Master and Servant

This is microhistory at its best. Taking as its subject a clergyman and his maidservant, it sheds light on both the personal histories of these two individuals and on many topics and debates of broader historical interest. At the centre of the book is the story of the Reverend John Murgatroyd, a Church of England clergyman, and his servant, Phoebe Beatson, and a discussion of why this upright clergyman kept an unmarried maidservant and her illegitimate daughter under his own roof, when under no legal obligation to do so. In the process, Master and Servant ranges over many aspects of this little household's lives, offering fascinating insights into the day-to-day running of Murgatroyd's school, of the duties of an Anglican clergyman without a living, of Phoebe's working life, and of the relationship between the pair. As Steedman notes, however, despite her centrality to the events at the heart of this book, not a word from Phoebe herself exists—nor indeed from George Thorpe—the father of Phoebe's child and the man who refused to marry her. Master and Servant, she tells us, is written ‘out of absence and silence, out of records missing and lost’ (p. 9)

Aesthetics · Art · Daughter · Obligation · Political science · Servant · Silence · Sociology · Subject (documents · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law