When Hester Thrale wanted to talk about James Boswell's “presumptuous task,” his blow-by-blow recording of the words, actions, and aperçus of another for fashioning into biography, a fictional servant recurred to her imagination (as servants will), one who had had a similar task imposed upon her, as part of her contract of employment.Footnote ¹ In March 1786 Hester Thrale—Mrs. Piozzi she was now—remembered a book she had read in her childhood, Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Arabella its eponymous heroine, and her maidservant Lucy. As she pondered that fictional relationship, James Boswell's Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785) had been out for just a few months. His Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was still but a proposal, not to be published until 1791, though le tout monde knew of his ferreting out of material for it. Hester Piozzi was writing from Rome, where a honeymoon tour, undertaken to remove her from embarrassment and ridicule (a widow in her forties, marrying for love! And her daughters' music master! And an Italian to boot!) had led her and her new husband.Footnote ² It was the same month when, back in London, her own best-seller, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was published, an account of the fifteen years in which the Thrales had made the houses in Streatham and Southwark Johnson's home, and all of them, before Thrale's death in 1781 and Hester's remarriage in 1784, had held each other in sincere and deep regard.Footnote ³

Hester Piozzi thought of Lucy, maidservant to the Female Quixote, and thus gave herself space to ponder the many motives that might be at work in the telling of another's life; for the very point of Lucy's onerous task is, that unlike Piozzi and Bozzy, she has no choice in undertaking it. Her mistress Arabella is heroine of a gentle satire, an anti-romance, that has her endearingly and solipsistically interpret every single thing that happens to her in her remote rural life, and every person she encounters, according to the old-fashioned chivalric romances she has read throughout her childhood. Indeed, she is still busy reading, for the house (the proto-gothic castle) is stuffed with them: a mother's legacy to an orphaned daughter. Arabella observes that each and every heroine of her girlhood reading possesses one attribute and prize possession, which is a story of Herself, related by a faithful servant. She calls Lucy into her closet and informs her that she has been chosen “to relate her History.” Lucy's first objection is that she is no storyteller: “It is not such simple Girls as I can tell Histories.” Nonsense! is Arabella's response. Would Lucy be her maid, if she wasn't clever enough? And anyway, “There is no Occasion…for you to make [emphasis added] a History,” for “There are accidents enough in my Life to afford Matter for a long one: All you have to do is relate them as exactly as possible. You have lived with me from my Childhood, and are interested in all my Adventures; so you must be certainly very capable of executing the task I have honoured you with.” The biography is “Part of [her] Duty” and anyway, “Did you ever hear of any Woman that refused to relate her Lady's Story, when desir'd?” The orders are detailed and explicit: Lucy must recount all her mistress's “Words and Actions,” every incident and thought (“however instantaneous”), every “Change of my Countenance …Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes…the Rise and Falling of my Voice; every Motion of my Eyes; and every Gesture which I have used these Ten Years past.” The maid is “excessively astonished” at these instructions: “Lord bless me! Madam,” she exclaims. “I never, till this Moment, it seems, knew the hundred Part of what you expected from me: I am sure, if I had, I would never have gone to service; for I might well know I was not fit for such Slavery.”

Telling another's story is a form of servitude, an analogy used and a state acknowledged by Hester Piozzi and James Boswell, albeit from rather different perspectives. Adam Sisman's hilarious and moving account of Boswell's devoted thralldom to his mentor, which shows neither writer nor his subject ever able to escape the other, is a sustained contemplation of the servitude involved in biography. Sisman shows that it was indeed Piozzi's accusation that Boswell was a mere secretary, a mere Lucy, that haunted him from the moment that his very first biographical account of Johnson saw the light of day.Footnote ⁴ And Sisman is probably correct in seeing her motive in the Anecdotes as an assertion of the servitude in which Henry Thrale's relationship with Samuel Johnson had held her. To present Johnson as a “cantankerous and demanding” house guest certainly rewrote a happy friendship between the three of them; and Sisman suggests that the rewriting served the purpose of justifying “her abandonment” of an old friend by her second marriage.Footnote ⁵ The adoption and rejection of the servant's place was in any case, deeply embedded in Hester Thrale's psyche: when she felt the most sorry for herself, she thought of herself in servitude (to her mother, her children, her first husband, her friends; to Dr. Johnson).Footnote ⁶ Her remembering Charlotte Lennox's novel then, in the moment she satirizes Boswell in a role she now rejects, is a most pleasing moment of intertextuality, where novel and Bozzy, Hester and Sam, are all bound together by the wonderful and irreverent Lucy. Her presence from 1752, in the imagination of the 1780s, suggests that there may be a joke somewhere, at the bottom of it all, and that this joke will operate by the principles of condensation and replacement, to reveal (as do dreams and slips of the tongue) what lies beneath.Footnote ⁷

But in this thought of Hester Thrale—in this letter of 1786—there is also the premonition of a darker response to the idea of being a servant, forced to tell the master's or the mistress's tale. Much has been made of an exchange that took place a century or so after this, between Sigmund Freud and his patient Ida Bauer (“Dora”), in her third and final analytic session with him, in December 1900.Footnote ⁸ According to the psychoanalyst as stenographer, writing down all her “Words and Actions… [Freud was a particularly acute observer of Dora's play with her reticule] every Change of [her] Countenance, Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes, Turnings pale, Glances, Pauses, Full-stops, Interruptions,” this was the analytic hour that opens with Dora's question: “Do you know that I am here for the last time today?”Footnote ⁹ The analyst, charged with the task of making a coherent story of “Dora,” and returning it to her as her own,Footnote ¹⁰ asks when it was that she came to the decision to leave. “A fortnight ago, I think,” she replies; and Freud swiftly responds, “That sounds just like a maidservant or a governess—a fortnight's notice.”Footnote ¹¹

Freud's observation did, in fact, provide both of them with enough material for Dora's history to be worked over yet again. It emerges that in the whole nasty story of family dysfunction and sexual abuse that will soon make up “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” one pivotal event has been Dora's feeling herself treated like a servant, by the family friend who attempted her seduction. She now appears to accept Freud's interpretation, indeed, to ponder it deeply: she “listened… without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed to be moved; she said goodbye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the New Year, and—came no more.”Footnote ¹²

It is Freud's resentment—his pique—at being treated like a servant, that is remembered, not hers; though both of them found a kind of truth in the sudden, surprising connection of self, story, and servant. “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case-History,” ran Steven Marcus's early contemplation of the perils of biography, and the subordination of the secretary-servant to his or her subject.Footnote ¹³ What follows here is a further account of these connections and their eighteenth-century origins. The relationship between telling someone else's story and the condition of servitude offers a contribution to a new and continually emerging historiography of the modern self.Footnote ¹⁴ The subject of modernity has been pursued and located in discursive, narratological, and philosophical terms for several decades now. But what Lucy and Arabella, Piozzi, Boswell and Johnson, Freud and Dora, may all offer us, is some new understanding of the social and political relationships—the social history—out of which it emerged during the course of the long eighteenth century.

The domestic service relationship was one of the most widely experienced in the society, the great social fact that underlay the comments of Sir William Blackstone, that the contract between employer and servant embodied the first of the “three great relations of private life” in which the law must be interested. According to Blackstone, the others—between husband and wife, and parent and child (or guardian and ward)— were founded on this first and primary one. He wrote here in reference to what he called “private oecenomical relations,” to a domestic arrangement “which is founded in convenience, whereby a man is directed to call in the assistance of others, where his own skill and labor will not be sufficient to answer the cares incumbent on him.”Footnote ¹⁵ Domestic servants were “the first sort of servant…acknowledged by the laws of England…menial servants; so called from being intra moenia, or domestics.”Footnote ¹⁶ Guidebooks to the law, magistrates' handbooks, and domestic manuals explored this relationship for seventy years after the Commentaries were published, with a fine culmination in 1831, in a Familiar Summary of the Laws respecting Masters and Servants, in which the author remarked that “there is not, perhaps, any branch [of the law] that commands more popular interests, or that requires to be more generally known and appreciated, than that which regulates the connexion between Master and Servant,—one of the most important and universal relations of the ordinary affairs of life.”Footnote ¹⁷

It was important to many writers and compilers of these texts—some of which are discussed below—that they provided a history of “the connexion between Master and Servant,” tracing England's constitutional past in a development from barbarism to a state of modern refinement in which the majority of the population had escaped conditions of general servitude. In the prefatory stories these writers told before they rehearsed the acts of Parliament that governed the master-servant relationship or guided their readers through the complexities of the right to poor law settlement though domestic service, the menial servant embodied the traces of an actual history of a former state of society. In these texts, a Lucy would have been the emblem of History, rather than the mouthpiece of her mistress's biography. But the History was only one of the many stories told about the servant's social presence. There were also the jokes, that are the focus of what follows here. Lucy's assertion that she cannot tell a story or make a History about Arabella, is a neat inversion—Lucy is a good joke, as we shall see—of the employer's desire that the servant, who is herself a History, should make one for them. These complications of contractual relationship, lived out in a mutual (though unequal) domestic watchfulness, in which different bodies embodied such very different principles, laws, and pasts, were first articulated by the marvellous Lucy, responding to “the curious Instructions for relating an History” that she is given. Now we must see, stirring in the recesses of Hester Piozzi's consciousness, the notion that she has been made a Lucy too, in her Anecdotes: that the joke is on her. And thus we may find ourselves in a new plot: “Freud and Lucy: Story, History, Biography.”

A profoundly Lockean moment occurs toward the end of The Female Quixote. The terms and conditions of Lucy's employment are altered yet again, and her storytelling duties expanded. Arabella has fainted and, on coming round, tells Lucy to relate “what has happened to me in the intermediate Time between my Fainting and Recovery. Give me a faithful Relation of all the Accidents, to which my Fainting and I am quite a Stranger” (Lennox, The Female Quixote, p. 305). Arabella is acting from a plot imperative, not a spirit of philosophical inquiry into the conundrum of the divided self, though Charlotte Lennox's interest in the questions of identity and personhood raised by John Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) is discernible. The chapter on “Identity and Diversity” asks what happens to a person—to his or her personhood—when asleep, or drunk, or having lost consciousness like Arabella; or when there is memory loss, or madness; when the body is present, but the mind, or the consciousness is absent.Footnote ¹⁸ To have a Lucy around is not a solution Locke proposes to the problem of suspended identity, though Lennox may be said to do so fleetingly here. (Very thorny philosophical questions, indeed, are raised by Lucy's assertion that there is nothing to say about Arabella's absence from consciousness, because absolutely nothing happened during it. At the textual level, however, this moment is one of the narrator's several assertions of Arabella's compelling self-centredness; it serves the author's purposes of characterization and is there for that reason).

Locke's major contribution to the questions we are considering here, of the service relationship and selfhood, was made not in the Essay, but in the Two Treatises of Government (1690). Here, as in the Essay, ideas and concepts are articulated by considering individual human bodies, and for our understanding of the relationship between employer and servant and the many stories—including jokes—that were told about it, it is on those bodies that we must concentrate. In the second Treatise, Locke describes how “every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself.”Footnote ¹⁹ The labor of his body, the work of his hands, are properly his, and he has property in them. In the great abundant world that God made, people have mingled their labor with the fruits of the earth, behaved like the Maker who made them, and the natural things with which they mixed their labor have become theirs: their property.Footnote ²⁰ This has been done throughout a long historical past, in the same way that it is done now, slowly and reluctantly in the late seventeenth-century anthropological present (“thus in the beginning all the world was America”).Footnote ²¹ In this situation (past and present), a free person, of his or her own will and volition, might “make himself a servant to another by selling him, for a certain time, the service he undertakes to do in exchange for wages he is to receive.” In that moment of hiring (in such an act of contract) the labor becomes the master's, not the laborer's. The moment, of the transfer of labor, is famously described: “The grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut…become my property…The labour that was mine removing them out of the common state they were in, has fixed my property in them.”Footnote ²² In this general historical account of the inauguration of property and ownership, the servant (who, in this particular example, is a turf-cutter) embodies certain principles of property making: its perpetual creation in modern societies.

As Elizabeth Cook remarks, these passages are also a justification of property ownership as “a by-product of the body/subject,” that is to say, a result of the immense efforts of political theorists and philosophers, from the mid–seventeenth century onward, to make the singular human body the locus of individuality and personhood. Cook is probably correct in understanding Locke's presentation of the servant's body here as “simply a kind of prosthesis,” though she does not note the startling comedy that lies in bringing her formulation to the visual imagination.Footnote ²³

Locke's famous example was about labor relations in general, and all kinds of worker (including domestic servants) who had agreed to perform certain tasks for some kind of compensation. It was framed and structured by the notion of a historical past that explained the conditions of late seventeenth-century society. It remains unclear, however, whether Locke searched for the actual historical origins of private property, rights, and the transferability of labor or whether the state of nature he described in The Two Treatises was a heuristic device, conjectural history amounting to no more than an explanation of how we got to be the way we were in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁴ What is more certain is that the propositions of the turf-cutting passage are to do with the conditions of early capitalism and a very wide variety of occupational categories. Robert Steinfeld has reminded us that for more than a century or so after Locke wrote, the idea of free labor remained “uninvented” (although such invention was in process in the former American colonies, from the 1780s onward), and that “all those who worked for others for compensation on whatever terms were in some sense “serving” their masters.” It was not simply a linguistic hangover from Tudor legislation to call workers “servants,” says Steinfeld, for “the broader usage of the term “servant” [captured the] common qualities of all versions of labor relationship.”Footnote ²⁵ Though domestic servants constituted the largest occupational category in mid-eighteenth-century Britain, Locke, at the end of the seventeenth century, was discussing a condition of labor that pertained even more widely. Within the legal and economic category “servant,” domestics were a minority. But—again according to Steinfeld—there were key distinctions between a “servant” and artificers and laborers: servants were “in the service of one other, for a unit of time… From the perspective of contemporaries, these differences were ordinarily taken to mean that laborers and artificers were not “in the service” of a single master and hence were not truly servants.”Footnote ²⁶ It is true, as Steinfeld further claims, that by the mid–eighteenth century the legal usage of “servant” had become broader, with the law of employment organized around the idea that anyone who served another for wages was a servant. And yet: in everyday language, and indeed, in the lower courts and the handbooks that magistrates consulted to administer that law, and perhaps above all in tax law, the mid-century was also the period in which the unadorned term “servant” came to mean, more often than not, domestic or menial servant.Footnote ²⁷

Lucy, had she been real, would have served her time as Arabella's servant on the great cusp of status and contract that the domestic servant has been taken to represent. As a figure in a text, she indicates those two systems that were much discussed in twentieth-century political science. She has been with Arabella since her mistress's babyhood and sometimes appears as “My Woman,” a traditional servant attached to a mistress through bonds of fealty and vassalage. But then, like any girl of the 1750s (even when living in the proto-Gothic realm of her inventor's satiric imagination), she got herself hired at some point, and several times refers to the terms of her hiring, when she actively “went to Service” (p. 122). Indeed, hiring (and thus contract) had been the legal form of the domestic labor relationship for a very long time, and had Lucy been real and getting herself hired sometime in the 1730s, then so too would her granny have done so, sometime in the late seventeenth century. The cusp discerned by political theorists was a very long one, more a kind of meandering development, in which existing contract relationships between servants and employers came to be much more rigorously asserted by the courts, from the mid–eighteenth century onward. This was particularly the case over the adjudication of settlement by service cases (working as a menial carried one of the most important rights to parish settlement) when they went on appeal to the higher courts.Footnote ²⁸

Elizabeth Cook thinks that the servant as prosthesis in Locke's second Treatise “must…be a result of money,” meaning the agreement to sell and to buy labor, expressed in the contract. But in fact (and though we might want to acknowledge the physiology of amputation, and point out that phantom limbs do go on hurting), the growth of contract diminished the legal image of the servant as mere appendage, or extra limb of the employer. This was not just because he or she who actively hires out their energies, capacities, and time, has to be taken note of by the law, as some category of legal person, in his or her own right, but also because the eighteenth-century English legal system paid such very detailed attention to domestic service. The servant getting hired—in case law and justice's manual—was a she: was a Lucy. The sweeping out of rooms, the washing of china, meals cooked and linens aired, rather than the cutting of turfs, was the work that parliament sought to regulate, the revenue office attempted to tax, and upon which the appeal courts pronounced.Footnote ²⁹ If the propositions embodied in Locke's symbol of the turf-cutter as servant reverberated throughout the eighteenth century, this is the first factor we must note in its continued contemplation: the servant figured in legislation, in justices's manuals, and in compilations of the law of service for domestic consumption, was a female domestic servant (though not always named as a Lucy). The second point is that the servant as prosthesis, so-called by Elizabeth Cook, was considered, but in the form of nervous comedy: a joke (though here and now, we must wait a little while, for our punch line and its interpretation).Footnote ³⁰

According to some contemporary commentators, the domestic servant performed work that was not work. In Adam Smith's grand formulation of the relationship between the division of labor and the making of society that is The Wealth of Nations (1776), he used the servant as a figure by which to explore the idea of value, the distinction between productive and nonproductive labor, and the social relationships that emerge between people under different conditions of buying and selling labor. Using “servant” first in its general sense, as anyone hired to work for compensation, he made it clear that fashioned and made things are labor materialized and made concrete, and that the labor fixed in these commodities is what gives them value. But by way of contrast, the “labour of the menial servant…does not fix or realise itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured.”Footnote ³¹ These questions of labor, the embodiment of labor in people and things, and the forms of personhood that emerged from the service relationship,Footnote ³² pushed Smith toward historical thinking and expression. He had used a world history, with time arranged chronologically by mode of production before 1776, in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759) and in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (delivered 1753–55), but it was the questions raised by work as a commodity (and the domestic servant's peculiar theoretical position in the argument of The Wealth of Nations) that allied him to the mainstream of eighteenth-century history writing.

As John Locke had briefly done, the eighteenth-century English and Scottish philosophic historians told the history of the world as a movement from barbarism to civilization: as a refinement of the laws and conventions governing the creation, possession, and exchange of property. Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson (1767), and John Millar (1771) wrote histories of civil society in which the historical account was inextricably connected to the way in which modern subjects were described, as legal and social beings. Their distinction and rank, their place in the great ordering of the world, was not just an external description, but an item of their identity.Footnote ³³ These were “natural histories” of humankind: inquiries into its evolution from a “barbarous” to a “refined state.”Footnote ³⁴

The philosophic historians focused much of their argument on the transition from one mode of production to another; on the inauguration of private property; on “the woman question” (i.e., the condition of women as a measurement of the increase of civility and refinement); and above all else, on the question of subordination and servitude. In their pages, we may read the history of the world as a diminution of servitude. We were all servants once, in vassalage and fealty to some lord in the pastoral and agricultural stages of human history; civilization is a state of society in which many of us have risen from that state.Footnote ³⁵

These formal historical statements about servitude as social condition related to more popular histories of the period, which told a national history through the servant's tale. “In the Infancy of our Constitution,” said one legal guidebook of 1755, “the Common People of England were little better than Slaves. But since the abolition of Vassalage…the Tyranny of Nobility is restrained; the Commonality are upon the same Footing as to Liberty and Property as the Gentry, and Servants of the Lower Class, being under the Protection of the Laws…have the same Remedy and Redress as their Masters.”Footnote ³⁶ Forty years later, a quite conventional handbook for magistrates provided a routine history of service from before the conquest as a preliminary to discussing the legislation concerning the regulation of servants then before parliament.Footnote ³⁷ The servant told us the story of “our ancient constitution” and of ourselves: of how we got to be the way we were. And these histories were given to servants too, as lessons in their own subordination. They were told that “making up a Part of every Family” they were as they were “by reason of Poverty, or a meaner Condition in the World”; this meant that they had “voluntarily submitted themselves, by Contract, for a certain Time to the Disposal of others, according to the Word of God, and the Laws of the Realm.” It was because of the inauguration of property that things were as they were: without property “the relation of the Master and the Servant could not stand.” In the first, lost realm of community when there were no masters and no servants, we may have been all on an equal footing with each other, but “that Community of goods which we read of, Acts iv, 34, was extraordinary and lasted but a little while.”Footnote ³⁸ The conjectural past of the philosophic historians joined the story of a Fall that inaugurated the division of ranks and the regime of subordination. The anonymous footman “B.J.” told his fellow workers in 1747 that every master should remember “that had it not been for some accidental Circumstances, he might perhaps have been in his [servant's] condition,” that is, “without Estate” and “undergoing the temporal Punishment inflicted upon them for Sin, and in the mean Time, serving others, as Servants.”Footnote ³⁹ These popular connections between two versions of the servant's history (the biblical and the historical-philosophical) provoked the uneasy sense (that is discernible in other varieties of eighteenth-century history writing) that perhaps after all, the people—the mob—were the repository of the true history of civil society.Footnote ⁴⁰

The immense effort of legal, political, and philosophical thinking devoted to the question of service in the eighteenth century is some measure of an anxiety of the employing classes, one that was perhaps managed by masters and mistresses through a routine and ritualized moaning about their household servants.Footnote ⁴¹ In handbooks of domestic management, religious tracts, and literature for children, the late eighteenth-century servant problem was articulated again and again. Servants kept breaking things: “It just came apart in my hands” was evidently a catchphrase by the later century.Footnote ⁴² They would never shut the door, but hung on the doorknob, saying, “But I am going out again immediately.”Footnote ⁴³ None of them would ever stay “beyond six months” (though “beyond a year” would have been a more accurate complaint: it was important to be hired and to serve for 365 days in order to gain local welfare rights). Servants' presence in a household with children might serve as an object lesson in propriety and civility, in something of the way that animals allowed first lessons to be taught. Servants functioned to show children that there existed feeling and emotion in others—those of a different rank, who were also older than the child, and thus doubly outside its range of experience. But parents of the polite classes worried constantly about their involvement in childcare, and what they might really be teaching the children.Footnote ⁴⁴

It was always possible to laugh about the relationship, as any reading of English literature will demonstrate (Arabella's severely unironic stance must come from all the French romances she has read, and Lennox expects us to know this, for contemporary joke theory held that it was much harder to be funny in states of political absolutism).Footnote ⁴⁵ But for the moment, laughter comes from a distant room; we can gauge neither its hollowness nor its heartiness; cannot tell exactly from which side of the door it emanates.

Hester Thrale had much invested in telling stories—funny stories—about her servants. Indeed, they did not have to be very funny to make it into the Thraliana. In the late summer of 1777, she recorded a whole collection of servant jokes, all of them turning on what Janet Thaddeus has brilliantly defined as “Mollspeak,” that is, the kind of language in which employers parodied their servants' misuse of it. Her collecting started in June, when she recorded one that had not “yet got into any Jest Book but this; and it is a true one. One Day when [a master] had been out all Morning his Maid at his return let him know that Lord Beauchamp had been at his Lodgings, and desired he would lend him Three Oxen and a Hogshead; Sure you misunderstood him says he; Yes Sir replies the Girl his Lordship said I could not understand him, but you would find out what he meant in a Moment—it was a Theocritus and a Horace.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This kind of joke had been told on her side of the door all through her childhood. She remembered that her “Mother said that disannul was always the fine word of a Footman,” as in “I sent my servant one Day to see if the House of Commons was up for some reason. It was just disannulled as I came to the Door said the fellow,” and then, relentlessly on, “I sent my Man to ask how a Lady whose house I was passing by—did—he brought me her Thanks in return & said that She was Lunatick he meant Rheumatick it seems.” “I sent my Man/Woman/Servant” had probably become a joke formula (“Waiter, waiter…”/“I say, I say, I say…”) by the time she started her joke collection.Footnote ⁴⁷

By December, she had so accustomed the Streatham household to their form that she was able to inveigle Dr. Johnson into telling a story about his black servant Francis Barber, a man whom Johnson held in the highest regard and about whom he had hitherto never cracked a joke. “The other Day speaking of his Negroe Francis,” she had observed that he “was very well-looking for a Black a moor; Oh Madam says he Francis has carried the Empire of Cupid farther than many Men: When he was in Lincolnshire seven years ago, he made Hay as I was informed, with so much dexterity that a female Hay Maker followed him to London for Love.”Footnote ⁴⁸ All of these jokes, pleasant or unpleasant, funny or not, were part of Hester Thrale's technique for the refining of a “tellable story” into the general truth that the eighteenth century understood the anecdote—and her later Anecdotes—to represent.Footnote ⁴⁹ And her stories about servants, her watching of them, certainly served a purpose beyond—or beneath—the éclat de rire.Footnote ⁵⁰ Any reader of her letters to her daughters, the ones written after they abandoned their newlywed mother in an excess of embarrassment and social disdain (for her choice of husband, the advanced age at which she did the choosing, and his rank, status, and nationality), will notice that the only way in which she was able to get off her high horse of rejection and hurt, indeed, the only way in which she could communicate with them, was by telling the girls stories of the servants they had known since their childhood. She used the servants as paper intermediaries. They stand in for her in her letters, say what it is she cannot write to her daughters.Footnote ⁵¹ And when she is not expressing her own desire that they will come back to her in the voice of the cooks, butlers, and gardeners they all know in common, she tells the girls stories about servants they have never met, but will recognize as types. Or more than types. Thaddeus has suggested that Jonathan Swift's obsessive observation of his domestics was born of his competition with them, in which the perspective of footman and master, audience and writer, are amalgamated in an impulse of deep sympathy for the servant's position.Footnote ⁵² Something of the same disaligned perspective is at work in one of the four letters Piozzi wrote to the cold-hearted Queeney (Hester Maria Thrale, her eldest daughter) from Paris, in the first stages of the great escape that was her wedding journey. In a little comparative sociology of servitude she reports on “A Town so full of People and all so apparently idle that it is no unobservable Contrast to our London, where even the Maid servant who sits by a Soldier's Side in St. James's Park—pretending to buy Milk for her Master the Linen Drapers little Boy—looks hurried as she listen to the rough Courtship of her Sweetheart; and wipes her face, & wishes to be at Home; and wipes her face again, but can't get the Anxiety off it. Here nobody seems expected to be busy.”Footnote ⁵³ She knows her daughter—her personality, her tricks of character—by observing her own maid, the sharp-tongued Eleanor Allen, observing in 1788 that “My Maid is so like my Eldest daughter in person, and cold heartedness, you would laugh.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The characters of her servants are of great interest to her; she exercises her technique as a writer, in describing them as personae. Beauty and amiability in a maid matter much to her—how could they not, in this “first great relation of private life?” Eleanor Allen “is very decent, and very Philosophical, and very well-looking,” she observed to a friend in October 1788; but ladies like them—Wits, Bluestockings—could “not bear such slow-minded, strong-hearted things, about [them].”Footnote ⁵⁵ She would remember long after the event, the pretty picture that she and lovely Mary Johnson (“Joh,” “Sybilla”) presented during a break on the road home from Bath in May 1784, when at dinner she had “sate at the head of the Table and Carved for the Men, who absolutely would treat Johnson and I for Love of her Beauty and my Wit, I trow.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Moreover, Mary Johnson was Welsh and, by this stage in Piozzi's life, the only person to whom she ever spoke her native language.Footnote ⁵⁷

Her servants did not so much have stories; they were stories; or rather, they represented time, sequence, plot, and denouement, in a way that Mrs. Piozzi's fragmented and alienated family could not. And they could not write back—with escalating coldness and distance—as her daughters did. She perfected her writing of a Life—in her view, little lives—in recounting the servants', noting in 1798 that “there are Vicissitudes upon this little Globe among Little Folks—my Handsome Maid that was with me in Italy…came to our Door this morning a poor Woman asking Charity—Ainsi va le Monde.”Footnote ⁵⁸ She examines motivation, the play of personality and circumstance, through recounting the servant's life; her servants can be, if she labors hard enough at it, her lost daughters found. Late in life, she used writing to effect what has been called the mission of written language in the eighteenth century, that is, the effacement of difference between event and representation. She records that—right now—“Bessy is pulling the pen out of my hand to make me be dressed in time. Be quiet Bessy.”Footnote ⁵⁹ She imitates a fictional servant of the 1740s, adopts Pamela's pen, Pamela's eternal writing “to the moment.” And perhaps Bessy created for her mistress that “abridged, transient utopia” that Bruce Robbins has noted, that “idyll of recognition” in which very different social relations from those that actually pertain, appear fleetingly between the lines of fiction that has servants anywhere present. For just before the pen is snatched, her mistress scribbles that Bessy is “all that a daughter should be.”Footnote ⁶⁰

There is a fantasy of the employing classes at work in all of this, neatly encapsulated in Arabella's task: that the servant might be watching you, and through his or her witness, your dimensions, your shape and form as a person, might become clearer, your outline more solid, and that you might be affirmed by the servant's observation and recounting of you. Such a wish, or desire, is also discernible in what twentiethcentury historians of the eighteenth century came to call emulation theory. Emulation theory was elaborated for the main part, out of eighteenthcentury employers' routine condemnation of their servants' supposed habit of copying the manners, and behavior, and above all, the dress of their betters, revealing to their masters and mistresses their true desire to be like them. This desire ascribed to eighteenth-century servants by their historians was often written out of a late nineteenth-century psychology of the sort that informed Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, to which the twentieth-century historian of consumerism and its culture made some attenuated reference.Footnote ⁶¹ Servants are the category of worker around which economic and social historians constructed many of their theories of consumption and yet the one about which they remain the most embarrassed—embarrassed at the idea of workers who could not easily be lined up with the “classic” industrial or craft worker of the historical imagination.Footnote ⁶² A theory that had little reference to lived experience in the eighteenth century appears to have framed much historical explanation of its social behavior. This is not to deny that there was, indeed, a voracious eighteenth-century appetite for reading about servants as copycats (in the deeply unattractive language of the time, “aping” their superiors); but there is very little evidence that it was a practice among servants, rather than an elaborate anxiety of employers, that expressed the hope that the servants might be doing just that: watching them, their betters; knowing them, copying them. Ann Walker pleaded with her imagined audience of maidservants in 1787, to please see things from her, the employer's point of view: “Can you believe,” she asked, that “any mistress can be pleased to find, that no sooner she puts on a new thing, than her maid immediately jumps in something as like as she can?”Footnote ⁶³ But the anonymous barrister who had, some years before this, compiled an up-to-date compendium of the law relating to service, did not even hint at emulation, in his tirade against the “Silks and…fine Linnens” that in his view, enormously inflated wages, had given London servants the means to purchase.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, he assumed, as John Styles's recent work on servants' consumption has demonstrated, that it was “the Lasses' resolution to follow the fashion,” something they did all by themselves, without any copying, aping, or emulation of their mistress.Footnote ⁶⁵

In discussing English fiction from below, Bruce Robbins has shown us the “mute, expository appearances” of servants in many nineteenthcentury novels; shown how “the silent messenger…with murder on his face as he takes orders for tea, is paradigmatic of many less extreme instances where the barest…mention of a servant's existence is sufficient to place the protagonist's life in problematic relation to the laboring community.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Robbins's intention is to show how the presence of servants in texts “indicates only the true absence of the people. Signposts left at random in the no-man's-land between what can and cannot be represented, they are capable only of showing that the other side of the border is inhabited.”Footnote ⁶⁷

And that they may be watching. A mistress who is both pleased and unpleased to find herself subject to such a watchful eye provides the complex and necessarily shifting perspective of Katherine Thomson's Constance: A Novel, published in 1833. This study of provincial life and manners (set in George Eliot territory and which reads, with hindsight, as some necessary progenitor of Middlemarch) is most precisely located in the 1780s, in the county town of Warwick, so that the servant joke with which it opens might work, and the novelist observe what it is she wants to observe.Footnote ⁶⁸ An elderly matron, resident of the town, waits for Thomas to bring in the tea things, and the moment he enters the room, remarks that “Thomas…this water don't boil Thomas.”

A few minutes, a few pages later, Mr. Cattell admonishes his wife for her persistent nagging: “Thomas won't stand it long, I can tell you, my dear; he's not a man to be run after, nor interfered with.” She retorts that “he's stood it these fifteen years”—and at that moment, Thomas reappears, from behind the door: “ “And if I don't give satisfaction,—ma'am—…’. Thomas well knew that these words always brought his mistress to reason; and setting down the toast at the same time, he retreated, having said he thought, just enough” (pp. 2–3).

This is a joke of the type that Hester Thrale collected, which proceeds by arresting attention through the servant's view—usually misprision—of the world and (though not in this case) misuse of language. Here the formula is transmuted into a scene of comfortable selfsatisfaction on the part of a narrator so that she (or he) can use the servant to explore the psychological dependancy of the members of this imagined household, in which all the characters are pleased with themselves, for knowing how the others think, and what motivates them. Writing a realist novel of habits and manners, Thomson sought a setting in which she could imagine a Thomas and the domestic configuration she had him manage and control. That setting could not be Warwickshire in the 1830s, for domestic watching had come by then to serve different ends, and, as we shall see, the mutuality of the gaze—the importance of a servant staring back—was much diminished.

The ocular was a motif in the vast body of literature that sought to advise about the governance of household servants, from the seventeenth century onward. This genre of literature and series of prescriptions have been very thoroughly accounted for by Tim Meldrum, writing of London in the period 1650–1750.Footnote ⁶⁹ He shows how servants were advised to look at, and look up to, their employers in order to both anticipate their wishes and also in order to learn how to be what was wanted. He shows as well, how masters and mistresses were counseled to watch their servants' behavior and their apprenticeship in that pleasing watchfulness. Discussing the social relationship between patricians and plebs during the eighteenth century, E. P. Thompson had the uneasy sense that “rulers and crowd needed each other, watched each other, performed theatre and counter theatre to each other's auditorium” in a “more active and reciprocal relationship” than is often supposed—a mutual watchfulness that both sides may have learned in the school of domestic servitude.Footnote ⁷⁰ Watchfulness was taught and learned under biblical injunction, specifically by way of Saint Paul's condemnation of eye servants, in his sixth letter to the Ephesians. Eye servants were those who behaved well only when observed by others. They were enjoined as “Servants [to] be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ; Not with eye-service, as man-pleasers; but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.”Footnote ⁷¹ In Paul's advice, eye service was a rather general tendency to do things for the wrong reason; but the image of the eye was used literally in advice books for servants and employers. Indeed, its weight as advice brings another image into view, of one vast panopticon avant la lettre, in which domestic servants were taught to behave as if they were being watched, even in the absence of anyone actually doing the watching.Footnote ⁷²

Indeed, there was a good joke about the servant's knowledge of the ambiguities of eye service, told in the anonymous and hilarious Letter from Betty to Sally of 1781.Footnote ⁷³ Betty has left her London place to get wed and writes a series of Swiftian instructions, in versified Mollspeak, to her former colleague, still at work in a household full of children (“whene'er you beat the children, mind / Tell them you'll beat them almost blind / You'll tye them up, and flog them well, / If e'er they speak or ever tell”) and a mistress made even more bad-tempered than usual by yet another pregnancy. Betty's advice neatly inverts all the formulae of the advice books (evidently tediously familiar by the 1780s), and she is particularly perspicacious on the question of housework, counseling Sally to “Talk fast, you're sure the battle's won” when there are complaints, and above all to

The joke may have worked even better in the 1780s, when there was perfectly sensible advice around, concerning the cleaning of the visible only.Footnote ⁷⁴

There is a good deal of self-deprecating comedy in the mistress's voice here (whoever it was who wrote it), a comedy spoken from an acknowledgment of how she might be seen by a servant. The servant joke in general becomes plainer, between the lines of A Letter: it is based on a deep conviction and wish that they are watching you; but it turns out to be the case that you are watching them, but perhaps not carefully enough to learn the lesson that Lucy teaches, which is that they're not really very interested in you; not interested in making a story out of nothing.

The example of the actual Warwickshire maidservant Elizabeth Hands (ex-maidservant, now married to the Bourton blacksmith) was the fantasy made disturbingly manifest—the fantasy that the servant did watch you, and then, Pamela-like, went on to write about what she saw.Footnote ⁷⁵ Elizabeth Hands's most notable publication was The Death of Amnon, about which she and her sponsors were somewhat nervous, for it dealt with the topic of incestuous rape (“albeit in a biblical context,” notes Roger Lonsdale). It shows Hands to be interested in the psychological effect of guilt on perpetrator and victim after a brother-sister rape; but even more interested in questions of family authority and the manipulation of the servants' fealty and loyalty in the royal household in which the incest takes place. Absalom, seeking revenge by murder for the violation of his sister by their older brother, instructs his servants to perform the act (“I have servants, they shall give the blow”). “Why tremble ye?” he asks them. “ 'Tis I command you—all the deed is mine.” Later, he urges them on with the observation that “Ye are but instruments within my grasp.” Well might a servant of the 1780s be interested in this question, as the weight of advice about their liability was in the process of shifting, from Blackstone's reassuring summary of 1765, that “as for those things which a servant may do on behalf of his master, they all seem to proceed upon this principle, that the master is answerable for the act of his servant, if done by his command, either expressly given, or applied,” to the terser advice of the early nineteenth century: “servant committing a crime, by master's command, liable to prosecution.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The Death of Amnon appeared in 1789, accompanied by the maid-servant's preemptive strike, entitled “A Poem on the Supposition of an Advertisement Appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant Maid.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Tea time (whatever its dramatically shifting time of day) was a pregnant hour in 1780s mid-Warwickshire, as we have seen. Hands opens with the same comfortable scene in which Kate Thompson's Thomas was improbably to appear as Moira, in Constance, forty years later. “The tea-kettle bubbled, the tea-things were set, / The candles were lighted, the ladies were met.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The topic is set immediately by the lady of the house, “a volume of Poems…produced by the pen of a poor servant-maid.” There is an immediate exclamation in response:

They move on to contemplate their own household servants, their irritation smoothed by long usage; one of them remembers her own “poetical maid” who “wrote on a wedding some very good lines.” All agree that “Had she wrote a receipt, to've instructed how To warm a cold breast of veal, like a ragout, Or make cowslip wine, that would pass for Champagne. It would have been useful, again and again.” Hands hammered home her point in “A Poem on the Supposition of the Book having been Published and Read,” that talent is not confined by class and that genius may be found in the most depressed of circumstances. She also reasserts one of Pamela's most important points, about membership of a community that transcends both individual families and one of the eighteenth century's particular meaning of “family,” as lineage and status:

The ladies and gentlemen twitter and sneer their way through some pedestrian literary criticism; and Hands then firmly closes the drawing room door on them, having most effectively prevented anyone doing the same to her own verse.Footnote ⁸⁰

You must perforce watch your servants if they performed work that you knew about, work that—unlike the ragout of veal, or the cowslip wine—is the employer's province as well as theirs. Frances Hamilton farmed the hundred acres just outside Taunton that was left to her before her widowhood (not by her husband, a Bath apothecary, but by her father, a local attorney).Footnote ⁸¹ She has to watch the day laborers she employs about the farm, all the women and children and parish apprentices who “help,” and the builders at work on improvements to the house, for they are carrying out the lists of tasks she has detailed in her numerous daybooks and ledgers. These are written down, not just for calculating wages by the hour or by the day, but also for the general planning and management of the business of the farm. She left day-by-day instructions in writing for her indoor and outdoor servants during the month's holiday she took in January 1787:

This kind of quite ordinary surveillance (in presence and absence) provides a moment of high comic exasperation. Home again, in June 1788, Frances Hamilton watches “John Meer from 6 to 8 o'clock attending the Cattle. Then he took the Stones from under the Lime Trees & put them down again a little higher up: this is literally true.”Footnote ⁸³ The comedy comes from her knowing what Meer was doing, and why (or rather, why he was wasting his—or rather, her—time). Like many an eighteenthcentury mistress, she wrote the truncated diary-ese in which, pronouns either abandoned or restricted to the first person plural, mistress merges with her servant in the performance of tasks. But as Amanda Vickery remarks, we really cannot be sure if Elizabeth Shackleton ever washed the china with her servant nor cannot know if Frances Hamilton sometimes dug in coal ash around the raspberry bushes.Footnote ⁸⁴

By the 1780s, there was a brisk trade in the informal codification of all the law (statute law and common law judgment) relating to the management of domestic servants. Its form was various, ranging from the handbook for magistrates, advice books for employers, legal instruction for servants (often misnamed as “friendly advice”), and tracts and stories for a fantasized audience of children and servants. As we have seen, several writers chose to codify by telling the history of “our ancient constitution” as the transition from vassalage to domestic servitude.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1774, in Jonas Hanway's Virtue in Humble Life, Mary, being instructed by her father on the whys and wherefores of going into service, in a two-week long dialogue, which anticipates her mistress-to-be's character, foibles, and whims in every possible detail, is forced to break the bounds of meekness (and almost perfect silence; this is a monologue rather than the exchange it purports to be) and to exclaim “Do people reason so much about servants?” to which the only possible answer was yes.Footnote ⁸⁶

Reference to Saint Paul's injunction about eye servants was still to be found in this secularized advice literature of the later century, but advice about the master's and mistress's gaze had dramatically altered. In the tracts you could buy by the hundred to hand out to domestics, they might still be advised not to be “what is called an eye-servant, appearing diligent in sight, but neglectful out of it”; but employers were advised to professionalize their gaze.Footnote ⁸⁷ The change is exemplified in a manual like John Trusler's Domestic Management, a text that quite implodes the concept of the implied reader, for this long moan about servants directed at servants, warns in its preface that “the subject of watchfulness, to which the master or mistress of a family will find it at all times to be particularly attentive,” is going to be very high on the agenda.Footnote ⁸⁸ It thus allows the servant to watch the master or mistress trying not to be too obvious about watching them (for that “would betray all confidence in those we employ”) and desperately trying to avoid setting them traps, where dishonesty is suspected.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, its most unpleasant anecdote of domestic policing involves no such subtlety nor restraint. Knowing it to be the duty of a mistress to curb servants' persistent tendencies in “dressing beyond the line of life in which they are placed,” an anonymous Domestic Panopticon, noting that hers has sewn a flounce and a pair of epaulettes to her dress, sends her out on an errand, enters the girl's room, and plucks off the offending haberdashery. The young woman is “astonished and displeased” but soon works out that the lady of the house must have done it. “Nothing was said on either side, the rebuke was powerful, and it had the desired effect,” noted Trusler with satisfaction.Footnote ⁹⁰

William Godwin's Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) offers a sustained contemplation of the master's watchfulness and the political and social power it involves. Toward the end of his own story, Caleb learns that his master's powers “reach through all space, and his eye penetrate[s] every concealment.”Footnote ⁹¹ Caleb, secretary and servant to the charismatic local squire Fernando Falkland, has watched his master closely, out of admiration for his qualities and concern for his melancholy. He uncovers a terrible past, in which Falkland has murdered a neighboring gentleman and let two of his tenants be hanged for the crime. Falkland, who watches Caleb closely in his turn, learns what his young secretary has uncovered, falsely accuses him of theft and has him imprisoned.

Caleb escapes, albeit temporarily, a very great deal (twice from prison, once from his reverence for his former master). But he cannot escape the connection that worried Hester Piozzi and James Boswell, that is, the nagging and insistent association between the secretary and servitude, and this despite his author's efforts, particularly in the editions of 1816 and 1831, in which Godwin sought to replace “master” with “patron” and to detach Caleb from the phalanx of domestic servants of whose number he clearly is in the first edition, by more clearly labeling him “secretary.” Caleb cannot escape being a servant. Brought into court after his second escape and recapture, and attempting yet again to make his accusation that “this man is a murderer,” he is addressed by the magistrate:

From the moment he enters the Falkland household, Caleb has been caught in the servant's dilemma. Intelligent and observant, he “easily understood that secrecy was one of the things expected from [him]” (p. 8).Footnote ⁹² But as it is observed in the thieves' kitchen in which he spends some time (en route to becoming the chapbook hero of his own life, pp. 237–38), “from the story it is as clear as the day that because he wishes to leave the service of his master, because he had been perhaps a little too inquisitive in his master's concerns…and trusted with some important secrets, his master conceived an antipathy against him” (p. 200). His case is much more serious than that of the maidservant who lost her flounces, but it is based on the same conundrum: that the servant was asked to watch, mark, and learn from the master or mistress, to admire and emulate, only to be put in the wrong for doing so—for watching too closely.

With forensic rage, Godwin shows Falkland playing the master's game to the hilt, a monstrous cat worrying a mouse, in the moments after he has told Caleb about the past accusations made against him (the murder of a rival in love; the trial at which he was exonerated; the tenants who went to their death in his place). “You have forced me to this,” Falkland flings at Caleb. “You have exhorted from me a confidence which I had no inclination to confer. It is part of the misery of my situation, that I am at the mercy of every creature, however little, who feels himself to sport with my distress.” In a tirade of sarcasm, he instructs Caleb to be content with having brought him so low. “Oh sir! I am not content” cries Caleb,

“My offence has merely been a mistaken thirst of knowledge,” reflects Caleb, after this scene of psychological torture (p. 110). And he scarcely escapes the most tenacious bond of all, which is his love and reverence for his master, his conviction of “the genius and perseverence of Mr. Falkland” (p. 257) and his deep need to understand him and what it is that promotes his melancholic charisma, his states of mania and depression. He broods on his master's “countenance…habitually animated and expressive beyond that of any other man I have seen. The curiosity, which…constituted…my ruling passion…stimulated me to make it my perpetual study” (p. 107).

Caleb is articulate about the dilemmas of watching, the merging of his watching of his master with Falkland's terrible pursuit of him, over blasted heath and in and out of prison cell and court of law: “I dared neither fly from the observation of Mr Falkland, nor continue exposed to its operation” (p. 125). He learns of Falkland's awe-full powers, not only from experiencing their effect but because their author has told him about them: “Young man, take warning!…I will not always be the but of your simplicity and inexperience, nor suffer your weakness to triumph over my own strength! Why do you trifle with me? You little suspect the extent of my power. At this moment you are surrounded with the engines of my vengeance, and before you are aware they will close upon you. You might as well think of escaping from the reach of the omnipresent God, as from mine” (p. 130). At the very end of it all, Falkland tells him that even when Caleb has thought himself free, he has been watched: “I have had my eye upon you in all your wanderings. You have taken no material step through their course with which I have not been acquainted” (p. 247).

Caleb's story resonates with that of Falkland, not only in these moments of heartfelt and overt identification with the older man, but in the very plot structure that Godwin gives them. They both enter the great house (Falkland's ancestral home, where stands the fatal chest that holds the secret) at the same time and for similar purposes. Their stories are resonant from the beginning, not least because Caleb is the author of his own life, a life that is also Falkland's. Caleb writes from the vantage point of an end in which Falkland is dead, and his guilt has been established. The book is structured by Caleb's return in writing, to his eighteenth year, when his father died and a situation was found for him by Falkland's steward. From the very beginning, Caleb's “heart bleeds at the recollection of [Falkland's] misfortune as if they were my own,” for the way in which to “his story the whole fortune of my life was linked” (p. 10). Now, at the end, with his master and daemon gone, the malevolent pursuit over, Caleb finds that he is not free at all—“it is only now that I am truly miserable”—for both his watcher, and the story that Falkland's watching gave him, have disappeared.

According to Robbins, the image of the servant in a wide variety of texts is as “an agent of an archaic fate that asserts the ultimate power of the community and presses obscurely toward social inclusiveness.”Footnote ⁹³ (The murderous footman bearing the tea tray is properly Moira, not Thomas at all.) According to Caleb, from the moment Falkland determined to come home and live in retirement on his country estate, “his misfortunes took their commencement. All I have further to state of his history is the uninterrupted persecution of a malignant destiny.” In Robbins's account fate belongs to the servant, and we are perhaps invited to view Caleb's very writing of the tale (which is, in its turn, largely made up of the verbal narrative of another servant, Mr. Collins, the steward) as the exercise of that fate. But if this is the case, it is not the servant's death that gives him “the unaccustomed right to be heard, along with the power to hurt,” as Robbins declares, but rather, the death of the master.Footnote ⁹⁴ Indeed, Caleb starts to write before Falkland dies; and because of this irreducible structure of the book, we may see Godwin himself in a larger plot, in which by reference to the first servant in English literature who pens the tale of a tyrannical master still living, as Richardson's Pamela did, he expresses the wish that the servant may indeed be doing this: watching the master, bearing witness to his abuse of earthly power, recording it: Things As They Are.Footnote ⁹⁵ Caleb is thereby no mere “signpost…left at random in [a] no-man's-land between what can and cannot be represented”; he is what he can—just still—represent in the 1790s: the presence of the people.Footnote ⁹⁶

William Godwin thought hard about servants (fictional and real), and was a severer critic than even his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, of polite parents' insulting anxieties about their domestics, their longstanding and nagging doubts about the “degrees of intercourse which is to be allowed between children and servants.”Footnote ⁹⁷ According to Godwin, parents would “caution their offspring against the intercourse of menials and explicitly tell them that the company of servants is by no means a suitable relaxation for the children of a family.” This practice outraged him:

He thought of the spatial hierarchies of modern houses and the social hierarchies deposited in modern society by the historical process. The house was “inhabited by two classes of being, or, more accurately speaking, by two sets of men drawn from two distinct stages of barbarism and refinement.” He admires the airy apartments on the upper floors; and then, “the fancy strikes me of viewing the servants' offices.” He descends by a narrow staircase (he will soon observe that while so far, he has been describing the household arrangements of the rich, exactly the same topography of subordination is to be found in modest middle-class households), and then “I creep cautiously along passages…everywhere is gloom. The light of day never fully enters the apartments…there is something in the very air that feels musty and stagnant.” Entering a servant's private room, he perceives “a general air of slovenliness and negligence, that amply represents to [him] the depression and humiliated state of mind of its tenant.” It is “a monstrous association and union of wealth and poverty together” that exercises him; and the thought of a wealthy man maintaining a household inhabited by “two different classes of being.” He observes that “if we were told of a man who appropriated a considerable portion of his house to the habitation of rats, and pole-cats, and serpents and wolves, we certainly should not applaud his taste or judgement” (p. 169).

The servant's depression—of social being, and of mind and spirit— was palpable for Godwin; he brooded on how servants must either develop a class consciousness or—this was the more likely—introject their depression: “Servants…must either cherish a burning envy in their bosoms, an inextinguishable abhorrence against the injustice of society; or, guided by the hopelessness of their condition, they must blunt every finer feeling of the mind, and sit down in their obscure retreat, having for the constant habits of their reflections, slavery and contentment. They can scarcely expect to emerge from their depression. They must expect to spend the best years of their existence in a miserable dependence.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Godwin nowhere mentions the febrile hilarity echoing from the top of the narrow stair and from the other side of the door; but his discussion makes very plain the psychological and social circumstances that might produce depression on one side of it, and gales of laughter on the other.

Ladies and gentlemen in drawing rooms, relentlessly capping each others' servant jokes, did not need James Beattie to tell them that “the species of the comic” that they enjoyed so much was best found among the lower orders, for this point was fundamental to the socioliterary criticism that many had learned from Aristotle, if not from Lord Shaftesbury.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Carl Hill, in his analysis of Freud's joke book, has made it very plain that its author understood how clearly jokes were related to the social and the political realms.Footnote ¹⁰¹ At the end of a substantial analysis of the joke, Freud—in possibly the oddest advice he ever gave—counsels his readers not to take jokes too seriously. Sometimes, things are just funny, and that's that. But what to do with this advice when the jokes aren't funny, with the observable physiological reaction that confirms the tedium of Hester Thrale's collection (by way of striking contrast with the laughter that the Maidservant's Preemptive Strike provokes)? We may, as a staging point in an argument, as a sketch plan for a mentalité, propose anxiety (about the Servant Problem) as an explanation and, ignoring Freud's advice, suggest that something profoundly important is made fleetingly visible by the unfunny joke; or perhaps something so important that it demands we evacuate the category of the visual (for that is not how these jokes worked) and substitute the visceral for it, as master and servant, body-subject and subjected body are put together in the burst of laughter. It is also fairly clear that we are looking in the wrong Freud, if we use his joke book to understand this particular category of them. We ought to be looking in “The Uncanny,” where he attempted to understand why disembodied hands and feet, dancing detached limbs, and body parts that sprout all over the place (like the nose in the folktale that grows as long as a sausage because of an inopportunely expressed hunger for one)—why these produce uncanny effect in some circumstances, but not in others.Footnote ¹⁰² If it's funny (like the sausage nose) then it's not uncanny; if it's funny, it is so because you know where it came from (from the dimly apprehended factor of castration, in Freud's view, though that need not delay us here). If it makes you laugh, it lacks the element of surprise and the capacity to frighten that the uncanny possesses. The servants in the (unfunny) eighteenth-century joke come from a social unconscious that knows them to be phantom limbs, dispossessed and alienated body parts; prostheses, indeed. Do the employing classes tell these jokes in order to retrieve something that has been lost? the limbs and appendages that political philosophy has removed from them, as Lockean philosophy and Lockean psychology threads its ways through multifarious eighteenth-century discourses? The phantom limb aches. Time to rescue Pamela from her footnote (n. 78, to be precise) and to laugh, out of sheer pleasure at understanding something that she and Lucy, and their fictional and real authors, their employers and their readers, all dimly, anxiously, discerned: that once, we were all on a foot, each a part of each other, in that lost realm of imagined community that the eighteenth century invented and that served it as a real Political Unconscious.Footnote ¹⁰³