What the Butler Saw

What the Butler Saw PDF Author: E. S. Turner
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571295185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
'A book which goes on a special shelf in my library.' P.G. Wodehouse What the Butler Saw (1962) is one of E.S. Turner's most pertinent and illuminating 'social histories', an exploration of the 'upstairs/downstairs' relationship across three centuries of English life. Drawing on literature, contemporary accounts and household manuals, Turner describes in fascinating detail how it came to be that the upper classes felt a need for an ever larger household staff, engaged in every imaginable form of drudgery; and, accordingly, how those in service - from high to low, butler to footman, housemaid to au pair - had to give satisfaction to their masters and mistresses while also, on occasions, contending with physical blows, tantrums, and (in the cases of some unfortunate servant girls) threats to their virtue.

What the Butler Saw

What the Butler Saw PDF Author: E. S. Turner
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571295185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
'A book which goes on a special shelf in my library.' P.G. Wodehouse What the Butler Saw (1962) is one of E.S. Turner's most pertinent and illuminating 'social histories', an exploration of the 'upstairs/downstairs' relationship across three centuries of English life. Drawing on literature, contemporary accounts and household manuals, Turner describes in fascinating detail how it came to be that the upper classes felt a need for an ever larger household staff, engaged in every imaginable form of drudgery; and, accordingly, how those in service - from high to low, butler to footman, housemaid to au pair - had to give satisfaction to their masters and mistresses while also, on occasions, contending with physical blows, tantrums, and (in the cases of some unfortunate servant girls) threats to their virtue.

Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell

Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell PDF Author: Julie Nash
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351125982
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Writing during periods of dramatic social change, Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell were both attracted to the idea of radical societal transformation at the same time that their writings express nostalgia for a traditional, paternalistic ruling class. The author shows how this tension is played out especially through the characters of servants in short fiction and novels such as Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Belinda, and Helen and Gaskell's North and South and Cranford. Servant characters, the author contends, enable these writers to give voice to the contradictions inherent in the popular paternalistic philosophy of their times because the situation of domestic servitude itself embodies such inconsistencies. Servants, whose labor was essential to the economic and social function of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society, made up the largest category of workers in England by the nineteenth century and yet were expected to be socially invisible. At the same time, they lived in the same houses as their masters and mistresses and were privy to the most intimate details of their lives. Both Edgeworth and Gaskell created servant characters who challenge the social hierarchy, thus exposing the potential for dehumanization and corruption inherent in the paternalistic philosophy. the author's study opens up important avenues for future scholars of women's fiction in the nineteenth century.

The Servant

The Servant PDF Author: Robin Maugham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780749000509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description


Feminism and the Servant Problem

Feminism and the Servant Problem PDF Author: Laura Schwartz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471331
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Reveals a hidden history of women's suffrage from the perspectives of working-class women employed as domestic servants.

The Servant Problem and the Servant in English Literature

The Servant Problem and the Servant in English Literature PDF Author: Mary Hallowell Perkins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Domestics
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description


The Servant

The Servant PDF Author: Fatima Sharafeddine
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
ISBN: 1554983096
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Faten’s happy life in her village comes to an abrupt end when her father arranges for her to work as a servant for a wealthy Beirut family with two spoiled daughters. What does a bright, ambitious seventeen-year-old do when she is suddenly deprived of her friends, family, education and freedom? Could the mysterious, wealthy young man who lives in the next apartment building help? When Faten finally manages to make contact with Marwan, a musician and engineering student, he helps her figure out a way to pursue her studies in secret. Even against the uncertain backdrop of the civil war, their romance develops, as the two conspire to exchange notes and meet at an idyllic seaside cafe. But in Lebanese society the differences in religion, class and wealth are stacked against them, and their parents have very different ideas about what their futures should be. When Marwan’s mother chooses a girl who will make him a suitable wife, Faten must pick up the pieces of her life and move forward. She does so, despite the odds, pursuing a job, an education and her independence. And, in the end, it seems there may be room in her life yet for romance, and hope for a future where young people can determine their own destinies. An engaging and lucidly written coming-of-age novel. Faten struggles to fulfill her potential in the midst of her society’s rigid expectations. She’s a nuanced, complex protagonist that any teenager can relate to — stubborn, impulsive and full of longing, but with the determination and smarts to keep her real dreams in sight.

The Cambridge Paperback Guide to Literature in English

The Cambridge Paperback Guide to Literature in English PDF Author: Ian Ousby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521436274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Derived from the parent Guide to Literature in English, this volume offers in concise form over 4,000 entries on literature in English from cultures throughout the world. Writers and major works from the UK and the USA are represented, as are those from Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, India, and Africa. The coverage is broad - from the classics of English literature to the best of modern writing. Additionally, the Guide has a wealth of entries on literary movements, groups or schools in literature and criticism, literary magazines, genres and sub-genres, critical concepts, and rhetorical terms.

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant PDF Author: Pamela Horn
Publisher: Sutton Publishing
ISBN: 9780750937177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Victorian England measured social acceptability in terms of the number of servants employed in a household. It is perhaps unsurprising then that this frequently overlooked body of workers actually formed the largest occupational group in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. In this illustrated account, Pamela Horn draws upon a wealth of contemporary sources and 'servants' books' as well as personal reminiscences by servants and employers. She presents a comprehensive record of recruitment and training; the duties expected by servants, and the wide range of conditions under which they worked, some of which led to happy retirement, others to prostitution or squalid death. It is a compelling picture of a vanished social system.

The Labors of Modernism

The Labors of Modernism PDF Author: Mary Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317026438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
In The Labors of Modernism, Mary Wilson analyzes the unrecognized role of domestic servants in the experimental forms and narratives of Modernist fiction by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and Jean Rhys. Examining issues of class, gender, and race in a transatlantic Modernist context, Wilson brings attention to the place where servants enter literature: the threshold. In tracking their movements across the architectural borders separating indoors and outdoors and across the physical doorways between rooms, Wilson illuminates the ways in which the servants who open doors symbolize larger social limits and exclusions, as well as states of consciousness. The relationship between female servants and their female employers is of particular importance in the work of female authors, for whom the home and the novel are especially interconnected sites of authorization and domestication. Modernist fiction, Wilson shows, uses domestic service to tame and interrogate not only issues of class, but also the overlapping distinctions of racial and ethnic identities. As Woolf, Stein, Larsen, and Rhys use the novel to interrogate the limitations of gendered domestic ideologies, they find they must deploy these same ideologies to manage the servant characters whose labor maintains the domestic spaces they find limiting. Thus the position of servants in these texts forces the reader to recognize servants not just as characters, but as conditions for the production of literature and of the homes in which literature is created.

The Negro in English Romantic Thought; Or, A Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed

The Negro in English Romantic Thought; Or, A Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed PDF Author: Eva Beatrice Dykes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans in art
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description