The Greatest Plague Of Life Or The Adventures Of A Lady In Search Of A Good Servant

Encyclopedia of British Humorists

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Servant's Hand

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.

The greatest plague of life: or The adventures of a lady in search of a good servant, by the brothers Mayhew