Carolyn Steedman
Personal Information
Description
Carolyn Steedman was born in 1947 and grew up in South London. She studied history at the University of Sussex and Newnham College, Cambridge from 1965-1972. After graduation she taught for a year before moving into educational research at the University of London. She lectured at the University of Warwick, becoming Senior Lecturer before returning to Newnham College to complete her doctorate. Back at Warwick, she became Professor of Social History, and later advanced to Director of their Centre for Study of Social History. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011.
Books
Master and Servant
Leading historian Carolyn Steedman offers a fascinating and compelling account of love, life and domestic service in eighteenth-century England. The book, situated in the regional and chronological epicentre of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, focuses on the relationship between a Church of England clergyman (the Master of the title) and his pregnant maidservant in the late eighteenth century. This case-study of people behaving in ways quite contrary to the standard historical account sheds new light on the much wider historical questions of Anglicanism as social thought, the economic history of the industrial revolution, domestic service, the poor law, literacy, education, and the very making of the English working class. It offers a unique meditation on the relationship between history and literature and will be of interest to scholars and students of industrial England, social and cultural history and English literature.
Strange dislocations
Carolyn Steedman's work on the theme of childhood is amongst the most radically innovative in Britain today. In this brilliant new study she takes as her starting point the idea of childhood and its history which, she argues, has much less to do with actual children than with adult concepts of the self and the way they have developed since the end of the eighteenth century. Pursuing nineteenth-century street children, child actors and acrobats, she uses the perspectives of social and cultural history and the history of psychoanalysis and physiology, in order to write the uncanny story of a child who never actually existed - the strange, disturbed child Mignon, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. In this way, Carolyn Steedman discusses a search for the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which, over the last hundred years, the lost object/essence/vision has come to assume the shape and form of a child.
Landscape for a good woman
"This book is about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don't quite work. It has a childhood at its centre - my childhood, a personal past - and it is about the disruption of that fifties childhood by the one my mother had lived out before me, and the stories she told about it.' Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and her daughter and two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism."--Amazon.com
An Everyday Life Of The English Working Class Work Self And Sociability In The Early Nineteenth Century
Labours lost
"This is a unique account of the hidden history of servants and their employers in late eighteenth-century England and of how servants thought about and articulated their resentments. It is a book which encompasses state formation and the maidservant pounding away at dirty nappies in the back kitchen; taxes on the servant's labour and the knives he cleaned, the water he fetched, and the privy he shovelled out. Carolyn Steedman shows how deeply entwined all of these entities, objects and people were in the imagination of those doing the shovelling and pounding and in the political philosophies that attempted to make sense of it all. Rather than fitting domestic service into conventional narratives of industrial revolution' or the making of the English working class' she offers instead a profound re-reading of this formative period in English social history which restores the servants' lost labours to their rightful place"--Provided by publisher.