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Master and Servant book cover
Master and Servant
Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age
2003
First Published
2.78
Average Rating
276
Number of Pages

Part of Series

Leading historian Carolyn Steedman offers a fascinating and compelling account of love, life and domestic service in eighteenth-century England. This book, situated in the regional and chronological epicentre of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, focuses on the relationship between a Church of England clergyman (the Master of the title) and his pregnant maidservant in the late eighteenth century. This case-study of people behaving in ways quite contrary to the standard historical account sheds new light on the much wider historical questions of Anglicanism as social thought, the economic history of the industrial revolution, domestic service, the poor law, literacy, education, and the very making of the English working class. It offers a unique meditation on the relationship between history and literature and will be of interest to scholars and students of industrial England, social and cultural history and English literature.
Avg Rating
2.78
Number of Ratings
9
5 STARS
11%
4 STARS
0%
3 STARS
56%
2 STARS
22%
1 STARS
11%
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Author

Carolyn Steedman
Carolyn Steedman
Author · 6 books

Carolyn Kay Steedman, FBA (born 20 March 1947) is a British historian, specialising in the social and cultural history of modern Britain and exploring labour, gender, class, language and childhood. Since 2013, she has been Emeritus Professor of History at University of Warwick, where she had previously been a Professor of History since 1999. Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex with an undergraduate degree in English and American Studies in 1968, and then completed a master's degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1974. She was a teacher from then until 1982, when she joined the Institute of Education in the University of London as a researcher; for the 1983–84 year, she was a Fellow there, before lecturing at the University of Warwick, where she was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1988, Reader in 1991 and Professor of Social History in 1995. For the year 1998–99, she was Director of Warwick's Centre for Study of Social History. Steedman returned to Newnham College to complete her doctorate, which was awarded in 1989. In 2011, Steedman was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

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