Domestic Servants as Poachers of Print: Reading, Authority and Resistance in Late Victorian Britain

Abstract

The huge growth in popular print in the second half of the nineteenth century meant that books and serials of all kinds (magazines, newspapers, penny novelettes) saturated the middle-class home and became crucial to its management. Print became the medium for advice on how to exercise domestic authority and the management of print in the home (who should read what, where and when) was defined as part of the mistresses’ task. The anonymous author of the pamphlet in the Bodleian Library from whom I quote above was among those eager to ensure the proper use of print. If even domestic servants might now be able to read, the mistress must ensure that what they read was ‘useful’. In this chapter I explore the politics of domestic reading and particularly the reading of domestics, that is of servants, in the late nineteenth-century middle-class household in Britain. The servant reading a book or magazine was a figure who produced conflicting tensions and anxieties. In the first part of the chapter l describe the context of these anxieties and suggest some theoretical models which may be useful. In the second half I read a variety of evidence and debates in relation to these historical and theoretical concerns. My general argument is that the reading of printed texts by servants presented itself as a knot or tangle in the webs of power and resistance which characterised domestic authority in the period.

Useful books for a servant are a Bible and Prayer Book, a Dictionary, some cheap domestic weekly or worthy paper, and recipes.¹