Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell (review)

Gospels and Grit explores the discourse of work from the Victorian period (Thomas Carlyle) to different moments of modernism (Joseph Conrad and George Orwell). Rob Breton's strategy of organizing the book is useful, for it permits the examination of a 'Gospel of Work' and the shifts in its construction and assertions across a period extending through a hundred years, from the height of Victorian industrialization to the rapid technological advances of the first half of the twentieth century. 'Work' is capitalized because it refers not only to the labour necessary to reproduce individual and social life, but also to claims for a daily spiritual regeneration and for the development of human capacities. Drawing on the values of Protestant ethics, the Gospel of Work maintains that work dignified the individual, contributed to a fulfilling life, and situated individuals within a self-affirming moral economy. As Breton writes, the Gospel of Work assumes that 'the hard worker is morally superior to the idler; the craftsperson more trustworthy than the careless.'

It comes as no surprise that the ideas and claims in the Gospel of Work emerge as a response to industrialization, as a protest against the exhausting and dehumanizing labour in what William Blake famously termed 'the dark Satanic mills' of England's industrial revolution factories. Later on at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, such a protest gained new energy in the increasingly systematized and disconnected industrial production of the modern world. As ideological contestation the Gospel of Work provided a vigorous counterdiscourse to the prominent rationalism of the early liberalism of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and others. Against the utilitarian calculus, the Gospel of Work exalted manual labour that produced the 'intrinsic satisfaction' of a job well done and the 'sanctifying sweat on the brow' of physical energy well expended. Like George Sturt's widely influential books of the 1920s, The Wheelwright's Shop and Change in the Village, which depict craftsmen whose work is organically connected to their lives as a whole, the Gospel of Work evokes an imagined world of the past, free from the impositions of industrialization. This is the sense in which the Gospel of Work is inevitably nostalgic: in opposition to the degrading, repetitious, and disconnected factory labour of the industrial age, the retrieval of dignified work looked firmly backward towards traditional village culture, often to the trades, the crafts, and farming. In The Road to Wigan Pier, for instance, when Orwell casts about for the ideal worker, he settles upon the coal miner, who exemplifies Work in 'its physicality, its demand for total engagement, its social usefulness, its community, its demand for "manly" strength, its direct involvement with the land and solid materials.' The miner, therefore, participates in Work that provides a contrast, as Breton points out, to 'the economic maximizing of bourgeois work or the cerebral work of the intelligentsia.' Mining, a form of production that can be traced back to very early human societies, also stands in significant distinction to the overly rationalized work on the assembly lines of the thoroughly Taylorized/Fordist factories of the twentieth century.

One of the decided strengths of Gospels and Grit is its attempt to situate the Gospel of Work in a series of historical conjunctures by discussing affiliations and differences with contemporaries of the major figure under consideration: the chapter on Carlyle discusses Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Cooper, John Ruskin, and William Morris; the chapter on Conrad analyses H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Robert Tressell, and modernism (the third chapter considers only Orwell). By opening out the discussion Breton is able to establish how, with tensions and variations, the Gospel of Work circulated within the ideological discourses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England. It would have been interesting if Breton had examined some of the representations of women's work, especially in the modern period, because the Gospel of Work seems implicitly to gender work...