"Duties best fitted" : servant characters, sensibility, and domesticity in the Victorian novel

Critic Bruce Robbins has argued in a recent study that servant characters are independent of social context, that they have not changed through history, and merely reflect a host of cliches which date all the way back to Shakespeare and beyond—and that they are not, therefore, worthy of study as either individual characters or as representatives of a time in history.

In this study, however, I will argue that nineteenth century servant characters are an exception to Robbins' My central argument is that as the middle class grew and its values pervaded British culture, the depiction of the servant in novels changed to reflect those values, the depiction of women and family changed during the century to reflect a more serious view of the home, the depiction of the servant changed away from the childlike dependent that he/she was in the early part of the century, to a more sophisticated character as the century progressed, the portrayal of servant characters often follows the portrayal of nineteenth-century heroines, in their transition “woman of sensibility" to the Victorian rule. As Further, from the Romantic domestic ideal.

To demonstrate these theses, I will be examining ser vant characters from several very early-century Gothic novels, and Victorian-era servant characters in novels of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the Brontes. I will be examining the power, or lack thereof, which individual servant characters have in these novels, how their power is related to middle-class values, and how this power evolves with different novelists as the century progresses, I will conclude my study with an examination of George Moore's Esther Waters, a novel unusual in its refusal to connect servant characters with middle-class values.

Overall, the servant character becomes more indepen dent, more individualized, in the nineteenth-century novel. Even if the morality they absorb from their employers is not necessarily their own, they can, in the nineteenth-century novel, have dignity and authority—and even, as in Esther Waters, sometimes reject the ill-fitting middle-class morality and live by their own moral code.