Servants, space, and the face of class in Victorian fiction

Erin Dee Chamberlain, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation examines the class tensions between servants and their employers at the height of the servant problem in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. I argue that the portrayals of servants' bodies, their character descriptions, and their positioning within the household became a way to redraw class boundaries as the middle classes established a higher social position for themselves. I examine the physiognomies of servants in both fiction and advertising, as well as the definition of the household through the depictions of the bodies of both mistresses and servants. I also explore why the spaces of the London streets and middle-class homes are described as either criminal or virtuous, and in particular how servants' characters can change based upon their positioning and movement within these locales. As I argue, the stereotype of the criminal servant is in deliberate contrast to the new machines replacing them at the end of the nineteenth century. Servants were considered inadequate, unnecessary, dangerous, and, most importantly, lower class. Using fiction, household guides, advertising, prose works, and autobiographies, I examine the deviant servant representations from popular writers like Dickens, Collins, Gissing, Braddon, Eliot, and Ruskin, to lesser-known authors like Eastlake, Haweis, Cullwick, Craik, and Howitt.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Palmer, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

COinS