In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Occupations and Preoccupations: Work in Ulysses Rob Breton University of British Columbia Shew me a People energetically busy; heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel... I shew you a People of whom great good is already predictable. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present If I undertake to put my shoulder to the wheel, I do it, and I earn what I get. Charles Dickens, Bleak House Monday morning. Start afresh. Shoulder to the wheel. James Joyce, Ulysses > V hen Thom as Carlyle to ld his public to put a shoulder to the wheel he was confirming a Victorian obsession and his own “Gospel: Work, and therein have wellbeing” (201). The association Carlyle makes in Past and Present between work and well-being, the founding and justifying principle behind the secular work ethic, is not offered as an entirely unproblematic panacea for psychological, spiritual, or social anxiety. He recognizes the difficulty of accruing mental or moral benefits from work performed under a laissez-faire economy and attempts to distinguish between commercial ambition and work which mitigates egoism. But Carlyle continues to offer the Gospel of Work indiscriminately and unre­ servedly to the idle aristocracy, to the potential middle-class Captains of Industry, and to the “noble Workers” (“It is to you I call”) (271). If he castigates the aristocracy for dilettantism, the middle class for Mammon, and the working class for Chartist class-consciousness, he nonetheless finds the solution to their various lives in Work. His absolutist rhetoric, and his dream of a world-dominant England, steer him into an invariable and all-embracing doctrine of work divorced from an immediate historiESC 30.2 (June 2004): 105-128 Rob Breton is currently an instructor in English at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in Victorian literature but also has interests in early twentieth-century British fiction. He is especially interested in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century representations of work and the working class at work, and a book on this subject is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. He has also published essays on William Morris and George Orwell. cal context. Carlyle disregards class— class interests, opportunities, and conditions— at the very point when class is most relevant. It is as if all work produces a stable identity, communal bonds, or well-being; Carlyle ultimately insists upon work even under conditions which he recognizes could not possibly lead to well-being. That Dickens read, lauded, and even dramatized Carlyle’s principles has been well documented.1 In particular, he echoed Carlyle’s belief in the salutary, non-economic incidentals of work. Will Fern in The Chimes begs for something to do (not to earn a living) under the patronage of paternalist ethics and codes. In Bleak House Dickens positions those who do against those who do not, action against knowledge, vitality against idleness, and effectiveness against sanctioned futility largely to celebrate work and its social and intrinsic effects. The residuals of selfless work in Bleak House are personal integrity and moral certainty. Yet who resounds the Carlylean cliche “shoulder to the wheel”? Mr Vholes. Vholes is not one of Carlyle’s “Poets” or “Heroes”; he is a rodent-like, sanctimonious lawyer feeding off naiveté and helplessness. A “shoulder to the wheel” is a favourite expres­ sion of his and the tableau in which he wishes to be remembered: he can always be found, he says, with a “shoulder to the wheel” (611). For Vholes the work ethic provides an opportunity to secure financial profit and a means to satisfy personal ambition. Though Carlyle has as little patience for self-aggrandizement as Dickens, the latter shows a growing doubt about the universal and panacean absolutism of the familiar adage in an age where optimizing masquerades as a moral philosophy. Dickens ulti­ mately endorses the private value of “the work ethic,” but he adumbrates its crises for all but the most petrified ideologues. Leopold Bloom repeats the work ethic cliché while on route to Patty Dignam’s funeral. It comes into his consciousness when thinking of Martin Cunningham, whose drunkard wife pawns furniture for quick money. Cun­ ningham, he believes, attempts to ease the burden caused by his domestic troubles by...

pdf

Share