Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenth Century London

Abstract

Although historians of the family and household structure have ably demonstrated the importance of the servant in pre-industrial English society, relatively little has been published on servants as an occupational group. The significance of service as an 'institution' is well established yet detailed studies are so scarce that as recently as 1986 Franklin Mendels could write that it offered 'a promising area for future research' into 'the history of youth and children, the history of women, the history of the family, migration, social mobility, the working classes and population'. To date progress has been slight and although two notable studies of servants in eighteenth-century France have appeared English servants have been relatively neglected. Ann Kussmaul has increased our knowledge and understanding of servants in agriculture but domestic service remains, as Olivia Harris has written, "almost a ghost in the ... study of (the) household ... acknowledged in one breath and denied in the next". Domestic servants were an integral part of all but the poorest households and yet what we know about them is restricted to that minority who served in wealthy households. It is the aim of this article to shed some light on the circumstances of the household drudge, the skivvy, the general servant.