The last few years have seen a cluster of books that interrogate the place of domestic servants in the history of early modern and modern England. Carolyn Steedman’s new book expands on this description of working conditions and relationships between masters and servants so endemic to all periods of English history by reconceptualizing the place of domestic service in the grand narratives of British history. Steedman argues that from 1760 until 1830 the way of conceptualizing labor transformed “from a social form (a form of relationship) … to some notion of labor as a material thing, that could be owned … as a form of property … located in his or her [the servant’s] body” (313). Contrary to most labor history, Steedman insists that Britain’s domestic servants constituted the first modern labor force and demonstrates that class consciousness first emerged among England’s largely female domestic labor force in the eighteenth century.

The prevalence of domestic servants, which she labels “ubiquitous” (38), made servants “good to think.” Using a myriad of varied and rich sources, Steedman shows how “law, labour, and the meaning of things, were articulated around domestic service” (16). Employers as well as legal theorists and political philosophers used their “involuntary labor” “to think (or think-through) the social and its history” (13–14).

The book begins with an examination of Francis Hamilton’s account books and day books in which Steedman reads an employer’s management style: her allocation of resources, her organization of daily life, her gendered assignment of tasks, and her surveillance of her servants in her absence. Steedman attends to Hamilton’s extensive reading on slavery, her involvement in the abolitionist movement, and her comments on the links between slavery and servitude. Hamilton speculated on depression and other psychological effects of slavery, commented on its incompatibility with law, and contrasted slavery with the legal rights afforded to servants in English courts of law. While Steedman traces the specter of slavery and its presence in the minds of both domestic servants and their employers, the imperial web connecting the slave trade, raced slavery, servants’ consciousness, and the rights and legal personalities they envisioned, enacted, and created for themselves is an area of inquiry suggested by Steedman as a subject in need of further research.

Despite her thorough reading of a mistress, Steedman’s analysis does not focus exclusively or predominantly on middling employers’ conceptions of their servants. She details the innumerable situations that brought English servants to court over questions of “people’s property in their own labor” (107). She effectively deploys the case of runaway slave Charlotte Howe to backlight the legal status of white servants and their perceptions of their legal rights. Even when their rights were not explicitly stated, magistrates frequently heard cases in which footmen and serving maids contested wage levels and terms of service expanding the legal footprint of domestic servants and shaping their lived experience.

Some of the most thought-provoking analysis in the book is found in Steedman’s examination of poetry and other sources that reveal the thoughts and opinions of servants themselves and their reflections on the existence of this “layered, or hierarchical, or ranked society in the English eighteenth-century” that determined so many of their experiences and defined their prospects and opportunities (15). She concludes that with their “theory-construction” about the circumstances that defined their lives and relationships, “ordinary men and women thought about, occasionally wrote about, and sometimes contested a world of division, rank and hierarchy” (15).

Steedman’s sources include diaries, letters, manuals of advice, court records, newspapers, pamphlets, economic and political treatises, legal commentary, poetry, account books, and images. She extracts details of servant life from plays, contracts and hiring agreements, justices’ notebooks, statutes, and receipts of payment. Her chapters cover the enumeration of servants and domestic laborers and the ways in which the law configured the lives of servants and their masters. She dilates on the relationships between servants and children, the literacy of servants, and their literary writing, the place of the kitchen in the household, and theories and practices of pay.

Steedman’s focus is steadfast: she persistently brings into undiluted view material culture and the experiences of daily life that fabricated the hourly life of a servant. Although masters and mistresses enter the picture, they are never the main object of inquiry. Her subchapters on horses, the necessary house, stays, and crime make visible the quotidian sights and sounds and acrid smells so omnipresent in the sources that historians have overlooked as “background.” Steedman pulls them into the foreground thereby exposing how horses co-constituted the lives of servants and how the disposal of waste embodied the anxiety of proximity that made up the relationship between domestic servants and their employers.

Making an impassioned, empirical, and trenchant case for a new materialist history that includes “ideas, thoughts, and language” on the “list of things—entities—that made and remade social relationships on a daily basis” (355), Steedman concludes that “these things—stories in the broadest sense—had discernable effects on the world as it was and as it has been described” (355). Steedman imports cultural readings into the sources of daily life to argue that “ideas, figures, propositions, the texts that carried them and the human voices that contested them,” should be treated as things, artifacts “fully part of the material world” that “shaped human use” (356) and left an indelible mark on the lived experience.

This highly readable book is remarkable for the level of detail unearthed about the daily experience of domestic service. Steedman’s storytelling draws the reader’s attention to her historical actors whose lives she materializes for us and whose bodies we see through work. She has pieced together the fragmentary though surprisingly plentiful evidence that draws an embodied, rich, and complicated picture of “the people—or if you will have it this way, the working class” (356). Her overwhelming evidence and convincing analysis should call historians of labor, gender, and culture to attend to its claims and to set to work immediately on reconfiguring the larger historical narratives of the working classes; class consciousness; gender relations; the relationship between humans and animals; and conceptions of the self, privacy, and personal identity.