London Clerical Workers, 1880–1914 by Michael Heller (review)

Michael Heller believes that London clerical workers have been understudied and misunderstood. According to Heller, the generally accepted narrative of a long apogee followed by a relatively sudden crisis and decline in the generation and a half before World War I is compelling but inaccurate. Heller convincingly argues that this story of rise and decline began in the late nineteenth century when clerical unions and some business writers created simple and sympathetic polemics that “imperceptibly became historical truths” (p. 204). In part, this happened because no one has examined them very closely and in part it was due to ideological predispositions. Heller’s main concern is with the narrative of decline, although he believes that the idea of a golden age is overstated.

Specifically, Heller objects to the notion that during the late nineteenth century clerks saw their positions erode and their prospects for advancement diminish as bureaucratization and mechanization deskilled their jobs while the spread of mass education and feminization increased competition, drove down wages, and made employment more uncertain. In place of this gloomy scenario of clerks slipping inexorably out of the middle class, Heller builds a more complex, and generally more convincing, narrative in which, among other things, bureaucratization brought professionalization and stability, mechanization eliminated at least as much drudgery as it created, and feminization actually helped solidify male clerks’ higher status. In short, he agrees that the clerk’s work life changed significantly—but in ways that were more often for the better, or at least not for the worse.

One of the reasons that the narrative of rise and decline has persisted so long is the scarcity of scholarship on clerks. That alone is enough to make this an important book in the field. Near the turn of the twentieth century London was the “head office of the world” (p.1); keeping those offices open required armies of clerks, whose lives have gone largely unstudied despite the fact that they made up 10 percent of all employed males and slightly more than 5 percent of female workers in the city. This is an ambitious book—instead of a case study of clerks in a specific industry, Heller deals with clerks as a class. To make his task manageable, he confines himself almost entirely to male clerks working for major employers such as government, the Great Western Railway, or Prudential Life Assurance Company. Female clerks appear only as they affect male clerks.

This is also an exceptionally well-organized book. Heller lays out his arguments, complete with caveats, clearly and summarizes the contents concisely in his introduction. Every chapter begins with a clear statement of how it furthers the main arguments and finishes with a summary of conclusions. He begins with a description of the different types of clerks in late Victorian and early Edwardian London, which highlights the great variety in duties, status, and pay among clerks. From there the book moves through brief chapters examining broad topics such as clerks’ attitudes toward work and toward their profession, their prospects for promotion and changes in income, and the impact of mechanization and feminization. Because the chapters are organized topically rather than by type of employer, some commonalities, such as opportunities for continuing education and self improvement, come into sharp relief, but at the cost of obscuring differences in what was a large and diverse group. The downside to this approach is that it is likely to leave a reader wondering where the differences between clerks were more important than the similarities. This matters given that clerks’ jobs cut across a wide swath of industries, with a variety of duties, and presumably with wide variations in pay, prospects, attitudes, and job satisfaction.

Despite this concern, the great strength of the book is that it provides a plausible and coherent framework for understanding the working lives of male clerks working in large institutions at time when the clerk was a large, vital, and little-noticed part of the...