A work of innovative literary and cultural history, The Servant's Hand examines the representation of servants in nineteenth-century British fiction. Wandering in the margins of these texts that are not about them, servants are visible only as anachronistic appendages to their masters and as functions of traditional narrative form. Yet their persistence, Robbins argues, signals more than the absence of the "ordinary people" they are taken to represent. Robbins's argument offers a new and distinctive approach to the literary analysis of class, while it also bodies forth a revisionist counterpolitics to the realist tradition from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), The Servant's Hand is appearing for the first time in paperback.

Where Have All the Servants Gone? compares the first three Israelite Kings to the way we lead churches today. Where Have All the Servants Gone? uses the servant parable to tie the three kings to the job description Jesus laid out for us as church leaders and also to how we should lead the next generation into their roles in church.

When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own in 1929, she established her reputation as a feminist, and an advocate for unheard voices. But like thousands of other upper-class British women, Woolf relied on live-in domestic servants for the most intimate of daily tasks. That room of Woolf's own was kept clean by a series of cooks and maids throughout her life. In the much-praised Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light probes the unspoken inequality of Bloomsbury homes with insight and grace, and provides an entirely new perspective on an essential modern artist.

• This book explores a complex historical background to fully contextualise the development of the early Gothic mode and the servant character’s role as a speaking and performing figure in literature. • This book includes a comprehensive engagement with a wide range of source texts, unpacking the theoretical elements of the Gothic mode through close-readings of individual works. • This book brings together readings of novels, plays, and adaptations (both contemporary and modern) to construct a full picture of the literary and cultural forces that shaped the literary servant’s role and the Gothic mode’s identity. • This book addresses a critically important yet much underrepresented area of Gothic studies by examining servant characters and their use of narrative.

In this volume, Fernandez brings the under-examined figure of the Victorian servant out of obscurity in order to tell the story of his or her encounter with literacy, as imagined and represented in nineteenth-century fiction, autobiography, pamphlets and diaries. A vast body of writing is uncovered on the management of servant literacy in Victorian periodicals, advice manuals, cartoons, sermons, books on household management, and pornography, thereby revealing that the domestic sphere was a crucial war zone in the battle over mass literacy. By attending to how fictional and nonfictional texts of the age feature literate servant narrators, she demonstrates how the issue of servant literacy as a cultural phenomenon has profound implications for our understanding of the nexus between class, mass literacy, voice and narrative power in the nineteenth century. The study reads canonical fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and R.L. Stevenson alongside popular detective fiction by Catherine Crowe, the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, and best-selling pamphlets of the age, while introducing to Victorian scholarship hitherto little known or unknown servant autobiographies that address life history as an engagement with literacy.

This book outlines the contribution made by servants to domestic and Continental travel and travel writing between 1750 and 1850. Aiming to re-position British and European travel during this period as a site of work as well as leisure, Katheryn Walchester provides commentary and analysis of texts by servants not addressed in current scholarship. By reading texts contrapuntally, this book draws attention to repeated tropes and common patterns in the ways in which servants are featured in travelogues; and in so doing, offers an account of alternative modes of experiencing and writing about the Home Tour and the Grand Tour.