A Real Shame

You can find the adapted version here.

[They] had wealth in store,

Had hirelings, friends, and slaves galore,

And yet were not contented;

But filch’d from every better name

Whatever added to its fame,

Nor of the theft repented,

They pitch'd their tents on Honour's plain,

And rummag'd o'er her fair domain,

Her smooth green carpets fretting;

Tore down her fences, pluck'd her flow'rs,

And levell'd all her shady bow'rs,

From rising sun to setting.

Susannah Gunning, Memoirs of Mary: a novel. By Mrs. Gunning. In five volumes, Vol. 5 (J. Bell, 1793), 180.

The copy-editor asked where the Coda to “Buying People Is Wrong” came from, and I said from my own fertile imagination. If the question hadn’t come as an editor’s “Comment,” requiring speed and brevity of response, I would have added: and obviously from spending ten years and writing two books on eighteenth-century domestic service. Here is the (invented) housemaid’s (invented) voice, which concludes my account of one Warwickshire slaveholder in the first quarter of the nineteenth century:

Coda from the Kitchen: I do know, as a servant, about the other place that shadows this one; I am not a fool. I have eyes and ears, and I can read, like everyone else in this kitchen. And there’s always been that old chestnut “A Present for Servants” (13th edn. 1805) handed out willy-nilly by clergymen and employers for a century past, and to me, when I first went to service at the age of ten. Have I never heard “of Slaves in the Plantations and how they are used ... by some who are more savage than they Negroes they call so?” it asks. Thinking on these things, maybe I will appreciate my master and his lady, do my “Work heartily, without grudging. ”Fiddle to that! Back home, in our house, my father has started to cut up the multiple copies bestowed on our family since 1693 (1st edn.) for use as bum wipes in the privy.

I did pause to wonder whose voice was Bertie Greatheed’s (invented) servant; to question the powerful feeling that she just arrived, and took over my pen. Only weeks later, after “Buying People” had been accepted for publication, did I remember Elizabeth Hands (1746-1815), Warwickshire poet and serving maid, whose breathtakingly brilliant satires on the employing class (“On the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant-Maid” and “On the Supposition of the Book Having Been Published and Read,” both in her collection The Death of Amnon, 1789) were the subject of a long article I wrote twenty years ago.[1] Before Hands published, she imagined the reaction to her two “Suppositions”:

The candles were lighted, the ladies were met;

The how d’ye’s were over, and entering bustle,

The company seated, and silks ceas’d to rustle:

The great Mrs. Consequence open’d her fan;

And thus the discourse in an instant began:

(All affected reserve, and formality scorning,)

I suppose you all saw in the paper this morning,

A Volume of Poems advertis’d––’tis said,

They’re produc’d by the pen of a poor Servant Maid.

A servant write verses! says Madam DuBloom;

Pray what is the subject?–a Mop, or a Broom?

He, he, he, says Miss Flounce; I suppose we shall see

An Ode on a Dishclout–what else can it be? (“Supposition” I)

The Coda may be Hands’ voice, and it could actually be her, visiting friends in the Guy’s Cliffe House kitchen of my historical imagination, for she did not die until 1815, and my invented maidservant speaks in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Bourton-on-Dunsmore, where Hands lived and died, is about 12 miles from Guy’s Cliffe, so she could have got a lift in someone’s cart.[2] And there was an actual connection between Guy’s Cliffe House and Elizabeth Hands: she dedicated The Death of Amnon to Bertie Greatheed. He may have promoted her work among his wider family: seven members of its Midlands branches subscribed to it, and he purchased a further seven volumes for himself.[3] I do not know if he ever read “Amnon” or the two “Suppositions” and saw something of himself therein. Probably not. He did not start to keep detailed notes on his reading until the new century, and I believe that he would not have able to make the mildest of “servant-joke” if he had read them.[4] But as noted in “Buying People,” he wrote plays and poetry himself, and as a boy, had seen his family promote talent in the serving class. In the 1770s a very young Sarah Siddons (Sally Kemble as was) had been his mother’s serving maid and continued as good friend, and in her fame as theatrical genius, to visit Guy’s Cliffe, well into the nineteenth century.[5] Greatheed appears to have understood that dramatic and poetic talent can exist in a plebeian woman; –and beauty too, for a cookmaid might be ornamental as well as useful: “Rebecca Barker came to our service at 25 Guineas a year,” he noted in October 1819; “I hope she may prove as good a cook as she is beautiful a woman.”[6] Elizabeth Hands taught me how to comment on such matters of personhood, status, ownership, gender, rank and class, as Bertie Greatheed negotiated them in his diary writing.

Hands’ Death of Amnon was reviewed widely, not so much for the novelty of the servant’s writing, but because a woman–perhaps because a plebeian woman–treated of a subject so portentous and elevated–and on the “delicate theme” of incestuous rape, observes a Captain Bonair in “Supposition” II). “`‘Tis a Scripture tale, ma’am—he’s the son of King David’”, explains an Old Rector to the biblically ignorant company. Twenty years ago I explained why a domestic servant of the 1780s might be concerned about the liability of servants ordered to perform an illegal act on behalf of their employer. In her account of Amnon’s desire for his sister Tamar, his rape of her, and his consequent death at the hands of their half-brother Absalom (2 Samuel, 13) Hands appeared to be most interested in the way in which Absalom, seeking revenge for the violation of Tamar, instructs his household servants to kill his brother; “`I have servants,’” he says; “`they shall give the blow.’” Why do they tremble at his proposition? “`’Tis I command you–all the deed is mine’”. He tells the servants they are “`but instruments within my grasp’”.[7]

And also, to keep Hands company and hovering at all the margins of “Buying People” is Hester Thrale Piozzi, who had so much to say about the set-up at Guy’s Cliffe House, in that voice of sprightly malice. I “forgot” Thrale when writing “Buying People” because Oh, thought I, the Thraliana is not online, and I’m not going to slog out on the bus to the University of Warwick to consult it.[8] But, as it turns out, it is available at the inestimable Internet Archive, as is her published correspondence, in which is to be found Thrale’s cruelty non pareil, about Ann Greatheed for one, whom she had first known when they were all associated with the Della Cruscan literary movement in Florence, Italy, on their various European grand tours of the 1780s.[9] Back home, Thrale visited the Greatheeds at Guys Cliffe many times. She reported what she witnessed and what she thought of them. When she heard about young Bertie’s death in 1804, she predicted the end of the Greatheeds’ marriage:

• [H]ere is news to tell that poor Mr. & Mrs. Greatheed have lost their only Son–their Dear Bertie, at Vicenza–Buonaparte permitted ’em to go on their Parole (though Prisoners) to any Place excepting England; –so they went to Vicenza in Italy, & there young Bertie died! Lord! Lord! how dreadful! The Mother had best die too! her Pride, her Pleasure, her Importance is all gone: She is in her Husband’s Way now; The Husband who used to adore her. He is a young Man and may have Heirs enough; –but She is old & ugly &–Oh She must die; there is nothing left for her to do.[10]

Later she reported that “The Greatheeds no longer inconsolable, they have got a Baby to nurse; Bastard (or they hope so) to their Son Bertie. Vive La Bruyere! he says, On pleure amerement et on est ensuite si foible et si leger, qu’on se console.”[11] Were I writing in the realm of the bourgeois-English, holiday-villa-romance-in-Tuscany saga, I could point out the obvious: that Hester Thrale had fancied Bertie Greatheed like crazy, ever since their time in Florence. And, I’ve noticed only just now, that Thrale’s maid is a good candidate for authorship of the Coda to “Buying People.” Thrale noted her interventions in her mistress’s letter writing, in 1813 recording that right now “Bessy is pulling the pen out of my hand to make me be dressed in time. Be quiet Bessy.” [12] And why not? Bessy has the purloined pen.

Thrale was not the only observer of the Greatheed marriage to point out that Ann was old. In a footnote I quoted the Greatheeds’ Warwickshire neighbor, the Revd William Field, who was eloquent on Ann’s loveliness; but like Thrale, he could not forbear mentioning that she was five years older than her husband. I was unwilling to mention that Field considered Ann Greatheed’s love for her son Bertie to border on the obsessive. And I thought about the family’s size and weight all the time. There was Maria Edgeworth’s comment on teenage Ann Caroline as “a great and fat heiress.”[13] At pushing six foot and weighing nineteen stone, her grandfather would now be considered clinically obese. The Greatheeds were all … big people. It seemed to me to be otiose and unpleasant to fat-shame the dead and gone when I was engaged in drawing up much more serious charge-list against the family. And yet … Bertie Greatheed was a great walker, covering miles and miles on foot during his diary-writing years. Modern medical science suggests that all that walking should have kept his weight down. One has to assume that this family were all big eaters; yet food is rarely mentioned in the diaries. The expense of entertaining seventeen people to dinner at Guy’s Cliffe–Yes. Toddler Ann Caroline’s words for butter and strawberries (“tuppa and posies”)–Yes. The marked difference between the sumptuous picnic fare of the family and friends with whom he made an excursion out of Dresden when detained there as prisoner of war during their last European tour, 1803-1804, and the meager supper of their bearers and porters–Yes. His account, copied from his reading, of the diet of the original inhabitants of St Christopher’s Island–Yes (though not a word about the diet of his slaves at his Conaree/Canaries plantation; I was at great pains to explain why he never wrote a word about his shameful West Indian possession). His hopes that the lovely Rebecca Barker would turn out to be a good cook–Yes. But taking the dairies as a whole, food and eating are an absence. I reminded myself about the always-disappointing lacunae of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel; my constant longing to know what people actually ate, in fiction and “real life”. I checked out histories of the topic, old and new, but the silence about food consumption in Greatheed’s writing remained a puzzle.[14]

I cannot think of any literature of the eighteenth-or nineteenth-centuries in which characters or narrator name, or discuss, the food they are in the process of consuming or writing about. I have always supposed that eating was understood as a low, perhaps comic, activity that detracted from a novel’s serious themes. The text of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) does not allow us to go near a horrible disjuncture between the dining habits of the Bertram family and the enslaved lives dragged out on Sir Thomas Bertram’s West Indian estate. When Fanny Price asks her Uncle Bertram, who has recently returned from a business trip to his Antigua plantations, about the slave trade, not only does this not happen at table, but Fanny is talking to her cousin in some unspecified other place at Mansfield Park, about what passed yesterday. A famous “silence” scene does not happen in the “now” of the text. Cousin Edmund tells Fanny that Sir Thomas is pleased with her, the way she has developed in his absence; he only wishes that she would talk more to his father. “`You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle’”, he says. “`But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’” she replies. Edmund did indeed hear her–“`and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther,’” he says. Fanny responds by saying that she longed to ask her uncle more questions,

• but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel. (Mansfield Park, Chapter 21)

It would have been a good idea to remind myself of what Jane Austen actually wrote on this question before I made the “dead silence” at Mansfield Park on the topic of slavery and the slave trade, speak volumes at Guy’s Cliffe House.

Fanny’s naming of the slave trade was first noted by Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism.[15] Now, after Said’s observations of 1993, there is a large academic literature on the topic of slavery and silence.[16] It’s a crying shame (and a dereliction of duty) that I did not go back to the Said/silence/slavery question (which I last engaged with round about 2000) when I was writing “Buying People;” it’s always worth seeing what literary scholars and critics have to say about history and the novel. For in 2006 George Boulukos suggested that Said's recovery of the marginal presence of slavery in Mansfield Park had been

• misconstrued–even by Said himself–as revealing a resounding “silence” about slavery in early nineteenth-century literature. Many now obscure novels and texts ... circulated widely and forthrightly offered their views of slavery. Rather than revealing a repressed “colonial unconscious” and an unspeakable guilt about slavery in early nineteenth-century British culture, Mansfield Park reminds us of something even more disturbing: the culturally mainstream belief of the time that, when pursuing amelioration, owning slaves–if not trading in them–was not only acceptable but even morally commendable.[17]

I could have done with knowing that in the literary realm, Greatheed’s position as slaveholder and abolitionist was not uncommon. The silence I heard at Guy’s Cliffe House now begins to echo the more “disturbing” history told by Boulukos.

I felt (and feel) the same diffidence in writing about all of this as Fanny Price did in speaking it: I did not want “Buying People” to all about me­–about my finely honed historical sensibility; about my quivering sensitivity in regard to the horrors of the past, my self-indulgent sympathy for the poor and dispossessed of history. I did not want anyone to think that I believed that I was displaying a wonderfully responsive and admirable stance in relation to historical guilt. (Who does she think she is? is a question that reverberates through many English girlhoods; it does not need to be spoken to be heard.) I did not want anyone to think that I thought I was better than those who held different views; like Fanny Price, I did not want to “set myself off at their expense.” (Mansfield Park, Ch. 21) I attempted writing in the manner of Bertie Greatheed, who made very little reference to his St Kitts possession, and none to the enslaved persons he owned; my initial purpose had been to find Lisette Nepel, the mother of the illegitimate grandchild he acquired from her, after all. But quite apart from not being a good enough writer to pull this off, it was pointed out by several readers that going about things that way looked as if I was avoiding the topic of slavery and the continued reverberation of Greatheed’s ownership on everyday life in the present. I rewrote, many times.

Grace–its bestowal; a way forward–came via The Zone of Interest and A Real Pain. Both films premiered in the UK between January 2024 and February 2025. Jonathan Glazer and Jesse Eisenberg, their respective directors, said a lot–were interviewed widely–during that year, about “writing” historical horror, about how maybe you should not write about it at all, or make a film (though they did; that was their point). It’s not that cultural activity “after Auschwitz” is impossible; it’s that poetry, and filmmaking, and history writing should be made with and in knowledge of it.[18] What they said was that you must just look; you have to look. I was particularly influenced by the camera-work of A Real Pain in which the characters, tourists on a guided tour of the lesser Polish concentration camps, do exactly that; in the Camp Museum they are not seen looking at the mangle of shoes and human hair in their Perspex boxes; we see those things. They do not look at each other; they are lined up, looking out at us: a level gaze that says, Look. Just look.

Preoccupied as I was at the time by the puzzle of the fat people at Guy’s Cliffe House and what they ate, I was transfixed by the scene in Zone of Interest in which Frau Höss is served her Full-German breakfast. (Such a lot of food! Such a big breakfast! And “a Full-German” looks just as disgusting as “a Full-English.”) She tells one of the Polish maids who is tardy serving it that her husband could be spreading the fields with her ashes within the week, had he, on his wife’s prompting, a mind to do so. Servant-jokes are still told; Glaser has Frau Höss speak this particularly vile one, as if in a grotesque scene from Monty Python (surreal comedy series, BBC 1, 1969-1971). Blackadder, who frequently threatens his servant Baldrick with monstrous, hideous punishment, would voice it. But leaving the cinema, I told the friend I was with that what had disturbed me most of all, was my seduction by the Höss World of Interiors: my shameful rug-envy. The set-designer provided some very beautiful antique rugs. I looked for them, in every room of the Höss house; often, my sight line was at floor level. I knew that my complicity was designed, woven into the texture of the film. Shame at looking/not looking is the very great achievement of the director (and in a minor key, of every person in the film’s audience who feels it). I wish I could achieve that kind of effect in writing. In 2019, in an earlier interview undertaken when he was preparing to make Zone of Interest, Glazer mentioned the guiding force of a “Bertolt Brecht poem written in exile in the 1930s:” “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times”.[19] And there will be laughter, too, dancing in the dark, says a different poet.[20] I sincerely hope that the laughter and the shame of it, written into “Buying People,” has not been completely dispersed by its ending. It was done (made–written–intended to be) against the dark.

________________________

Carolyn Steedman is Emeritus Professor of history at the University of Warwick; she retired in 2013. She is author of many books and articles, including Poetry for Historians (2018) and History and the Law (2020). A Play on the Recent Past: History, Writing and Stanley Middleton's Novels will be published in August 2025.

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[1]Carolyn Steedman, “Poetical Maids and Cooks Who Wrote,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 1-27; Elizabeth Hands, The Death of Amnon. A Poem. With an appendix, containing pastorals, and other poetical pieces (N. Rollason, 1789).

[2]Celia Dereli (23 September 2004) “Hands [née Herbert], Elizabeth (bap.1746, d. 1815), poet.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/45851

[3]Steedman, “Poetical Maids,” 14.

[4]Servant “jokes” as told by employers, are discussed in Steedman, “Servants, and Their Relationship to the Unconscious,” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 3 (2003): 316-350. Employers denigrated the servants by laughter and sneering, in the way of Hands’ “Madam Du Bloom” and “Miss Flounce.”

[5]Warwickshire County Record Office, CR1707, Heber-Percy of Guys Cliffe, 1759–1826. Diaries of Bertie Greatheed. CR 1707/116, 10 Sep 1805; CR 1707/122, 14, 17 July, 17 November 1818. Sarah Siddons was “The Queen of Drury Lane,” the first woman to play Hamlet on the English stage. Robert Shaughnessy (24 May 2008), “Siddons [née Kemble], Sarah (1755–1831), actress,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/25516

[6] Greatheed Diaries, CR 1707/122, 2 Oct 1819.

[7]Advice about the servant’s legal liability changed during Hands’ lifetime. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book the First, 3rd edn, 4 vols (John Exshaw and 14 others, 1769), Vol. 4, 429-432; Samuel Clapham, A Collection of Several Points of Sessions Laws, Alphabetically Arranged, 2 vols (Butterworth and Clark, 1818), Vol. 2, 21.

[8]Felicity Nussbaum, “Hester Thrale: `What trace of the wit?,’” Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730-1830, Elizabeth Eger, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 187-210. The “Thraliana” was the diary she kept in the series of blank volumes given her by her first husband, Henry Thrale the brewing magnate. Later, in her widowhood and to great scandal, she married her daughters’ Italian music master, Gabriele Mario Piozzi. Katharine C. Balderston, ed. “Introduction,” Thraliana. The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776-1809 (Clarendon Press, 1951), Vol. 1, ix-xxxii.

[9]Steedman, “Buying People,” Note 14.

[10]Balderston, Thraliana, Vol. 1, 1063.

[11]Thraliana, Vol. 2, 1069: “Long live La Bruyere! he says, We cry bitterly, we are deeply touched; but then we are so weak and so light, that we console ourselves.”. Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1686) was French moralist and satirist of whom Thrale and Greatheed were mighty fond.

[12]Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom eds, The Piozzi Letters. Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–1821 (formerly Mrs Thrale) Vol. 5, 1811-1816 (University of Delaware Press, 1989), 40, 206.

[13]Maria Edgeworth’s opinion is noted in an account of Ann Caroline’s husband, Hon. Charles Percy whom she was to marry in 1822: https://www.historyof parliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/percy-hon-charles-1794-1870.

[14]Emma Kay, Dining with the Georgians: A Delicious British History (Amberley Publishing, 2014); Linda Young, “Gentility: A Historical Context for the Material Culture of the Table in the Long 19th Century, 1780–1915,” Table Settings. The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700-1900, ed. James Symonds (Oxbow Books, 2010), 133-143; Gwen Hyman, Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-century British Novel (Ohio University Press, 2009); Jean Latham, The Pleasure of Your Company: A History of Manners and Meals (A. & C. Black, 1972).

[15]Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Chatto and Windus, 1993), 95-116.

[16]Marsha Huff, “Sir Thomas Bertram and the Slave Trade,” Persuasions On-Line 41, no.2, https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-41-no-2/huff/

[17]George E. Boulukos, “The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery,” Novel. A Forum on Fiction 39, no. 3 (2006): 361-383. “Crying shame”: from the obsolete to cry shame upon; to express strong disapproval or censure; current ca.1600-1850.

[18]“There can be no poetry after Auschwitz” was abandoned as interpretation of what Adorno actually wrote, in the 2000s: Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft”, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), 7-26; Klaus Hofmann, “Poetry after Auschwitz: Adorno's Dictum”, German Life and Letters 58, no. 2 (2005): 182-194.

[19]Catherine Shoard, “Interview. Jonathan Glazer: `Nazism took hold like a fever. It's happening again’”, Guardian, 27 October 2019; https://www.theguardian.com/ film/ 2019/ oct/27/ jonathan-glazer-the-fall-nazism; Brecht’s “Motto” is discussed by William Ayers, “Singing in Dark Times,” Journal of Educational Controversy, 3, no. 1 (2008): Article 7. It was originally published in Svendborger Gedichte (1939); also in Bertolt Brecht, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. David Constantine and Tom Kuhn (Liveright, 2018).

[20]Cecil Day Lewis, “A Time to Dance” (1935), The Collected Poems (Jonathan Cape with the Hogarth Press, 1954), 141-157: “My friend who within me laughs / bids you dance and sing”.