More Office Affairs

Between 1880 and 1920 a dramatic transformation reshaped the field of modern labor. Graham Lowe, a sociologist, has dubbed it "the administrative revolution," while JoAnne Yates, a scholar of management communication, terms it "a veritable revolution in communication tech-nology" and "an office revolution since unequaled until the advent of the desktop computer."¹ A bare list of new devices, some quite primitive to our later eyes, confirms her assessment: loose-leaf ledgers, card indexes, vertical filing systems, typewriters, telephones, Dictaphones, adding ma-chines, duplicators. In the U.S., moreover, this enlarged administrative culture with its new technologies found itself lodged in a wholly new kind of building, the skyscraper, itself a confluence of numerous new technologies (central heating, hydraulic elevators, and recently developed systems of ventilation, lighting, and plumbing). Laboring in these new buildings and deploying the novel communications and storage-and-retrieval technologies, a vast army of clerical workers, male and female, crowded the business centers of major cities. It is these workers who form the subject matter of the two books under review here, works that differ sharply in their approaches and conclusions. Taken together, they plainly mark a major advance in contemporary research into cultural depictions of office life; but they also leave unanswered a number of critical questions that badly need addressing if we are to deepen our understanding of this distinctly modern phenomenon.

The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 (hence-forth ROC), by Jonathan Wild, works on a deliberately restricted scale, confining itself to literary portrayals of male clerks in British culture. "Lack of space available in a single volume" is one reason behind the geographical limitation, while another is that American accounts of male clerical workers were so different, so much more positive, and moreover have recently been the subject of two recent studies (ROC, 6).² (Nothing is said about, say, male clerks in France or Germany.) But Wild also turns this limitation into an opportunity: the self-imposed restrictions on subject matter gives him space to reconstruct in detail the contexts surrounding his chosen works, reconstruction that draws heavily on approaches developed in studies on the history of the book.

Wild's account, spread over eight chapters, is straightforwardly chronological. Following a brief introductory chapter, it begins by tracing "The Clerk's Emergence in Literature, 1880–1890" and concludes by considering "The Black-coated Worker and the Depression." In between are two chapters devoted to clerks in works by George Gissing and comic literature up to 1900; two more that take up male clerks in the Edwardian era; and one more one that explores the clerk in the First World War and its aftermath. Chronological periods are then used to conjure thematic clusters, such as anxieties about degeneration during the Edwardian era. This is a conventional, even reassuring structure that almost conceals the originality of the material that Wild takes up: much of it is drawn from outside, far outside the canon, however generously defined. Setting aside Leonard Bast from Forster's Howards End or Edwin Reardon from Gissing's New Grub Street, or The Diary of a Nobody or Three Men in a Boat (these latter both comic works that still have some renown in Britain, though not in the U.S.), the works that Wild takes up are largely unknown even to scholars with extensive experience in British literature of the period 1880 to 1940. By any standard, Wild has performed an impressive feat of research merely by virtue of assembling this corpus of materials.

Chapter Two, treating "the clerk's emergence in literature, 1880–1900," is highly representa-tive. It takes up three works: All in a Garden Fair (1883) by Walter Besant; The Story of a London Clerk (1896) by an anonymous author; and The Man from the North (1898) by Arnold Bennett. In all three...