Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T22:56:46.220Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Servants and Their Relationship to the Unconscious

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Carolyn Steedman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , July 2003 , pp. 316 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

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 Stinstra, Johannes, 2 June 1753, in The Richardson-Stinstra Correspondence, ed. Slattery, Wilhelm C. (London and Amsterdam, 1969), p. 28Google Scholar. The “presumptuous task” was James Boswell's and what he called his various tellings of Samuel Johnson's life. Sisman, Adam, Boswell's Presumptuous Task: Writing the Life of Dr Johnson (London, 2001)Google Scholar. Hester Piozzi thought of Lucy, in Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752; reprint, Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar. Bloom, Edward A. and Bloom, Lillian D., eds., The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–1821 (formerly Mrs Thrale), vol. 1, 1784–1791 (Cranbery, N.J., 1989), p. 191Google Scholar.

2 Sisman, Presumptuous Task, p. 140. For an example of contemporary reactions, see Baretti, Joseph, “On Signora Piozzi's Publication of Dr. Johnson's Letters: Strictures the First,” European Magazine and London Review 13 (May 1788): 317Google Scholar, and how “in the great wisdom of her concupiscence, she has degraded herself into the wife of an Italian singing-master.”

3 Sisman's succinct explanation for Hester Piozzi's withdrawal from the aging Johnson seems the most psychologically likely. Sisman, Presumptuous Task, pp. 139–42. But there have been many, more opaque accounts in circulation since 1784. For the most recent, see Bainbridge, Beryl, According to Queeney (London, 2001), pp. 221–31Google Scholar.

4 Sisman, Presumptuous Task, p. 146.

5 Ibid., p. 140.

6 Hyde, Mary, The Thrales of Streatham Park (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1977), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Balderson, Katharine C., ed., Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale Thrale (Later Mrs Piozzi), 1778–1809, 2 vols. (1941, reprint, Oxford, 1951), 2:709Google Scholar; Piozzi Letters, 2:14–15.

7 Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, originally published 1905, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 6 (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 239–302Google Scholar.

8 Freud, Sigmund, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” originally published 1905, in Case Histories I, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 8 (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 29–164Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 142.

10 Mitchell, Juliet, Women: The Longest Revolution: Essays in Feminism, Literature and Psycho-Analysis (London, 1984), p. 288Google Scholar, for the most felicitous account of this process. Or there's Auden, W. H'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 10Google Scholar.

11 Different society, different century, different labor law. Summarizing a century's development, the anonymous A Familiar Summary of the Laws Respecting Masters and Servants, Apprentices, Journeymen, Artificers and Labourers (London, 1831), p. 21Google Scholar, pointed out that the convention in eighteenth-century England was “by what is called a month's warning or a month's wages…this mode of hiring has been now so long sanctioned by all powerful custom, that the law courts do not hesitate to recognise it as binding on both parties.” See also Clapham, Samuel, A Collection of the Several Points of Sessions Law, Alphabetically Arranged, 2 vols. (London, 1818), 2:83–86Google Scholar. 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.

12 Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” p. 150.

13 Marcus, Steven, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case-History,” in his Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 1976), pp. 247–310Google Scholar. See also Bernheimer, Charles and Bernheimer, Claire, eds., In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

14 For the main part, the progress of this self has been charted by nonhistorians. Landmarks include Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Elbaz, Robert, The Changing Nature of the Self (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Mascuch, Michael, Origins of the Individual Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar. 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)Google Scholar.

15 Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books, originally published 1765, 6th ed. (Dublin, 1775), bk. 1, p. 422Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 425.

17 A Familiar Summary of the Laws Respecting Masters and Servants, pp. 14–15.

18 Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689; reprint, London, 1961), pp. 156–71, bk. 2, chap. 27Google Scholar.

19 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government (1690; reprint, Cambridge, 1970), pp. 304–7, bk. 2, chap. 5, secs. 26–28Google Scholar.

20 Tully, James, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 116–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steinfeld, Robert J., 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. 78–81Google Scholar.

21 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 319, chap. 5, sec. 49.

22 Ibid., p. 306, sec. 28.

23 Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, Calif., 1991), pp. 162–63Google Scholar. 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. 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. Waldron, Jeremy, “The Turfs My Servant Has Cut,” Locke Newsletter 13 (Autumn 1982): 1–20, 10Google Scholar.

24 Pocock, J. G. A., “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,” in Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present, ed. Parel, Anthony and Flanagan, Thomas (Waterloo, Ontario, 1979), pp. 154–55Google Scholar. Tully, Discourse on Property, pp. 21–25. Spellman, W. M., John Locke (Basingstoke and London 1997), p. 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor, pp. 18–21, 85–86, 102, 105.

26 Ibid., pp. 19–21. For time as the thing contracted for, see Tully, A Discourse on Property, p. 139, discussing Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York and London, 1974), pp. 54, 59–83Google Scholar. See also Richard Biernacki's discussion of the differences between the United Kingdom and Germany over labor materialized in products and labor time, as what was contracted for. Biernacki, Richard, The Fabrication of Labour: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995)Google Scholar. The English domestic servant, however (as William Blackstone observed), agreed to perform tasks over an agreed period of time. This is by way of striking contrast with how Biernacki (following Adam Smith) depicts British labor relations. However, Biernacki's examples are taken from the nineteenth century and from the woollen manufacture.

27 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 Steedman, Carolyn, “The Servant's Labour: The Business of Life, England, 1760–1820” (unpublished manuscript, University of Warwick, 2003)Google Scholar.

28 See Carolyn Steedman, “Lord Mansfield's Women,” Past and Present, no. 176 (August 2002): 105–43.

29 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. Huntingford, J., The Laws of Masters and Servants Considered: With Observations on a Bill Intended to Be Offered to Parliament (London, 1790), pp. 89–96Google Scholar. See Meldrum, Tim, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750 (London and Harlow, 2000), p. 53Google Scholar, for earlier attempts. For an account of the tax on employers of servants, see Schwarz, Leonard, “English Servants and Their Employers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 52, no. 2 (1999): 236–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Steedman, Carolyn, “Smuggling Servants” (unpublished manuscript, University of Warwick, 2003)Google Scholar.

30 Linguistic theorists of comedy note that there is no technical term for the punch line, though it has been named as paesis by Hockett, Charles F., “Jokes,” in his The View from Language: Selected Essays, 1946–1964 (Athens, Ga., 1977), pp. 257–89Google Scholar; and locus by Nash, Walter, The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse (London and New York, 1985), pp. 33–53Google Scholar, as the central element in the formulaic joke.

31 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations: Books I–III (1776; reprint, London, 1986), p. 430Google Scholar; see also pp. 133–40.

32 With Adam Smith, we may even ask questions about labor and subjectivity and not be anachronistic: Smith was quite clear about the role of repetitive labor in the making of intelligence and personality. See Rubin, Isaac Ilych, A History of Economic Thought (1929; reprint, London, 1979), pp. 184–85Google Scholar, for an account of bk. 5, chap. 1 of The Wealth of Nations, where Smith makes such observations.

33 Smith, Adam, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G. (Oxford, 1978), 5:76–78, 175–79Google Scholar; Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767; reprint, Edinburgh, 1966)Google Scholar; Millar, John, 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)Google Scholar. 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.”

34 Wokler, Robert, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Fox, Christopher, Porter, Roy, and Wokler, Robert (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), pp. 31–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The century's most famous conjectural history was Rousseau's: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, A Discourse on Inequality (1755; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 118–37Google Scholar, and On the Origin of Language: Two Essays: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder (1781; reprint, Chicago, 1966), pp. 1–74Google Scholar.

35 Millar, Origin, pp. 297–362.

36 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), prefaceGoogle Scholar.

37 Huntingford, Laws of Masters and Servants, preface.

38 A Present for Servants, from Their Ministers, Masters, or Other Friends, 8th ed. (London, 1768), pp. 14–15Google Scholar. This was last reprinted in 1787.

39 B.J., The Footman's Looking Glass; or, Proposals to the Livery Servants of London and Westminster for Bettering Their Situation in Life, and Securing Their Credit in the World. To Which Is Added, An Humble Representation to Masters and Mistresses. By J.B. a Brother of the Claoth (London, 1747), pp. 5–6.

40 See Adams, Matthew, “Imagining Britain: The Formation of British National Identity during the Eighteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 2002)Google Scholar, for the people as the repository of a true history of England.

41 Tim Meldrum notes this rhetorical form (moaning and groaning) in historical discussions of servants in English local history, as late as the 1920s. Meldrum, Domestic Service, p. 7.

42 Trimmer, Sarah, 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. 66Google Scholar; Trusler, John, Trusler's Domestic Management; or, The Art of Conducting a Family with Economy, Frugality and Method (London, 1819), p. xvGoogle Scholar.

43 Domestic Management; Or, The Art of Conducting a Family with Instructions to …Servants in General: Addressed to Young Housekeepers (London, 1800), p. 18Google Scholar. Late eighteenth-century towns evidently rang with the cry from drawing rooms after departing servants of “Shut that door!” See Thaddeus, Janet, “Swift's Directions to Servants,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 107–23, 108–9Google Scholar; Trusler, Trusler's Domestic Management, p. 65; Robbins, Bruce, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986; reprint, Durham, N.C., and London, 1993), p. 50Google Scholar.

44 Steedman, Carolyn, “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. Jones, Colin and Wahrman, Dror (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2002), pp. 124–36, p. 135, n. 43Google Scholar.

45 Hill, Carl, The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud (Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1993), pp. 11–63Google Scholar; Beattie, James, “On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition. Written in the Year 1764,” in his Essays (Edinburgh and London, 1776), pp. 321–486, 464–82Google Scholar. 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.”

46 See Thaddeus, “Swift's Directions to Servants,” pp. 107–23; Balderson, Thraliana, 1:57.

47 Chiaro, Delia, The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play (London, 1992), pp. 61–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Balderson, Thraliana, 1:175. For Barber, see Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), pp. 424–26Google Scholar; and Reade, Aleyn Lyell, Johnsonian Gleanings. Part II. Francis Barber, the Doctor's Negro Servant (London, 1952), p. 16Google Scholar. There is another version of this story in Thrale's Anecdotes. Piozzi, Hester Lynch, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D during the Last Twenty Years of His Life, 2d ed. (London, 1786), p. 210Google Scholar.

49 McCarthy, William, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1984), pp. 111–12Google Scholar.

50 de Baecque, Antoine, Les Eclats du rire: La culture des rieurs au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2000), pp. 19–22Google Scholar.

51 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).

52 Thaddeus, “Swift's Directions to Servants,” pp. 111–12.

53 Piozzi Letters, 1:110–11.

54 Balderson, Thraliana, 1:281; see also p. 285.

55 Piozzi Letters, 1:285. Especially when the Wits were in sentimental mode, even if that mode were little like the way the treacherous Baretti depicted it, in The Sentimental Mother: A Comedy in Five Acts; the Legacy of an Old Friend, and His Last Moral Lesson to Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale, Now Mrs Hester Lynch Piozzi (London, 1789)Google Scholar. Formerly the Thrales' steward, Joseph Baretti, was a notorious example of what might happen when those formerly in your service wrote. Piozzi thought that her daughters were behind his extreme satire on the way she had brought them up: “I do believe God forgive me that She [Queeney] and her old Nurse between 'em dictated Baretti's most audacious libel” (Balderson, Thraliana, 2:680).

56 Piozzi Letters, 1:59.

57 Ibid., 1:110.

58 Ibid., 2:483. For some account of the relationship between jokes and this kind of narrative of reversal, see Chiaro, Language of Jokes, pp. 49–58; and Nash, Language of Humour, pp. 26–30. And for a perfectly crafted reversal joke concerning Dr. Johnson's servant Francis Barber, see Lyell Reade, Gleanings, pp. 27–28; and Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 211–12.

59 Piozzi Letters, 5:206, 443, 453. On the eighteenth-century writer's mission to efface this difference, see Eagleton, Terry, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Textuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford, 1982), p. 40Google Scholar.

60 Robbins, Servant's Hand, pp. 32–45.

61 Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; reprint, New York, 1965), pp. 22–34Google Scholar; Campbell, Colin, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987), pp. 49–57Google Scholar.

62 Theresa McBride adduced historiographical reasons for this neglect. McBride, Theresa, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France, 1820–1920 (London, 1976), pp. 9–17Google Scholar.

63 Walker, Ann, A Complete Guide for a Servant Maid; or, The Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem, 5th ed. (London, 1787), pp. 20–21Google Scholar.

64 Pamela, and her clothes, were certainly in his mind, as he hearkened back to a lost, former time, when “People were much better served…when a Maid in a good Family had but forty shillings a Year, and wore a plain round-eared Cap, a Gown which with the Neatness then in Use would last half a dozen Years, and often much longer.” Gentleman of the Inner Temple, Laws Concerning Masters and Servants, viz Clerks to Attornies and Solicitors…Apprentices…Menial Servants, Labourers, Journeymen, Artificers, Handicraftmen and Other Workmen (London, 1769), pp. 26–27Google Scholar. For Pamela's famous cap, and her extreme neatness of dress, see Richardson, Samuel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 87–88, 109Google Scholar.

65 Styles, John, “Clothing the North: The Supply of Non-elite Clothing in the Eighteenth-Century North of England,” Textile History 25, no. 2 (1994): 139–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “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); Palmer, Roy, “The Lasses' Resolution to Follow the Fashion,” in his A Touch on the Times: Songs of Social Change, 1770–1914 (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 162–63Google Scholar. See also Steedman, Carolyn, “Englishness, Clothes and Little Things,” in The Englishness of English Dress, ed. Breward, Christopher, Conekin, Becky, and Cos, Caroline (Oxford, 2002), pp. 29–44Google Scholar.

66 Robbins, Servant's Hand, p. 123.

67 Ibid., p. 27.

68 [Mrs.Thomson, Katherine], Constance: A Novel, 2 vols. (London, 1833)Google Scholar. Page references in the text are to vol. 1.

69 Meldrum, Tim, “Domestic Service in London, 1660–1750: Gender, Life Cycle, Work and Household Relations” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1996), chap. 6Google Scholar.

70 Thompson, E. P., “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in Thompson's Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 57Google Scholar. For watching brought to the pitch of formal perfection, in actual late eighteenth-century theaters, see Karr, David, “‘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): 324–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Saint Paul, Eph. 6:5–6. Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1998), p. 141Google Scholar, for the disturbing qualities of “eye-service.”

72 For the panopticon, see Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (1975; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 195–228Google Scholar.

73 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)Google Scholar.

74 See Glasse, Hannah, A Servant's Directory, or House-keeper's Companion (London, 1760)Google Scholar; Domestic Management, p. 25; Walker, Complete Guide, pp. 11–12.

75 For biographies of Elizabeth Hands, see Lonsdale, Richard, ed., Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford, 1989), p. 422Google Scholar (Lonsdale reproduces a substantial part of Hands's Death of Amnon here); and Landrey, Donna, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 186–209Google Scholar.

76 Blackstone, Commentaries, bk. 1, pp. 429–30, 432. Clapham, Sessions Law, 2:21. For immediately contemporary advice, see Gentleman of the Inner Temple, Laws, pp. 1, 7–9, 23–26.

77 Hands, Elizabeth, The Death of Amnon: A Poem with an Appendix: Containing Pastoral and Other Poetical Pieces (Coventry, 1789)Google Scholar.

78 Actually, Thomson's Thomas may be present in Hands's second strike (to be discussed below), which contains the order “Tom, take out the urn, / And stir up the fire, you see it don't burn.”

79 “Why what is all this, my dear, but our neighbour has a mind to his mother's waiting-maid!” says one of the gentry Pamela is about to marry into; “And if he takes care she wants for nothing, I don't see any great injury will be done here. He hurts no family by this.” Richardson, Pamela, p. 172. Just a little later, Pamela states a fundamental principle of equality in God's sight: “My soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess, though in quality I am but upon a foot with the meanest slave” (p. 197) and on p. 294, she refers back to the Christian myth of origin, to the beginning of time, when there were no monarchs, social hierarchies, nor country gentleman like Mr. B.: when “we were all on a foot.” For the multiplicity of eighteenth-century families, see Tadmor, Naomi, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 73–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; pages that indeed employ Pamela, as she must be employed, whenever these questions are discussed.

80 Not that it stopped them of course. Landrey, Muses, pp. 186–89.

81 Allen, Margaret, “Frances Hamilton of Bishops Lydeard,” Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset 31 (1983): 259–72Google Scholar.

82 Somerset County Record Office, DD/SF, boxes 5 and 7, Bishops Lydeard Farming Accounts and Household Accounts, Mrs. Frances Hamilton (née Coles), box 7.2, pp. 63–72.

83 Ibid., p. 140; entry for 7 June 1788.

84 Vickery, Gentleman's Daughter, pp. 148–49.

85 In addition to examples above, see, e.g., A Present for Servants; Huntingford, Laws of Masters and Servants; Jones, Charles (Sarah Trimmer), The Story of Charles Jones, the Footman, Written by Himself (London, 1796)Google Scholar; Tomlins, T. E., The Law-Dictionary, Explaining the Rise, Progress and Present State of the English Law…Originally Compiled by Giles Jacob, 2 vols. (London, 1797)Google Scholar; Reflections on the Relative Situations of Master and Servant, Historically Considered (London, 1800)Google Scholar.

86 Hanway, Jonas, 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), 1:361–62Google Scholar.

87 Barclay, David, Advice to Servants (London, 1780), p. 13Google Scholar; A Present for Servants, pp. 14–15, 35; Trimmer, Servant's Friend, p. 107.

88 Its subtitle indicates the wildly oscillating readership it intends: The Art of Conducting a Family, with Economy, Frugality & Method, the Result of Long Experience; with Full Instructions to Servants of Various Denominations, How to Time and Execute Their Work Well, Necessary for Every Mistress to Know, and the Best Present She Can Make Them, Even for Her Own Comfort and Interest. Trusler would have preferred the categories of servants named on his contents page to go straight to their section and “get their job by heart” (pp. 4–5); though he thought that a housemaid, e.g., might well read “To a Footman” if none were kept at her place, for “it comprises many of her duties” (pp. 149–59). Trusler hoped to police reading rather in the way he supported employers in policing a family. But servants who did obey him would have missed a laugh (laughter in the manner of Swift), especially the housemaid reading diligently in order to transform herself into a footman: “To the Footman…If at dinner-time, he be ordered to break the claw of a lobster, he will not crack it between the hinges of the dining-room door, but will take it into the kitchen” (p. 151)!

89 Trusler, Trusler's Domestic Management, pp. xi, xii.

90 Ibid., p. xii.

91 Godwin, William, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, in Three Volumes (1794), ed. Clemit, Pamela, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (London, 1992), 3:130Google Scholar. Page references in the text are to this edition.

92 A theme well explored by Samuel Richardson, Pamela, pp. 61–62.

93 Robbins, Servant's Hand, p. 29.

94 Ibid., pp. 18, 123.

95 For the laughter of Things As They Are, see n. 103 below. Not that Godwin employs it here.

96 For the presence of the mob in the eighteenth century's political and historical imagination, see Adams, “Imagining Britain.”

97 See Godwin, William, “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. Clemit, Pamela (London, 1993), pp. 167–71Google Scholar. For Wollstonecraft's observations on parents' suspicion of servants, see Wollstonecraft, Mary, 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. Todd, Janet and Butler, Marilyn, vol. 6 (London, 1989)Google Scholar. For her earlier, more conventional position on this question, see Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1788)Google Scholar.

98 Godwin, “Of Servants,” pp. 168–69.

99 Ibid., p. 170.

100 Beattie, “On Laughter”; Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Klein, Lawrence E. (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 29–69Google Scholar; Aristotle, , Aristotle's Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature, trans. Golden, Leon (Englewood, N.J., 1969), pp. 9–10 (V, i)Google Scholar; Aristotle's Poetics; or, Discourses concerning Tragic and Epic Imitation (London, 1775), pp. 18–19 (I, iii)Google Scholar.

101 Hill, Soul of Wit, p. 34.

102 Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, Art and Literature (London, 1985), pp. 339–76Google Scholar.

103 For uses of the past to construct a lost realm of community, see Adams, “Imagining Britain.” And for this very particular species of les éclats du rire, see Davis, D. Diana, Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (Carbondale, Ill., and Edwardsville, Ill., 2000), p. 33Google Scholar. Here the laughter of knowing (of recognition) is brilliantly described, as the sudden apprehension of “the pure presence of the real world, of the order of things.” Or: Things As They Are (but see n. 95 above).