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" Domestic service in London, 1660-1750 : "
Meldrum, Timothy.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1094871
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TLets362798
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| Main Entry
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Meldrum, Timothy.
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| Title & Author
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Domestic service in London, 1660-1750 :\ Meldrum, Timothy.
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| College
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London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)
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| Date
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1996
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| student score
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1996
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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Young people flooded into the capital in the late seventeenth and early eighteenthcenturies, and for many their experiences were moulded by working and living inothers' households. As metropolitan life-cycle service, the occupation of domesticservice provided them with a means of maintaining themselves by providing accessto remuneration amid the fluctuating metropolitan economy, but it also gave themshelter in a city most were experiencing as migrants.The historiography of this subject has been stymied by the concentration, oftenthanks to limited record availability, of an older generation of scholars on the writingsand material evidence of elite employers. As a consequence, a picture has beenpainted of an occupation dominated by the male liveiy to the resident nobility andgentry, mirroring in miniature the polarised social relations allegedly found in Londonas a whole. This thesis has sought to revise the history of domestic service byexploring a wider range of sources, particularly the words of contemporary servantsthemselves found in the church court depositions, in order to examine the nature ofthe service experienced by most.Servants largely worked in the households of the middling sort, whose numberswere expanding in this period, and these households were overwhelmingly employersof female domestic servants. The gendered experience of service is one of thethesis's central themes: levels of remuneration, nature of work tasks, opportunitiesfor a career in service, relationships with employers, all differed significantly betweenmale and female servants. Examining the work servants did in London households,a pattern emerges of three categories of task - housewifery, luxurious consumptionand 'production' - which demonstrated distinct differences according to householdsize and function, and in household relations, in which very real work generatedsocial as well as economic value within a moral economy of service.
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| Added Entry
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London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)
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