Servants and Illiteracy in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit” and Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone

This article analyzes the figure of the illiterate servant in Thomas Hardy’s short story “On the Western Circuit” and Ruth Rendell’s novel A Judgement in Stone. I argue that both works displace the class antagonisms of domestic labor into the realm of cultural antagonisms via the issue of illiteracy. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ conception of literacy as a totality of historical writing practices, I problematize Hardy’s and Rendell’s criticisms of the upper-classes in their fictions and how these only end up reinscribing cultural differences in terms of liberal politics as well as occluding the foundational relationship at the core of these stories: the labor of the servant for their master.