The Enlightenment Worker: An Introduction

Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert's tapissiers, engraved by Robert Benard after a design by Louis-François Petit-Radel, are figures of rapt concentration (see facing page). Gripping with their knees the chairs they are upholstering, they focus on the delicate task of fixing the fabric to the wood with fine nails. This is no portrait—they do not face the viewer—and yet neither is it merely generic. This planche strives to represent real workers engaged in a real task, celebrating their embodied intelligence. The small chaos of horse-hair stuffing in the corner of the illustration evokes the miraculous transformation of the simplest materials into a stylish piece of furniture. Flipping through the many plates in the Encyclopédie (1751-72) dedicated to trades and manufactures, one has the growing impression that the artisan is, for Diderot and d'Alembert, the hero of the Enlightenment. With remarkable skill and energy, the artisan pulls gold wire, makes buttons, or presses cheese, working in an atelier that is clean, modern, and light-filled. Surrounded by the specialized tools of the trade, the skiller worker is pictured amidst the beautiful and desired objects he or she produces.

The philosophe campaign to elevate the mechanical arts also found expression in British print culture. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), and William Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747) were some of the most popular and widely disseminated fictional narratives in Britain in their day. Each strikingly tells a story of work. Robinson Crusoe sets himself to turning his island's resources into modern consumer goods through Herculean labour. Taking an experimental approach, he tries his hand at most every trade—joiner, basket weaver, potter, baker, even dreaming of becoming a brewer—until he can honestly call himself "a compleat natural Mechanick." One of the pleasures of the text is sharing in Crusoe's mastery of his world through his growing dexterity: "I was never more vain of my own Performance, or more joyful for any thing I found out, than for my being able to make a Tobacco-Pipe."¹ The tempting fantasy here is that producer and consumer could be seamlessly conflated in a single bourgeois subject, and that a person could with perseverance recreate European domestic life in the colonial wilderness. Pamela Andrews, to escape the sexual attentions of Mr B., readily embraces a return to home and a working life by gathering the humblest of her clothes and even practising at being a scullery maid to harden her hands. The escape is thwarted, and she never meets a life of hard labour, but the novel clearly connects honest labour with virtue, and turns the reader's attention to the work that Pamela does take up—putting her experiences on paper and, ultimately, managing a family estate. In the opening plate of Industry and Idleness, two apprentices sit at their looms, Francis Goodchild working his shuttle, Tom Idle snoozing, a contrast that will be elaborated over twelve plates, as they follow their respective paths to the Lord Mayor's coach and the gallows. In each of these three narratives, the lives of the protagonists are articulated through labour, hardly surprising given that the three authors of these texts all had roots in the world of skilled labour: Defoe, the son of a tallow-chandler, was a member of the Butcher's Company and had tried his hand at a range of ventures, including keeping civet cats for their musk and managing a brickworks; Richardson was apprenticed to a printer at seventeen, eventually becoming one of London's busiest master printers; and Hogarth, a highly successful painter and print designer, began his career as an apprentice to a silver engraver. All three articulate fundamental connections on the individual level among work, personal fulfillment, and moral strength, and on the level of the political they connect work with a new metropolitan social order based on personal liberty, integrity, and industry, rather than birth and title.

On both sides of the channel, the...