Master and Servant is a novel and compelling book. Its remit is at once wide and narrow: it is a broad consideration of class, authority, and interpersonal relations viewed through the remit of one master and his servant in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. It is E. P. Thompson with the affective personal relations put back in, Wuthering Heights as a piece of social commentary. As this paragraph probably already suggests, it is also an unusual book.

The master and servant of the title are the Yorkshire minister John Murgatroyd and his long-standing domestic servant, Phoebe Beatson. Phoebe performed a wide range of domestic tasks for the household and also engaged in spinning out-work, thus representing a neat fusion of the two sides of an industrializing economy. Two other facts about this master and servant are particularly important for this study. The first is that Phoebe became pregnant out of wedlock in her late thirties and was supported throughout her pregnancy, birth, and single motherhood by her master. The second, perhaps even more important for the selection of this case study, was that Murgatroyd kept a diary of his thoughts and activities. Neither of these facts is so unusual in historical terms, but they allow Carolyn Steedman to take up a wide variety of themes that are crucial to our understanding of love, work, and authority in this period. Through Phoebe she is able to examine the work life of domestic servants and the nature of courtship and authority from master and poor law. Murgatroyd offers an insight into the ubiquity of Anglicanism to daily life and into authority and love within the household.

One of the first things we must thus deal with is the problems that the case-study approach brings up. The first-person narrative is clearly a valuable tool for investigating personal relationships (although, as Steedman very freely notes, none of Phoebe's own words or actions exist firsthand: her bastardy and settlement depositions do not survive, and Murgatroyd refers to her specific actions relatively rarely, although she is frequently present in the diary). The positions of the two actors (and the significant although almost entirely absent father of the illegitimate child, George Thorp) do shed light on a number of neglected topics in the social and economic history of the period, most notably for this reader, the work and nature of domestic service and the role of religion in everyday life. Other chapters deal with education, teaching, and love. However, one must question whether the choice of themes and the viewpoint taken is overly directed by the circumstances of this particular case study. Does Murgatroyd's position as a minister direct a certain view of religion, for example? Were his views and practices on education (he was a schoolteacher of long standing) typical? How much can we extrapolate from his treatment of his loyal servant on wider attitudes to household relations, bastardy, and courtship? In a sense Steedman does not apologize for the potential partiality of her sources because typicality is not her primary aim. However, the reader may be left feeling a little unsure as to how much to read into the (albeit moving) story of Phoebe and her master. As hooks to hang themes on, the characters are useful, but how representative are those hooks, and how does an author decide when to prioritize the theme and when the hook? Phoebe's child, for example, is not much discussed, except in a rather moving section on Murgatroyd's feelings for her, nor are Phoebe's experiences of the poor law dwelt on, except to describe them as “bruising” (210). In other cases, such as the discussion on education, the hooks seem to dictate the choice of themes.

In several respects this book may also be seen as somewhat whimsical. It roves across a fascinating array of topics, including pagan gods, classical didactic works, and (a very interesting and insightful) discussion of the philosophy of labor and its value. One frequently gets the impression that the links it makes and the approaches it takes have more meaning for the author than the reader. That is not to say that it does not have a significant amount of great interest but to say, simply, that the reader sometimes feels like a companion on a personal journey. Again, Steedman makes no apologies for her approach and indeed is very frank about her decisions as a historian, and the book's whimsies allow it to escape from the conventional frameworks of methodology. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the decision to relate the theme of domestic service and work in Yorkshire to the servant character and narrator of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean. The novel's early incidents take place at a similar time to Phoebe Beatson's experiences of work and pregnancy, and Dean offers a first-person commentary in a way that Phoebe cannot. Of course, Nelly Dean's words are probably not exactly representative of a domestic servant of the time, but the device is an interesting, if unconventional, way into a discussion of historical sources and narrative.

It is these novel viewpoints and approaches that give Steedman's book its greatest credit. The author frequently refers to her approach using the personal pronoun, and her book reads like a personal voyage of trial and discovery of how to access and deal with subjects of everyday life in the industrial period. She discusses specifically how to handle her treatment of God and religion, for example, and the nature of an investigation of single individuals. These types of methodological questions are not usually discussed, and certainly not so freely, and it is both refreshing and instructive to hear them voiced by a well-respected historian. Many research students will find the insight into the process of research very useful. The impact of the chapters themselves is variable, with genuine and supportable insight given into the role and significance of domestic work and religion and their relationships with class identity. The discussions of teaching and social advancement are also interesting but suffer more from the inherent problem of wider representativeness mentioned earlier. They also appear less connected with the main substance of class, labor, and love than some of the other chapters. Perhaps they are designed to evoke other important parts of everyday life, however: their intention is somewhat unclear. These points aside, however, this book deserves the utmost praise for its unique approach to humanizing the history of class and labor and also for its refreshing freeness and frankness in addressing matters of methodology.