Domestic service, privacy and the eighteenth-century metropolitan household

Abstract

Recent analysis of the public-private dichotomy in the eighteenth century has portrayed the London household as the locus of architectural innovation as elites distanced themselves from their domestic servants, so implicating it in a fundamental component of modernity, the ‘growth of privacy’. The master-servant divide allegedly widened over the course of the eighteenth century, trickling down from the nobility to the middling sorts. But the testimony of domestic servants demonstrates that much architectural innovation (like back stairs and servant bells) can be found in London houses well before the orthodox model allows, and their cultural transmission is by no means simply one of trickle-down. Continuity and complexity, rather than paradigmatic shift, are much more apparent, bringing into question the use of probate inventory or architectural evidence alone in charting cultural change.