‘No Followers’: The Victorian Servant Problem

Abstract

Believes that what middle-class Victorians referred to as “the servant problem” could not be solved because servants were not the problem. Instead of being rooted in servants’ dissolute character, the issue was actually a visible symptom of much more fundamental conflicts within middle-class culture as a whole. Claims middle-class masters and mistresses had difficulty coming to grips with the servant’s place in their households because their presence revealed that the boundaries and categories were illusory fictions, producing anxiety in the minds of their employers, whose social authority and sexual identity were underwritten by those fictions.