Tell Your Story to No One: ‘Re-Servicing’ Virtue in the Magdalen House

Abstract

Thearticle probes the amphibious character of the ‘slippery’ servant-maid who methodically migrates between servitude and prostitution. It focuses in particular on the revision of the servant-maid/prostitute in the 1759 novel The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House, published concomitantly with the opening of the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes as an aid in its object of re-training fallen women for domestic service. The literary re-imagining of Histories is analysed here through its engagement with the most significant topoi in master-servant relations recurring in both anti-servant literature and domestic conduct manuals as well as within the larger context of the so-called Pamela controversy.