A Real Shame

What appears below is an adapted piece from a longer essay. You can find the full version here.

Painting of Guy's Cliffe, Warwick, Warwickshire, England from the book "County seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland," 1870. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

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 from spending ten years and writing two books on eighteenth-century domestic service. Obviously!

I did pause to wonder whose voice was this; to question the powerful feeling that she—the maidservant—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 in her collection The Death of Amnon, 1789) were the subject of a long article I published in 2005. Before Hands published, she imagined the reaction to her two “Suppositions.” In some Warwickshire parlour, some evening, sometime, the Ladies are met. Have they all seen the morning paper? That advertisement for a volume of poems? In “Supposition I” it’s 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?

My Coda may be Hands’ voice, and it could actually be her, visiting friends in the Guy’s Cliffe House kitchen, for she did not die until 1815, and my invented maidservant speaks maybe a decade before that. 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. 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 it among his wider family: seven members of its Midlands branches subscribed, and he purchased a further seven volumes for himself.

I do not know if he ever read The Death of Amnon or saw something of himself in the two “Suppositions” within. Probably not: I believe that he would not have been able to make the mildest of “servant-joke,” to laugh at and denigrate his domestic staff, if he had read them.  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. Greatheed appreciated that dramatic and poetic talent might 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 his diary for October 1819; “I hope she may prove as good a cook as she is beautiful a woman.” Elizabeth Hands taught me how to comment on such matters of personhood, status, ownership, gender, rank and class, as they were negotiated by Bertie Greatheed in his diary writing.

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 Library to consult it. (The Thraliana was what she labelled the notebooks—a present from her brewing magnate husband—in which she kept her dairies.) But the Thraliana, it turns out, 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, 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. Back home, Thrale visited the Greatheeds at Guy’s Cliffe many times. She reported what she witnessed and what she thought of them. When she heard about Bertie Jnr’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.

Later she reported that “The Greatheeds [are] no longer inconsolable, they have got a Baby to nurse; Bastard (or they hope so) to their Son Bertie.” 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 Bessy is also a good candidate for authorship of the Coda. In 1813, in a letter to a friend, Thrale wrote that right now “Bessy is pulling the pen out of my hand to make me be dressed in time. Be quiet Bessy.” 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 neighbour the Revd Field who was eloquent on Ann’s “gay vivacity of temper;” but he, like Thrale, could not forbear mentioning that she was five years older than her husband. 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.” 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 a much more serious charge-list against the family. And yet Greatheed was a great walker, covering 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 all were detained there as prisoners of war, and the meagre supper of their bearers and porters–Yes. And 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 of the always-disappointing lacunae of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, my constant longing to know what fictional people actually ate.  The absence of the food consumed by these large people puzzled me.  It obsessed me, in a low-key way, as I wrote “Buying People.”

I supposed that eating was perceived as a low activity; I could not 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. The text of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) for example, 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 Indies 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. 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 Fanny says that she does talk to her uncle. Didn’t Edmund hear her ask about the slave trade last night? She says she longed to ask 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.

A famous “silence” scene does not happen in the “now” of the text; the dead silence at Mansfield Park on the topic of slavery and the slave trade was the silence I made speak volumes at Guy’s Cliffe House.

Edward Said first noted Fanny’s naming of the slave trade in Culture and Imperialism. Now there is a large academic literature on the topic of slavery and silence. It’s a crying shame (and a dereliction of duty) that I did not go back to the Said/silence/slavery question 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.

It would have been a good idea as well, to remind myself of what Jane Austen actually wrote on this question.

I felt the same diffidence in writing about all of this as Fanny Price felt in speaking it: I did not want “Buying People” to be all about me­–about my finely honed historical guilt; 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 the piece displayed a wonderfully responsive sensibility to historical shame. 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.” I first attempted writing in the manner of Bertie Greatheed, making little reference to his St Kitts possession, and none to the enslaved he owned; after all, my initial purpose had been to find Lisette Nepel, mother of the illegitimate grandchild he acquired from her. 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 films The Zone of Interest and A Real Pain. Jonathan Glazer and Jesse Eisenberg, their respective directors, were interviewed widely around the time of their premieres, 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 (as Theodor Adorno is purported to have said); it’s rather that poetry (and filmmaking, and history writing) must be made with and in knowledge of it. You must just look; you have to look. I was particularly influenced by the camera-work of A Real Pain, where the characters, tourists on a guided tour of the lesser Polish concentration camps, do exactly that; in the Camp Museum we do not see them looking at the heaps of shoes and human hair in their Perspex boxes; we see those things. They do not look at each other; sometimes they are lined up, looking out at us: a level gaze, that says: Look. Just look.

In the same modality, and preoccupied as I was with the size of the people at Guy’s Cliffe House, 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. Exiting the cinema I told the friend I was with that what disturbed 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 scene set in a new 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 audience who feels it). I wish I could achieve that kind of effect in writing. In a 2019 interview undertaken when he was preparing to make The Zone of Interest, Glazer mentioned the guiding force of a Bertolt Brecht poem [“Motto”] 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.” And there will be laughter, too, dancing in the dark, said the poet C. D. Lewis in 1935. I sincerely hope that the laughter and the shame of it, written into “Buying People,” has not been dispersed by its ending. It was done (made–written–intended to be) against the dark.  

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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 September 2025.

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