Professor Selina Todd

This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city's cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester's contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester's cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire's industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the cultural life of the city of Manchester, including cultural historians, sociologists and urban geographers, as well as general readers with interests in the city. It is written by leading international authorities, including Viv Gardner, Stephen Milner, Mike Savage, Bill Williams and Janet Wolff.

Far from being symbols of a bygone era, servants remain central to life in modern Britain. One in ten British households currently employs domestic workers.1 The ‘disappearance’ of service — already heralded in the 1920s, when press coverage of ‘the servant problem’ was filled with nostalgic laments for the faithful Victorian maid—never happened. Change, of course, did occur —the live-in housemaid of the 1900s was replaced with the parttime cleaner of the 1950s — and it is that transition on which I focus here. I therefore treat the history of twentieth-century domestic service as one of development, rather than decline. Moreover, I argue that relations between servants and their employers illuminate the important and dynamic role that class has played in modern British history — though we would not know it from the silence on service that characterizes the major historical studies of class in twentieth-century Britain.2 This article builds on existing histories of domestic service by moving beyond the polarization of socio-economic and cultural history. Between the 1960s and the 1980s sociologists and social historians were preoccupied with whether ‘deference’ or ‘defiance’ shaped servants’ behaviour and actions. While some scholars argued that servants were socialized into unquestioning obedience,3 others suggested that deference in fact masked covert defiance.4 Both groups used close analysis of the interaction between servants and their employers to place them within an existing paradigm of class relations.5 Most of these studies agreed that domestic service had ‘disappeared’ by the 1950s, largely because young working-class women found the occupation oppressive and left when job opportunities increased in factories, shops and offices.6 The recent insights of cultural historians have challenged this older methodology and the conclusions derived from it. Judy Giles and Lucy Delap have used middle-class women’s writing and, in Delap’s case, servants’ memoirs, to suggest that service was a positive experience for many working-class women.7 These different strands of scholarship have produced immensely valuable work, but none has successfully explained the coexistence of servants’ and former servants’ positive testimonies with the replacement of ‘live-in’ service by part-time domestic work after the SecondWorldWar.