Work, Class, and Respectability in Robert Roberts’s House Servant’s Directory or, A Monitor for Private Families (Boston, 1827)

Roberts’s Directory is a 180-page guide for household management divided into two main parts: one providing advice to servants-the author directly addresses two young men, “Joseph and David” (p. 2), who are soon to be servants-and also to their employers; and the other oering instructions and recipes (“Receipts”2) concerning a variety of common household tasks, from rendering “old pictures as ne as new” (p. 94) to “making liquid currant jam of the rst quality” (p. 97), and preventing “the breath from smelling, after liquor” (p. 115). At the end of the book, the author also writes a “word to heads of families” (p. 154).