The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy by Joshua Gooch (review)
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"What is the cost of becoming a service worker?" (168). This question is at the heart of Joshua Gooch's The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy, and the answers offered are suitably rich given the ambivalence surrounding service work and the variety of responses to it. Gooch traces service work and, with it, the concept of immaterial labour from eighteenth-century debates about unproductive labour to the emergence of a service economy in the nineteenth century. Along the way, he provides readings of George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) and "Brother Jacob" (1864), Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868), and Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1874–75), as well as a brief account, in the conclusion, of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), showing how the contemporary debates around service work make their way into these novels by means of the work of characters—affective and intellectual—and the work of narration itself. In Silas Marner, productive labour and the [End Page 188] "discontinuous and immaterial relations in its plotting and narration" are in tension with one another given the value that Eliot accords to "useful work and material labor" (60); by the time of Dracula, "happy labor" enjoins clerks and other service workers not only to become "self-directing and disciplining subjects" but also to "accept their weakened economic and political condition as a source of self-realization" (170). Throughout the book, Gooch aims to direct our attention to the diversity of service work, shifting our focus from finance alone, which has tended to dominate analyses of the service economy and immaterial labour within Victorian studies.
Following in the footsteps of the Italian autonomist tradition, Gooch frames his analysis of the service economy in opposition to older forms of Marxism that in his view focus on the political economy of capital over the political economy of labour. To shift this focus toward labour is to make visible the human agents of capitalism; autonomism, which Gooch names his "methodological rule of thumb," emphasizes the "work-relation itself as a political collision of forces in which the actions of the workers matter as much as capital's reifying logic" (17). At the same time, though, Gooch is quick to clarify that biopolitical labour produces not only the commons—as Antonio Negri and other autonomists stress—but also the social factory. He concludes that, as a result, "Victorian service sector work should be understood as multiply articulated, from positive forms of work that produce social life [the commons] to negative forms of work that create social domination [the social factory]" (17).
Throughout his readings of individual novels, Gooch tends to spend the bulk of his critical energy on demonstrating how service work reveals labour as a site of domination. In this sense, the book can feel somewhat old-school, a feeling reinforced by Gooch's stated indebtedness to D.A. Miller. Discipline, or what Gooch calls "work-discipline" (70, passim), rules the day. I wonder whether a more varied approach in this regard to these texts—one able to conceptualize at once the disciplinary work of an emerging service economy and the excesses that threaten the smooth functioning of that work—might be coaxed out of the panoply of critical work Gooch engages, ranging from analyses of Victorian literature and culture to contemporary accounts of immaterial labour and the service economy.
Yet Gooch's set of keywords from the service economy debate certainly resonates across nineteenth-century fiction: duty, disinterestedness, servility, respectability, gentlemanliness, and dependence constitute key terms not only in the particular novels that Gooch addresses but also in many others, from other Dickens novels—Great Expectations (1860–61), to be sure, but also Bleak House (1852–53), with Esther's repeated injunctions to herself to remember her housekeeping duties and perform them willingly and happily ("Esther, Esther, Esther! Duty, my dear!" [103])—to Mary Elizabeth...
