History from below stairs: domestic service in Britain & Ireland, 1650-1850 - HIS00126M

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Module summary

From the lavish retinues of liveried staff kept by the most affluent establishments to the single ‘drudge’ employed in more modest households, domestic servants were a ubiquitous feature of social and domestic life in the long eighteenth century. Domestic service was probably the single largest category of female employment throughout this period.  Servants and the ‘servant problem’ were a constant subject of debate and discussion as masters and mistresses lamented that domestics were venal, dishonest and incompetent and not as good as they used to be. Yet, at the same time, the virtuous heroine of one of the greatest literary successes of the age, Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740), was a servant, whose virtue was rewarded with marriage to her master.

In this module we will draw on the rich and expanding scholarship on the social, cultural and literary history of domestic service and a diverse array of contemporary writing about, by and for servants, as well as visual representations, court records and other archival material. Among the questions we will consider are: How should we understand the evolving relationship between servants and their employers in this period? Were they part of the extended household family, or agents on the labour market with a clear sense of their contractual rights and obligations? What did masters and mistresses think and feel about their servants and vice versa? How might the inclusion of domestic service and servants change how we write the histories of the labour and the working class? How did the master-servant relationship inform thinking about social, political and racial hierarchies in this period? And, in this unequal relationship, could servants wield power?
 

Professional requirements

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

• Timothy Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750. Life and Work in the London Household, (London: Routledge, 2001.)
• Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.)
• Kristina Straub, Domestic affairs: intimacy, eroticism, and violence between servants and masters in eighteenth-century Britain (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009.)
   

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 1 2026-27

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
• Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
• Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will: 

• Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
• Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
• Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
• Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following: 

1. Placing the servant: household, work and gender
2. The servant problem
3. Pamela and anti-Pamela
4. Scribbling servants
5. Servants, the social order and social conflict
6. Colonial domesticities
7. Servants or slaves?
8. Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby
    

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Module feedback

Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.

For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.  

Indicative reading

For term time reading, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

Bridget Hill, Servants. English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Timothy Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750. Life and Work in the London Household (London: Routledge, 2001).

Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Kristina Straub, Domestic affairs: intimacy, eroticism, and violence between masters and servants in eighteenth century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)