The servant problem in Hogarth and Richardson

In his prints, engravings, and paintings William Hogarth sheds light on English servants of the eighteenth century.  Despite their ubiquity in “all but the poorest households” according to Hanway, the nuances of gender, adolescent experience, class, and urban and rural geography remain largely unexplored by historians.  Hogarth’s prints provide a priceless detailed account of contemporary eighteenth century visual evidence of the public sphere.  Hogarth was a meticulous observer, and sketched thousands of figures from real life to incorporate into his paintings and prints.  At a time when most servants were painted into family portraits to show status, Hogarth sketches their faces and shows character-most servants of this times are fairly featureless, showing how much they were symbolic markers of class, less important than the livery they were clad in. 

The class tensions and hostility that existed between servants and their masters and mistresses was both a comedic trope in satire and lampoon as well as a source of tensions and anxieties for men and women on both sides of the master/servant divide.   Hogarth’s prints address a multiplicity of class and gender norms in his detailed pen and ink portrayals of London life.  A contemporary account from 1762 estimates that there were “wagon loads of poor servants coming every day from all parts of the kingdom” and William Hogarth’s portrayal of the young girl being hired by the bawd in The
Harlot’s Progress gives a visual understanding of this real historical event.  In historical accounts, the preference for country girls is emphasized, to the detriment of women servants raised in London, who found it more difficult to find employment.  Country servants were popularly thought to be purer and more moral than their city counterparts.  In eighteenth and nineteenth century erotica, there is a genre focusing on the innocent virgin girl of the country being hired into a house specifically to be seduced by the patriarch.  How often girls were actually “purchased” in this way is not known, but there was a brisk trade in virgins in eighteenth and nineteenth century London. 

In Pamela, Richardson focuses on the virtuous and moral maidservant of the title, emphasizing her sexual morality above all.  Gender and class norms emphasized the promiscuity of lower class women, who were often sexual prey for upper class men.  Servants, by nature of their work, were both public and private figures, attendant to the most personal needs of their employers and simultaneously serving as a public show piece of wealth and status.  The complicated status of servants in the public and private sphere is simplified in Hogarrth’s prints, which emphasize how easily servants are led astray.  The servant problems of the eighteenth century were recognized and written about by Daniel Defoe and other contemporaries, who viewed them more as easily, influenced children than people with agency.  It is significant that Richardson shows Pamela in the opposite light-she is the moral guidance for her upper class rake employer rather than the sexually promiscuous would be harlot of Hogarth’s visual print.  Pamela demonstrates agency and is ultimately given the ultimate reward for her chastity-marriage to her employer and entrée into another class.