Essays (Edinburgh and London, 1776), pp. 321-486, 464-82. Beattie thought that a limited (constitutional) monarchy like England's was the "most favourable to comic writing . . . where persons of all ranks, and those ranks so very different, and the public welfare depends on their living on good terms . . . each within the sphere of his own prerogative." Here "the manners of individuals, and more outward circumstances of life . . . supply the materials for wit and humour . . . [because] more diversified."
66. See Thaddeus, "Swift's Directions to Servants." pp. 107-23
67. Balderson, Thraliana, 1:57
68. Delia Chiaro, The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play (London, 1992), pp. 61-65
69. For Barber, see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), pp. 424-26
70. and Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings. Part II. Francis Barber, the Doctor's Negro Servant (London, 1952), p. 16
71. William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1984), pp. 111-12
72. Antoine de Baecque, Les Eclats du rire: La culture des rieurs au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2000), pp. 19-22
73. In 1784, Piozzi wrote to her eldest daughter about "Foolish Jemmy [who] says to me this morning - 'Your Daughters will come back in half a Year. . . .' 'What do you think half a year means Jemmy?' 'Six months my Lady; 12 months makes a year, I know that tho' I am a Fool' " (Piozzi Letters, 1:110-11)
74. For some account of the relationship between jokes and this kind of narrative of reversal, see Chiaro, Language of Jokes, pp. 49-58
75. and Nash, Language of Humour, pp. 26-30
76. And for a perfectly crafted reversal joke concerning Dr. Johnson's servant Francis Barber, see Lyell Reade, Gleanings, pp. 27-28
77. and Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 211-12
78. Piozzi Letters, 5:206, 443, 453
79. On the eighteenth-century writer's mission to efface this difference, see Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Textuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford, 1982), p. 40
80. Robbin s, Servant's Hand, pp. 32-45
81. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; reprint, New York, 1965), pp. 22-34
82. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford. 1987), pp. 49-57
83. Theresa McBride adduced historiographical reasons for this neglect. Theresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France, 1820-1920 (London. 1976), pp. 9-17
84. Ann Walker, A Complete Guide for a Servant Maid; or, The Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem, 5th ed. (London, 1787), pp. 20-21
85. For Pamela's famous cap, and her extreme neatness of dress, see Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 87-88, 109
86. John Styles, "Clothing the North: The Supply of Non-elite Clothing in the Eighteenth-Century North of England," Textile History 25, no. 2 (1994): 139-66, "Custom or Consumption? Plebeian Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England" (paper presented to the Conference on Luxury and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century Europe, University of Warwick, 1998, cited with permission of the author), and "Involuntary Consumers? Servants and Their Clothes in Eighteenth-Century England" (unpublished manuscript, 2003)
87. Roy Palmer, "The Lasses' Resolution to Follow the Fashion," in his A Touch on the Times: Songs of Social Change, 1770-1914 (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 162-63
88. See also Carolyn Steedman, "Englishness, Clothes and Little Things," in The Englishness of English Dress, ed. Christopher Breward, Beckv Conekin. and Caroline Cos (Oxford, 2002), pp. 29-44
89. Robbins, Servant's Hand, p. 123
90. [Mrs. Katherine Thomson], Constance: A Novel, 2 vols. (London, 1833). Page references in the text are to vol. 1
91. Tim Meldrum, "Domestic Service in London, 1660-1750: Gender, Life Cycle, Work and Household Relations" (Ph.D. diss., University of London. 1996), chap. 6
92. E. P. Thompson, "The Patricians and the Plebs." in Thompson's Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 57
93. For watching brought to the pitch of formal perfection, in actual late eighteenth-century theaters, see David Karr, " 'Thoughts That Flash Like Lightning': Thomas Holcroft. Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London," Journal of British Studies 40, no. 3 (July 2001): 324-56
94. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1998), p. 141, for the disturbing qualities of "eye-service."
95. For the panopticon, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; reprint. Harmondsworth. 1979), pp. 195-228
96. A Letter from Betty to Sally, with the Answer; a New Year's Gift. Recommended to be Learnt by Every Servant in the Three Kingdoms, Read Once by Every Mistress of a Family, in the Hearing of Every Master, Whose Fortune Does Not Exceed Three Hundred a Year (London, 1781)
97. See Hannah Glasse, A Servant's Directory, or House-keeper's Companion (London, 1760); Domestic Management, p. 25
98. Walker, Complete Guide, pp. 11-12
99. For biographies o Elizabeth Hands, see Richard Lonsdale, ed., Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford, 1989), p. 422 (Lonsdale reproduces a substantial part of Hands's Death of Amnon here)
100. and Donna Landrey, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 186-209
101. Elizabeth Hands, The Death of Amnon: A Poem with an Appendix: Containing Pastoral and Other Poetical Pieces (Coventry, 1789)
102. For the multiplicity of eighteenth-century families, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 73-99: pages that indeed employ Pamela, as she must be employed, whenever these questions are discussed
103. Margaret Allen, "Frances Hamilton of Bishops Lydeard," Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset 31 (1983): 259-72
104. Vickery, Gentleman's Daughter, pp. 148-49
105. T. E. Tomlins, The Law-Dictionary, Explaining the Rise, Progress and Present State of the English Law . . . Originally Compiled by Giles Jacob, 2 vols. (London, 1797)
106. Reflections on the Relative Situations of Master and Servant, Historically Considered (London, 1800)
107. Jonas Hanway, Virtue in Humble Life: Containing Reflections on the Reciprocal Duties of the Wealthy and the Indigent, the Master and the Servant, 2 vols. (London, 1774), 1:361-62
108. David Barclay, Advice to Servants (London, 1780), p. 13
109. A Present for Servants, pp. 14-15, 35
110. Trimmer, Servant's Friend, p. 107
111. Trusler, Trusler's Domestic Management, pp. xi, xii
112. William Godwin, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, in Three Volumes (1794), ed. Pamela Clemit, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (London, 1992), 3:130. Page references in the text are to this edition
113. For the presence of the mob in the eighteenth cen ury's political and historical imagination, see Adams, "Imagining Britain."
114. See William Godwin, "Of Servants" (1797), essay 4 in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 5, Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit (London, 1993), pp. 167-71
115. For Wollstonecraft's observations on parents' suspicion of servants, see Mary Wollstonecraft, Lessons from the Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), in The Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vol. 6 (London, 1989)
116. For her earlier, more conventional position on this question, see Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1788)
117. Godwin, "Of Servants," pp. 168-69
118. Beattie. "On Laughter"
119. Anthony Ashley Cooper. Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 29-69
120. Aristotle's Poetics; or, Discourses concerning Tragic and Epic Imitation (London, 1775), pp. 18-19 (I. iii)
121. Hill, Soul of Wit, p. 34
122. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919). in Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, Art and Literature (London, 1985), pp. 339-76
123. For uses of the past to construct a lost realm of community, see Adams, "Imagining Britain.quot; And for this very particular species of les éclats du rire, see D. Diana Davis. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (Carbondale, Ill., and Edwardsville, Ill., 2000), p. 33 n. 95 above)