A gaping hole in the history of the working class in England is about to be plugged by an ambitious, detailed study of the evolution of England's serving classes by University of Warwick historian Professor Carolyn Steedman. The three year study, which has received £271,000 from the Economic and Social Research Council, will provide a significant new insight into the making of the English working class.

The last major study on this scale of the development of the English working class was also undertaken by a University of Warwick historian. Professor E. P. Thompson's seminal work The Making of the English Working Class has dominated the field for decades but it is curiously quiet when it comes to the huge numbers of working class who were seen as "servants".

It has often been thought that the many working class people in service roles (often more numerous than those entering early industrial forms of work) were less interesting than their industrial brethren as they were more conservative and deferential. But the work Professor Steedman has already undertaken on this area presents a very different picture of a confident, even at times combative, serving class who were often ahead of their industrial cousins in forming an acquisitive consumer led outlook and had more opportunity to see and resent the stark divisions between rich and poor.

Other historians have found that servants were among the first working-class converts to the consumer society. Professor Steedman has discovered that some of them made particular consumer led demands of employers seeking to engage their service. An example of this can be seen in a study she has already made of female servants in 1780's Yorkshire who expected any employer to supply them with a pair of stays (a good quality corset) a highly sought after and very expensive item of clothing. She has already published on the jokes employers and servants told about each other. This kind of verbal exchange between servants and masters significantly undermines any idea that servants were generally more deferential than their industrial counterparts.

Taxation records also provide a rich vein of material, as the employment of servants was taxable from the late 18th century onwards, and using employers' appeals against assessment can reveal exactly what kind of work male and female servants actually did in households. Lancashire and Yorkshire will also form a key part of the study as will Poor Law and other records in the Public Record Office.

For further information please contact:

Professor Carolyn Steedman
Department of History, University of Warwick
Tel: 024 76 523624

Peter Dunn, Press and Media Relations Manager
University of Warwick 07767 655860
02476 523708 p.j.dunn@warwick.ac.uk

PR18 PJD February 2005