The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939

The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 Jonathan Wild The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Cul...

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The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 Jonathan Wild

The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939

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The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 Jonathan Wild The University of Edinburgh

© Jonathan Wild 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4526–6 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4526–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wild, Jonathan, 1961– The rise of the office clerk in literary culture, 1880–1939 / Jonathan Wild. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4526–8 1. English prose literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Clerks in literature. 3. English prose literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 4. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 5. English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. PR888.C58W55 2005 823⬘.809352865137—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2005050045

For my Mother, Dorothea Wild


Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

1 Introduction: Leonard Bast’s Revenge

1

2 ‘Getting On’?: The Clerk’s Emergence in Literature 1880–1900

9

3 ‘The Decently Ignoble – or, the Ignobly Decent?’: George Gissing’s Fictional Clerks

33

4 The Day of Inconceivably Small Things: The Clerk in Comic Literature 1888–1900

55

5

81

Degeneration in the Edwardian Office

6 The Friends and Patrons of Leonard Bast: Liberal Anxiety and the Edwardian Clerk

101

7 ‘A Merciful, Heaven-sent Release’?: The Clerk and the First World War

123

8 The Black-coated Worker and the Great Depression in 1930s Literature

147

Afterword

168

Notes

170

Bibliography

195

Index

207

vii

List of Illustrations 2.1 Aubrey Beardsley, ‘Le Dèbris d’un Poète’, 1892. By permission of V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum 4.1 Weedon Grossmith’s illustration for The Diary of a Nobody: Cummings, Mr Pooter and Sarah in the parlour. By permission of V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum 4.2 A Frederic’s illustration for J.W. Arrowsmith’s edition of Three Men in a Boat: Harris, J and Montmorency waiting for a cab

viii

18

61

69

Acknowledgements Many colleagues, institutions and friends have helped me at various stages in the completion of this book. I would like to extent particular thanks to my doctoral thesis supervisor, Mike Irwin, for his interest in and enthusiasm for this project. His advice was invariably wise and the finished text of this book owes much to his insightful criticism. I am similarly indebted to the British Academy for providing me with a postgraduate studentship for this project. My appreciation also goes to my partner Michelle Keown for the support that she has offered to me during the research and writing of this book. Her sound advice, when editing various versions of my manuscript, has helped to smooth out many rough edges. The nature of this project has resulted in considerable periods of time in libraries and archives, and I would like to thank the staff at The British Library, The National Library of Scotland, The Templeman Library at the University of Kent, the Edinburgh University Library and The Geffrye Museum. I am also grateful to the following for permission to reproduce visual and textual material: A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of The Society of Authors, The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge and The Victoria and Albert Museum. A number of colleagues and friends have offered me advice and encouragement including Keith Carabine, John Carey, Pierre Coustillas, Rod Edmond, David Ellis, Jeremy Lewis, Jan Montefiore, Steff Newell, Mark Nixon, Martin Scofield, Randall Stevenson, and warmest thanks to my Edinburgh ‘mentor’ Bill Bell. Bill has proved very generous with his time and advice and, during my time in Edinburgh, has helped me to get to grips with book history. Finally thanks to my sister Thea Fisher for providing a safe haven for me in Chichester, and especially to my mother, Dorothea Wild, who originally inspired me to write this book and to whom it is dedicated.

ix


1 Introduction: Leonard Bast’s Revenge

The anonymous reader of the manuscript of this book describes the office clerk as ‘a haunting and heretofore ghostly figure in fiction’. My own research into this topic began from a similar perception of the spectral nature of this figure. Why, I wondered, had such a representative member of the urban scene apparently left behind so few traces in British literature between Charles Dickens and the inter-war period? In other literatures of this era – American, Continental European, Russian – clerical workers were recognised as key components of developing cityscapes. By contrast, during the same period, British literature managed to produce only a comical Mr Pooter and a pathetic Leonard Bast to stand for their emerging class. While nobody would suggest that the literature of a nation should slavishly mirror its entire working population, the swelling army of late Victorian and early twentieth-century clerical workers would seem to plead a special case for representation. As a group that epitomised the petit bourgeois of the era, their interest for readers and writers (including those of the clerk class themselves) is selfevident. The starting point for my investigation therefore, and the question around which this book is constructed, concerns the reasons for an apparent fault line in literature in Britain. What was it about this culture that inhibited the development of a body of work capable of responding to the growth of a distinctive and effectively new class? While specific literary historical questions remain foregrounded in this book, I am mindful of Robert Darnton’s warning that book historians often ‘lose sight of the larger dimensions of the enterprise’ because they ‘stray into esoteric byways and unconnected specializations’.1 The ‘larger dimensions’ of my topic are, I hope, always kept in view. More than simply the history of representations of the office clerk, my study seeks to offer a valuable contribution to the history of social class in 1

2

Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture

Britain. In making this somewhat ambitious claim, I do not wish to suggest that this book offers a naïve reconstruction of social history via largely fictional literary sources. It is, instead an attempt to understand a dynamic relationship between texts, readers and society. To date, scholars of literature and history have consistently overlooked the petit bourgeois in discussions of class in Britain. When seminal studies of this class were published in the 1970s by Arno J. Mayer and Geoffrey Crossick, their research looked forward to a growth of scholarly interest in this area.2 This optimism, however, failed to produce the body of research on the lower middle class that might have been anticipated. Both Mayer and Crossick predicted the reasons why the studies of this class would remain few in number, and their arguments are worth revisiting here. Mayer suggested on the one hand that the ‘polymorphous and tangled’ nature of the group made it too intricate to satisfactorily analyse, and on the other hand that scholars were content to avoid dealing with a class for which they had ‘approvingly prophesied … extinction’. Mayer further inquired ‘could it be that social scientists are hesitant to expose the aspirations, life-style, and world view of the social class in which so many of them originate and from which they seek to escape?’3 Crossick, focusing specifically upon the British lower middle class, pointed towards the group’s inactivity on ‘the historical stage’, and additionally its failure to achieve a ‘sense of corporate identity’ or ‘organisation’. This lack of dynamism, according to Crossick, ensured that future historians would experience a ‘difficulty [in] penetrating lower middle class ideas and beliefs’.4 Whichever of these arguments is correct (and I have much sympathy with Mayer’s theories on scholarly embarrassment), the neglect of this section of society remains unquestionable. The effect of this lacuna in scholarship is clear in relation to my own field of specialisation. Apart from a chapter in John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (2001), and several extended references in Arlene Young’s Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel (1999), representations of the petit bourgeois clerk in British literary history have been almost entirely overlooked.5 Nor has much work appeared which attempts to trace the office worker as reader and writer of literature. Only in Jonathan Rose’s recent The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) has this area received any serious investigation.6 Rose’s book has at least managed to focus fresh critical interest on this overlooked field of study. Furthermore, in a chapter entitled ‘What was Leonard Bast Really Like?’, Rose sets off a number of hares that my own investigation looks to pursue: ‘was Leonard Bast so culturally

Leonard Bast’s Revenge 3

impoverished?’; ‘was the character Forster created an authentic representation of that vast and growing army of Edwardian clerks?’.7 While I tend to agree with Rose’s general conclusions that ‘those of us who only know Leonard Bast from Howards Endwould scarcely recognise the man in his self-portrait’, my own approach to this point takes a somewhat different route.8 The focus of this study is much more about the causes of the disparity between fact and fiction. Although Rose admirably draws upon memoirs of the period to reveal a generation of culturehungry clerks, he sheds little light on reasons for the evident gap between these real clerks and Leonard Bast. My own study therefore attempts to work backwards from Rose’s often autobiographical sources by asking why the clerks he identifies were so anxious to establish their cultural credentials in print. Why was there such an evident need for them to take their revenge on the literary establishment that had classified them, along with Bast, as simply a ‘tailcoat and a couple of ideas’.9 Any attempt to trace a single theme through a large stretch of print cultural history necessitates an important series of choices regarding selection and limitation of material. In my own case, the decision to focus this study upon British male clerks from 1880 to 1939 implies a number of exclusions on grounds of geography, gender and chronology. At this stage it is worth outlining the reasons behind the choices upon which this book is constructed. To take the question of dates first, it might be asked why the offices and clerks of Dickens, Lamb, Thackeray and Trollope are placed outside the boundaries of my investigation. Although these earlier nineteenth century depictions of office life are indeed of great interest, the extraordinary changes evident in both the history of work and literature after 1880 suggest the value of a later starting date. These changes, as they affected the working population, primarily involved a rapid increase in numbers of clerks; census figures reveal the total number of white-collar employees in Britain rising from 262,084 in 1871, to 534,622 in 1891, and further swelling to 918,186 in 1911.10 But more than just a growing workforce, the era witnessed the supplanting of the Dickensian counting house by the modern business office. As David Lockwood argued in his landmark study The Blackcoated Worker, the arrival of clerical modernity was marked by several factors: the increase in average size of offices; the emergence of scientific management and office mechanisation; and an increase in industrial concentration and amalgamation which in turn led to the ‘concentration and rationalization of office work and staffs’.11 Lockwood further notes in relation to the increased opportunities for white-collar work that during this period ‘every literate person became a potential clerk’.12 Even if

4


one remains sceptical about the scale of the effect of the Education Act of 1870 and successive legislation, it is still possible to see the late Victorian clerk as an individual distinctly different from his earlier counterpart. The field of British print culture was undergoing a similar period of transition after 1880. Once again, the scale of change is revealed in rapidly increasing numbers, in this case reflecting the volume of books and magazines issued: the total number of new adult novels appearing in 1874 was 516, rising to 762 in 1887, and further increasing to 1315 in 1894; similarly, the number of weekly and quarterly magazines issued rose from 643 in 1875, up to 1298 in 1885, and later reaching 2081 in 1895.13 Behind these figures were several key factors and events in publishing history that stimulated greater production. The massive jump in new novels, for example, was influenced by the demise of the threedecker in 1894 and the subsequent emergence of the single volume novel as the standard format for new works of fiction. An increase in opportunity for new writers was also promised at this time by the popularity of the weekly paper Tit-Bits and its successors. With an average weekly circulation of half a million copies during the thirty years following its launch in 1881, Tit-Bits heralded a new epoch for the popular press.14 All of these changes were facilitated by a number of technological developments in publishing.15 As Richard Altick notes, these improvements included more economical production of paper through ‘the development of chemical and mechanical methods of preparing wood pulp’; the introduction of the high speed Hoe press ‘to turn out enormous quantities of paper-bound books’; and the slightly later emergence of the Monotype composing machine. Taken together, these technological innovations ensured more efficient and cheaper production of printed material. Whereas the opportunity to examine the parallel expansions in work and publishing history offers compelling reasons for beginning this study in the 1880s, other choices of focus for this book are less clear cut. The decision, for example, to deal primarily with the masculine dimensions of clerical work suggests that my investigation into office and cultural life is only a partial one. Women had a demonstrably growing presence in offices from the 1880s (by 1921 they represented 46 per cent of Britain’s total number of clerks)16 and the traces that these developments have left upon literary culture are clearly of considerable scholarly interest. This interest has indeed begun to be acknowledged in recent works that discuss the relationship between new business technology and female workers in the fin de siècle office.17 But although


male and female clerical workers were both classified as ‘clerks’, their experience of clerical employment was entirely different in terms of roles performed, expectations of advancement, and pay scales. To a considerable extent, women and men existed in separate occupational spheres of the business world. Gregory Anderson confirms the scale of the gendered division of roles, noting the extent to which female clerks were associated with shorthand and typewriting: women typists in England and Wales in 1931 numbered 212,296, compared with only 5155 men in equivalent roles.18 My intention therefore in focusing upon male clerks in this book is not to impose a false gender border upon a topic that clearly embraces both men and women. It is rather to recognise the differing experiences of the sexes that might easily become masked behind the single elastic term ‘clerk’, and in doing so to acknowledge the need for separate studies of cultural representations of these groups. Reservations about offering a masculine gender focus for this book are further eased when one notes that British literature before 1914 seldom depicts men and women together in mixed sex offices. Although both male and female office workers are evident in a variety of print cultural sources, these appearances tend to serve different literary ends. Female clerks in literature, almost invariably machine workers of some description, typically inspire debates about genteel employment for ‘surplus’ middle-class women. By way of contrast, the archetypal male clerk is generally a member of the lower middle classes, whose literary role reflects contemporary debates about masculinity and urban life. While this crude division is challenged by several notable exceptions in the following pages, the rough outline provides a fair indication of the clerk’s place in literary culture. Taking this dichotomy into account, it is perhaps easier to understand why British literature did not produce a female Pooter or Bast. In a similar way, we can recognise why few male counterparts of the resourceful and physically attractive female typists are found in contemporary novels and short stories. Rather than attempting to bridge these evidently disparate literary and (occupational) points of focus, this study instead seeks to concentrate upon issues relating to men and masculinity. While not intending to position this book alongside those recent works which offer a specialised study of masculinity and literature, my study does intersect with and complement these other works.19 The final major decision regarding focus of research for this book relates to the geographical boundaries of my investigation. If Great Britain was not alone in experiencing vast changes in cultural and

6


business life at the end of the nineteenth century, why restrict the study’s scope to a single area? Although lack of space available in a single volume provides an economic and practical answer to this question, other considerations offer more pertinent reasons for making this choice. These are perhaps best outlined by sketching the gulf that exists between British and, say, American literature with reference to my topic. While North America and Britain both experienced a similar shift towards modernity in business and publishing industries from the 1880s, the social framework of those countries was and remains quite dissimilar. It is reductive to introduce here simple clichés opposing American democracy to British feudality, but American history from Civil War to New Deal undoubtedly created substantially different conditions for the cultivation of business and culture. The evidence to sustain this grand claim is discovered in the readiness with which, for example, the urban businessman found a prominent place in American literature. From the earliest period of business expansion Walt Whitman anticipated the openness of American writers to new city dwellers and workers. Whitman sums up this attitude in Song of Myself: The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail’d coats, I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,) I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me, What I do and say the same waits for them, Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.20 This avowedly democratic vision embracing cultural life and business life is widely evident in subsequent American literature in the work of such writers as Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, O. Henry, William Dean Howells, Henry James and Sinclair Lewis. For many of these writers, the office clerk became an American Everyman, epitomising the country’s economic shift towards commercial and financial capitalism; Christopher P. Wilson goes as far as to describe the American white-collar worker after 1880 as representing the ‘arithmetical mean of culture, a norm embedded’.21 In British literature, I will argue, the male office clerk was also seen as a symbolic representation of social change, but his symbolic attributes lack the positive quality so evident in Whitman’s verse. Few British writers


were prepared to recognise clerks as duplicates of themselves. While American literature is therefore outside the focus of this book, it does retain an implicit marginal presence. * * * Having decided on the scope of this study in terms of period, gender and geographical location, the subsequent decision to present this material in a diachronic framework was a relatively straightforward one. The strength of this option became clear when I realised the extent to which the clerk’s portrayal in print culture was sensitive to specific historical events and trends. We can trace this relationship between history and cultural form in the way that, for example, the First World War and Great Depression apparently softened the literary profile of the office worker. This reorientation balanced those pre-1914 attitudes which had associated male clerks with perceived limitations in late Victorian education reforms. For writers such as George Gissing, these reforms, beginning with the 1870 Education Act, had created a blighted generation whose misguided schooling had left them unsuited for both office life and cultural life. The image of the ‘quarter-educated’ Board school clerk feebly sipping culture while shackled to an office desk typifies the prevailing literary attitude in this era. By using a diachronic framework, therefore, historical events can be placed alongside print cultural evidence to trace otherwise obscured relationships. The print cultural evidence that I present here consists primarily of novels and short stories, the majority of which have been overlooked since their publication. These neglected texts were identified through research on weekly book reviews in a variety of newspapers, magazines and journals. Without the adoption of this admittedly painstaking approach it is unlikely that valuable works such as the anonymous The Story of a London Clerk, Rudolf Dircks ‘The Two Clerks’, or Herbert Tremaine’s The Feet of the Young Men would have emerged from undeserved obscurity. Although traditional ‘literary’ sources provide the core of my research texts, I have also traced much other relevant cultural material. This material, including memoirs, essays, letters, contemporary sociological texts and newspaper correspondence, provides a broad socio-cultural context in which to locate the clerk. While any attempts to recreate ‘lost’ historical epochs are destined to fail, it is at least possible to reposition cultural material in its temporal frame. In adopting this method of literary interpretation, I concur with Pierre Bourdieu’s

8


argument that: Ignorance of everything which goes to make up the ‘mood of the age’ produces a derealization of works: stripped of everything which attached them to the most concrete debates of their time … they are impoverished and transformed in the direction of intellectualism or an empty humanism.22 While I make no attempt here to follow Bourdieu’s example in fully reconstructing historical fields of cultural production, my own approach is sympathetic to and informed by this holistic theoretical model. Finally, by way of introduction to this book, I need to qualify the use of the word ‘rise’ in my title. While I do offer a sense of positive progression from the ‘hopeless clerk’ of the 1890s (Chapters 2, 3 and 4), through the tensions of the Edwardian era (Chapters 5 and 6), to the often self-assured and forthright clerks of the First World War and interwar period, (Chapters 7 and 8), this is no simple narrative of Whig history. While the clerks (and the lower middle class in general) do find a cultural voice during the twentieth century, the negative connotations associated with the word ‘clerk’ effectively work to eradicate this term. If equivalents of the term ‘clerks’ discussed in the following chapters exist today they are likely to be ‘managers’, consultants’ or ‘executives’. The rise of the clerk must therefore be recognised only alongside his subsequent death.

2 ‘Getting On’?: The Clerk’s Emergence in Literature 1880–1900

When writing his autobiography in the 1930s, H.G. Wells looked back with satisfaction upon the early years of his literary career: The last decade of the nineteenth century was an extraordinarily favourable time for new writers and my individual good luck was set in the luck of a whole generation of aspirants. Quite a lot of us from nowhere were ‘getting on’.1 This chance to ‘get on’ provided not only financial rewards for Wells and his fellow literary aspirants but also the opportunity to transform existing print culture. The scope for transformation of British literature at this time is hinted at in Wells’s self-conscious description of his own class background as ‘nowhere’. For Wells and others of his generation this was the ‘nowhere’ of the suburban lower middle classes, a social landscape until then lacking definition in literary material. The opening up of this cultural field allowed these new writers the chance to refigure for their readers an existing Victorian literature that, as Wells remarked, ‘no longer fitted into their everyday experiences’.2 Arnold Bennett’s first novel A Man from the North (1898) includes a moment which, on several different levels, shows Wells’s reflections in action. In this scene Richard Larch, a solicitor’s clerk and the northern man of the title, is depicted sitting in a London public library reading a half crown review and speculating about embarking on a career as a writer. These meditations are inspired by an article in the review, written by ‘a writer of considerable repute’, entitled ‘To Literary Aspirants’: After an unqualified statement that any man … might with determined application learn to write finely, the essayist concluded by 9

10 Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture

remarking that never before in the history of literature had young authors been so favourably circumstanced as at that present.3 Bennett’s own background offered proof of the veracity of this statement. He, like Larch, had been a library-haunting solicitor’s clerk who had successfully exchanged office life for professional authorship in the 1890s. Although he was not yet in 1898 a ‘writer of considerable repute’, Bennett was soon to become an inspirational figure for other aspiring authors of the clerk class. In collections of essays such as Fame and Fiction (1901), The Truth About an Author (1903) and How to Become an Author (1903), Bennett set out to inspire real Richard Larches to follow his lead. Given the new democratic climate in British print culture, as evoked here by Bennett and Wells, one might have anticipated that ensuing literary depictions of the lower middle classes would reflect the evident optimism of the age. But if we take the clerk character as a typical example of the representations of this class, what emerges is less predictable and more complex than this forecast. Rather than a literary panorama showing the diversity of modern urban life, a more concentrated vision of this existence tends to emerge in the 1890s. Bennett’s Richard Larch, for example, as a would-be writer who is trapped in his city office and suburban home, represents a key motif around which portrayals of clerks during this era tend to coalesce: examples of this ‘type’ are found in the work of writers such as George Gissing (see Chapter 3), William Hale White (Mark Rutherford), J.S. Fletcher, Rudyard Kipling, and Edwin Pugh. To analyse the development of this motif and the reasons behind its occurrence, I intend to examine three novels that, while focusing upon frustrated literary clerks, also illustrate contrasting elements of late Victorian print culture. The first is Walter Besant’s All in a Garden Fair (1883), a three-volume work (originally serialised in Good Words) which looks back to characteristic forms of novel publication before the 1890s. The second is The Story of a London Clerk: A Faithful Narrative Faithfully Told (1896), a tale, written by an anonymous author, that epitomises the sort of fiction destined for lower middleclass readers during this era. The last is Bennett’s A Man from the North, a novel published by John Lane, a new and dynamic publishing firm in fin de siècle London. Examined alongside one another, these three novels allow us to trace the evolution of the literary clerk against the background of the era’s rapidly changing publishing industry. * * * Although Walter Besant’s 1883 novel All in a Garden Fair provides the first serious portrayal of a ‘modern’ office clerk in British print culture,

The Clerk in Literature, 1880–1900 11

the clerical worker was already a familiar literary figure by the midnineteenth century. Back as far as 1825, Charles Lamb had anticipated later depictions of the ‘thraldom’ of office life (‘I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul’) in his Elia essay ‘The Superannuated Man’.4 But the first sustained group of petit bourgeois office clerks in print appeared in periodical literature in the 1830s and 1840s. As Arlene Young has revealed, during this period numerous satirical depictions of minor clerks were printed in publications such as New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Bentley’s Miscellany, Fraser’s Magazine and Punch.5 In these periodicals, clerks with evocative names like Julius Nosebody and Jermemiah Fubkins are routinely duped by more wily individuals from the upper or lower classes. Young argues that this sustained disparagement of petty clerks has its roots in bourgeois anxiety regarding ‘the insidious threat of the apparently unrestrainable growth of a large – not to mention contiguous and kindred – stratum of society’: Disparagement is indeed a component of the imaginative strategy of control and containment that evolved during the nineteenth century, a strategy that restrains the potential power of the lower middle class by feminizing it and defining the domestic sphere as its natural habitat.6 This argument appears persuasive in relation to the particular type of diminutive clerk character found in early Victorian magazines and is one to which I will return when investigating the question of masculinity in later ‘office’ literature. Unlike Young, however, I do not believe that this rationale should be applied more indiscriminately to other nineteenth century depictions of petit bourgeois office workers. Young’s totalising assertion, for example, that Charles Dickens’ lower middle-class figures ‘retain a characteristic diminutiveness that signifies their social insignificance and marginality’ fails to account for the breadth and diversity of Dickens’ depictions of this class.7 As George Newlyn’s research has revealed, Dickens’ work includes one hundred and four clerks, of whom nineteen represent characters of reasonable significance.8 Indeed, far from betraying an ‘ambivalence to his lower-middle-class roots in his fiction’, as Young argues, characters such as Heep, Linkinwater, Swiveller, Wemmick, Wilfer and Cratchit appear to reveal a preoccupation – almost an obsession – with this social group.9 Whereas other clerks-turned-writers discussed later in this book do strategically distance themselves from their former lives by offering condescending accounts of clerical work, this simple


logic cannot account for Dickens’ concentration of focus upon this environment. For him, it seems an experience of office life (as a law clerk in the 1820s) provided instead an acute and sympathetic understanding of the literary potential of commercial life: something also true, I would argue, of another clerk-turned-writer, Anthony Trollope.10 A measure of Dickens’ success in exploiting this potential is recognised in the ways in which his work continues to provide a primary reference point for discussion of this environment by both literary critics and historians.11 Although a lengthy examination of Dickens’ clerks is outside the scope of this book, it is important here to register the extent of his influence. Abundant proof of the enduring nature of this legacy will be evident in Chapter 4 of this book which examines the writers of comic and light literature in the 1880s and 1890s. But for the writers of more serious-minded fiction at the century’s end, while Dickensian offices provided a general point of reference, more direct influences were found elsewhere. G.H. Lewes’s novel Ranthorpe (1847), for example, in terms of plot and characterisation, seems to provide a blueprint for those later works which focus upon literary clerks. In the early chapters of this novel, Percy Ranthorpe is depicted as a twenty-five pounds per annum lawyer’s clerk, who ‘longed to set himself fairly afloat upon the wide sea of literature’.12 After the publication of his verse in a magazine, Ranthorpe defies his father’s wishes (‘What! am I to see you throwing up a certainty – a livelihood!’), following the realisation that ‘his clerkship [had become] more and more intolerable to him’.13 While Ranthorpe was not widely republished after 1847, it did make a considerable impact on its release, and was praised in leading journals and by other writers of fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Bronte.14 Given this reception, and taking into account G.H. Lewes’s prominent position in mid-Victorian literature, it is reasonable to assume that Walter Besant had read the novel, or was at least familiar with Ranthorpe’s narrative. The plot of All in a Garden Fair is certainly close enough to Ranthorpe to encourage this assumption. Like Ranthorpe, Besant’s novel also focuses its earlier chapters on a clerk, Allen Engledew, who longs to exchange his office job for life as a poet. Also like Ranthorpe, Engledew leaves his office in defiance of a parent’s wishes (‘you can’t make your fortune by writing’),15 and with a final rejection of clerking: ‘the time has come … when I can go to the City no more. The work has long been intolerable to me’ (105). But the treatment by Lewes and Besant of office work, although apparently similar in this outline, is in fact intriguingly different. The different application of these otherwise comparable plots illustrates the


distinction between the office of the ‘counting house’ era and that of the ‘modern’ epoch. In Lewes’s novel, Ranthorpe’s position as a clerk is implicitly criticised simply because it is the wrong job for a poet. Besant’s work, while making the same point regarding the incompatibility of art and commerce, goes further in extending the depiction of Engledew’s clerkdom into a wide ranging polemical attack on modern City work. It is certainly true that other mid-Victorian writers had already criticised the commercial exploitation of clerks in their texts. The popular poet Martin Tupper, for example, in his work entitled A Dozen Ballads about White Slavery (1854), sympathised with ‘yon pale copying clerk’, whose ‘Twelve hours per diem at quill-driving work’ rendered ‘Man as a mere machine’.16 But Besant’s attack on clerking in All in a Garden Fair is much more informed and targeted than Tupper’s vague broadside. Albeit conforming to the rigid requirements of three volume publications (which, as Peter Keating has noted, imposed ‘a mechanical and largely arbitrary form onto fiction’),17 Besant managed to use much of the first third of the novel to discuss the potentially malign fate of the modern clerk. Besant’s concerns for the office worker were motivated by an acute awareness of the changing nature of this occupation during the 1880s. Since he had shared lodgings with his City clerk brother in Holborn in the 1850s, Besant had developed a close interest in the changing face of the metropolis.18 From this perspective he was well placed to register at first hand the scale of transformation that London as a commercial centre was experiencing at that time. As Gregory Anderson argues, during the final decades of the nineteenth century: Those occupations concerned with the provision or exchange of goods and services, especially those connected with commerce, banking and insurance, grew more rapidly than most other employment sectors. There was a similar proliferation of clerical jobs in the large bureaucracies such as central and local government and the railways.19 Anderson reinforces this point by noting that within the wider census classification that categorised ‘commercial occupations’, those employed as commercial clerks expanded in number faster than any other group, increasing between 1841 and 1881 by almost 400 per cent.20 In addressing this social phenomenon, Besant’s stance in All in a Garden Fair is not simply to condemn out of hand the rapid growth in commerce and its consequences. His concerns as expressed in the novel


are more focused upon the ways in which unchecked commercial expansion tends to exploit a workforce. This exploitation, Besant suggests, is of particular concern when that putative workforce is made up of the young and the inexperienced.21 For Besant, many of these young and inexperienced workers, often graduates of the newly instituted Victorian Board schools,22 were likely to find that the social advancement promised by office work would prove illusory.23 This gap between expectation and actual achievement, Besant argues, is masked by the elastic term ‘clerk’.24 Behind this word, as All in a Garden Fair reveals, are two occupational tiers leading in different directions. The first group of clerks, with ‘friends’, ‘influence’ and ‘money’, join firms as ‘ambitious rising clerks’, and go on to ‘draw large salaries, or have a share in the profits’ (30). The second group, classified as ‘hopeless clerks’, start out alongside their more favoured counterparts, but fail to progress beyond letter copying, ledger work and limited salaries (30). A liberal commentator in the novel – Engledew’s French teacher, M. Philipon – remarks that for the latter group of clerks this prospect currently provides ‘the life of a dog’, and he speculates further on the growing nature of this problem by suggesting that in ‘ten years it will be the life of a thousand dogs’ (45). In the novel’s first volume Allen Engledew is destined for this dog’s life, but Besant goes further than simply addressing the iniquitous aspects of modern commercial life. He is equally determined to use the novel as a vehicle to illustrate potential solutions for the problems he discusses. These solutions (mainly involving the provision of specialised education such as foreign language tuition for clerks) demonstrably help Allen ‘out of the lower levels of clerkery’ and into a position in which his ‘commercial value [is] doubled’ (28). While the advice from which Engledew benefits appears to offer direct guidance for young ‘hopeless clerks’, it seems unlikely that this group would form the primary readership for Besant’s work. If it is unwise to be too dogmatic about late Victorian reading communities, it is possible to make general assumptions about audiences for specific print cultural material given what we know about the publishing history of individual works. In the case of All in a Garden Fair, the nature of its original appearance in serial and three volume versions suggests that the bulk of Besant’s audience was drawn from amongst the established middle classes. Good Words, in which the novel was serialised from January to December 1883, was a well-established sixpenny ‘Sunday reading’ magazine. Its reputation was that of a popular and ‘middlebrow’ monthly which, Sally Mitchell argues, ‘records the literature of respectable bourgeois


England’.25 The three volume novel publication of All in a Garden Fair by the reputable firm of Chatto & Windus implies a similarly solid middleclass audience. The vast majority of this group of readers, rather than buying the volumes at a total cost of thirty-one shillings and sixpence, would borrow their copies from one of the numerous circulating libraries, the most prominent of which, in the 1880s, were Mudie’s Select Library and Smith’s Circulating Library. Besant was keenly aware of the constitution of his magazine and circulating library readership and was equally cognisant of the restrictions placed upon his work when writing for this market. In a symposium published in the New Review in 1890 on the subject of ‘Candour in English Fiction’, Besant stated his position on this topic unequivocally: ‘he who works for pay must respect the prejudices of his customers’. He went on to remark that if a novelist ‘crosses certain boundaries’, circulating libraries such as Mudies or Smiths would refuse to distribute his books, at which time it became ‘a question of money – shall he restrict his pencil or shall he restrict his purse?’26 Besant as a popular professional writer was not inclined to sacrifice his livelihood for the sake of art, but he was aware that within ‘certain boundaries’ he could use his novels to promote social equality. This was something that Besant had already attempted to achieve in his previously published and bestselling novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882). In this context, we can perhaps view All in a Garden Fair as a sort of bargain struck between Besant, his publishers and his readers. Besant would undertake to provide a tale which might open his reader’s eyes to social injustice, but he would also guarantee that the material would not offend any of the welldefined prejudices of his audience. One revealing aspect of the implicit negotiation taking place between writer, publisher and reader is recognised in Besant’s decision to make his hero Allen Engledew a gentleman in reduced circumstances rather than a member of the socially ambitious working class. Allen, following his father’s suicide, does begin office work in the same position as a Board school educated clerk whose ‘parents were too poor to keep [him] at school after fourteen or fifteen, or to teach [him] anything beyond the ordinary school course’ (24). Equally, however, he possesses the sort of innate social pedigree that makes him an acceptable three volume novel hero.27 For Besant this compromise – if indeed he considered it as such – was a small price to pay for the potentially educative function of his tale. Little of the ‘office’ fiction that follows All in a Garden Fair shares Besant’s crusading zeal and uncomplicated sympathy towards ‘hopeless clerks’. William Hale White’s novel Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance (1885)


is an exception to this tendency, presenting several extended scenes in which clerks perform monotonous and ill-paid work. The general trend, however, is marked by a hardening of writer’s attitudes towards clerks and the City.28 It is rare, for example, for ensuing ‘office’ fiction to include positive clerk role models such as Allen’s school friend Will Massey. This character, who takes advantage of the advice given to him about ways in which to improve his prospects, is destined in the novel to achieve the ‘great prizes of a merchant’s career’ (45). Furthermore, unlike later ‘successful’ fictional clerks, Massey (who is depicted as ‘rejoicing in his strength and in his youth’ (59)) is energised rather than stunted by commerce. While this vote of confidence in the potential for goodness in commerce is largely rejected by later writers, another aspect of this portion of the novel is widely echoed in 1890s fiction. Besant’s frequent descriptions of the incompatibility of Engledew’s artistic temperament with the business environment are, with hindsight, well calculated to appeal to those who shared Engledew’s sensitivity. Engledew’s early lament, ‘where are the people who read books and talk about things that don’t mean money?’ (15), remains his characteristic complaint until he escapes from his office at the end of the first volume. In amplifying this element of the narrative, Besant makes plain the unsuitability of the City for the type of sensitive, artistic youth whom he felt was increasingly likely to be produced by the Board schools. For individuals such as Engledew (and by association Besant), the atmosphere of the City office would remain perpetually uncongenial, and no amount of promotion and salary increase – considerations precious to Engledew’s friend Massey – could alter this situation. Engledew’s teacher, M. Philipon, having guided him to a position where he is able to draw ‘substantial pay and [do] responsible work’ (86), recognises the incompatibility of the poet and the clerk: In the City he has no future, he will neglect whatever chances offer; he will see no opportunity; such men as he are blind to opportunity; if a hundred doors lie open to success he would see none of them, his thoughts will be elsewhere. Money is not in his mind, nor success … . He lives two lives. One of these is dull and mean; to think of it, while he is living the other, makes him angry and ashamed, for in the other he lives in an enchanted world where he is a magician and can conjure spirits. (45–6, 47) For Engledew this alienation is typified by the philistinism of his fellow clerks (though significantly Massey is not included amongst these), who


inspire the following observation communicated to a friend: ‘If I were to tell the fellows in the office about my – my verses they would think it the best joke they ever heard’ (164). This complaint, echoing throughout much literature located in offices, is designed to confirm the separation of the artistic and business worlds. More than a mere distinction, it crucially classifies the office as an environment hostile to art and the artist. Aubrey Beardsley, once a clerk in the Guardian Life Insurance Company, gracefully encapsulate this same sense of the incompatibility of culture and business in his drawing ‘Le Dèbris d’un Poète’ (Figure. 2.1). In contrast to the reception of Lewes’s Ranthorpe, we can be confident about the influence which All in a Garden Fair had on at least two of the following generation of writers. George Gissing, whose fictional clerks are examined in the Chapter 3, was a struggling young writer when he read Besant’s novel. Writing to his brother Algernon in 1884 he described the book as the ‘most charming and delicate of modern novels’, which he had read with ‘extreme delight’.29 Gissing’s contemporary, Rudyard Kipling, also read and re-read the novel when he was a disillusioned journalist in a newspaper office in India. Kipling considered the book a primary source of inspiration for his career as a writer, calling it ‘my salvation … a revelation, a hope and strength’.30 Besant’s knowledgeable and optimistic vision of a young man’s progress towards literary success clearly appealed to Gissing, Kipling and other aspiring authors.31 But echoes of Besant’s descriptions of the life of ‘modern’ office workers are also traceable in the work of the following generation of writers. Besant’s work therefore seems to operate as a bridge between the old and the new. Although the book’s three volume format and unequivocal optimism look backwards towards mid-century fiction, Besant’s recognition of the growing significance of and implications for ‘modern’ means of employment looks forward to fiction of the 1890s. * * * When the Leadenhall Press published The Story of a London Clerk: A Faithful Narrative Faithfully Told in 1896, they were targeting a market that was still relatively new. The readership that constituted this market was only identified as a significant phenomenon by publishers and critics following the successful debut of the penny paper Tit-Bits in 1881. Although Walter Besant did not attempt to target this reading public with All in a Garden Fair, he remained a close observer of its growth and development. Writing in 1899, he reflected on the transformation in

18

Figure 2.1 Aubrey Beardsley, ‘Le Dèbris d’un Poète’, 1892. By permission of V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum.


British publishing brought about by these ‘new’ readers: There are at this moment in the country hundreds of papers and journals and magazines, weekly and monthly, published at prices varying from half-a-crown to a penny … . The circulation of some is enormous, far beyond the wildest dreams of twenty years ago: they are the favourite reading of millions who until the last few years never read anything: they are the outcome of the School Board, which pours out every year by thousands, by the hundred thousand, boys and girls into whom they have instilled, as one result of these standards, a love of reading. The favourite amusement of young people is reading.32 Arnold Bennett held a similarly optimistic opinion of the influence of this legislation, confidently stating in 1901 that ‘the Education Act [has] created a new reading public’.33 While it is surely wise to remain sceptical about Bennett and Besant’s simple equation of the Education Act of 1870 with the immediate creation of a mass literate audience, a more nuanced claim for the effects of this (and subsequent) legislation is reasonable. Like Kate Jackson and John Goodbody, I would argue that the ‘New Journalism’ of the late nineteenth century, in skilfully targeting a potential readership increased (if not created) by the Act, gave the impression that this audience had emerged almost overnight.34 Even if the Education Act was not therefore wholly responsible for creating a new class of reader, the then common perception of a ‘Board school audience’ allowed publishers the confidence to brand and target a discrete market. Apart from the ‘New Journalism’ discussed by Besant, many other forms of print media were directed towards the emerging audiences of the 1880s and 1890s. The Leadenhall Press’s list indicates the ways in which a small publishing firm of this period might adapt its stock to attract these ‘new’ readerships. Although the firm – originally under the name Field and Tuer, and subsequently as the Leadenhall Press – published a number of books of high quality (their 1895 catalogue lists several volumes issued at between two and six guineas), their general stock consisted of more modestly priced works. They were encouraged to publish books that appealed to the ‘Board school’ market after early successes with Jerome K. Jerome’s first two books: On the Stage – and Off (1885) and The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886). The profit made from Jerome’s works and also those of another popular writer, Max O’Rell, provided Leadenhall with a platform to issue a small number of new


novels each year. The Story of a London Clerk, priced at three shillings and sixpence, appears typical of these works of fiction. Although cheaper than the standard six shillings charged by the trade for new novels in 1896, it was still priced above the one shilling or even sixpence generally asked for reprints or paper-covered editions. For their three shillings and sixpence, the buyers of London Clerk received a quarto novel bound in light-green cloth, which, for a status-conscious reader, conveyed some degree of quality. The material values of Leadenhall’s new novels at least prevented the accusation that these texts were merely sensationalist trash. Distinctions such as these were increasingly important as the original ‘Board school’ audience evolved and fragmented.35 The Story of a London Clerk provides a useful example of the extent to which those ‘new’ readers described by Besant as a mass had actually developed heterogeneously by the mid-1890s. This sense is conveyed in the highly specific readership targeted by this novel, thereby suggesting Leadenhall’s confidence in the scale of an apparent niche market. Furthermore, the tightly packed print on the novel’s three-hundred plus pages indicates the publisher’s conviction that its clerk readers – although quite probably former Board school graduates – wanted something beyond Tit-Bits’ snippet journalism. If we consider London Clerk as a case study, the pricing of this book is also revealing. As well as indicating that the book’s audience would desire a well-packaged edition, it additionally suggests that three shillings and sixpence was not then considered an excessive price for the intended market. This is perhaps surprising when one takes into account that the average income of a young London clerk at this time was about fifteen shillings a week. From this knowledge, we can confidently assume that any clerk on a modest income who decided to buy London Clerk would only do so as a luxury purchase. Leadenhall certainly timed the publication of the novel in late spring 1896 to coincide with the start of the summer season, so they presumably hoped to capitalise on the holiday trade. But it would seem more likely that the publishers anticipated the bulk of the book’s sales coming via indirect purchase for its putative audience. An apparently edifying title such as The Story of a London Clerk: A Faithful Narrative Faithfully Told might, for example, be sold to a library, or be awarded as a prize for a distinguished pupil. Although publishing an anonymous novel on a seemingly unexciting and unfashionable topic presented a risk for Leadenhall, one must assume that this City-based publisher understood the market well and anticipated profit. Clearly, a relatively small firm like Leadenhall was not in a position to take an unnecessary gamble or publish on a whim.36


Without the existence of a publisher’s archive for the Leadenhall Press, it is of course impossible to be certain about the weight which the firm’s partners placed on a clerk readership. The whole concept of an ‘implied reader’ is, anyway, a problematic one, as Lynne Warren reminds us: ‘implied readers are not, and never can be, anything more than approximations of real people’.37 Even allowing for this caveat, I would argue, however, that several aspects relating to the production and distribution of the book permit the assumption of this core readership to be made with confidence. Primary evidence is offered by the unequivocal nature of the title and sub-title, The Story of a London Clerk: A Faithful Narrative Faithfully Told. Together, these titles seem to deny the potential for romance or sensation in the narrative, instead locating the book firmly within the work-a-day world. Given this impression of the novel’s contents from the title, it seems unlikely that the book would appeal to those without a definite interest in clerking. The novel’s plain appellation also inscribes the social class with which the novel is concerned. Instead of depicting a clerk like Ranthorpe or Engledew, gentlemen forced into office work following family reversals, this ‘London Clerk’ is immediately identified as a rising member of the lower classes. Looking beyond the book’s cover further confirms this impression. Any prospective reader browsing through the novel’s contents would recognise that its text was firmly rooted in the quotidian detail of work. This accumulated detail appears to further narrow down the proposed/ideal reader of the text. Rather than an established clerk who would conceivably be familiar with the life depicted in the narrative, the book seems particularly designed to appeal to a prospective office worker. The specificity with which the author offers a guide to the potential pitfalls of clerking certainly seems to reinforce this assumption. As a narrative, The Story of a London Clerk traces the story of Osmond Ormesby, an ambitious provincial clerk who looks to improve his prospects – and his ten shillings per week wage – by moving to London. On arrival in the capital, however, Ormesby’s long periods of unemployment are punctuated only by brief employment in poorly paid or illegal work: an initially promising twenty-five shillings a week post for an insurance company turns out to be merely a job created as part of an elaborate scam; later, the fifteen shillings weekly wage offered by a Lambeth solicitor is severely reduced by a 15 per cent agency fee. The author illustrates the clerk’s London odyssey with plenty of practical advice which provides a guide to managing unemployment in the capital. Among these tips is the purchase of a ‘sixpence ha’penny’ spirit stove and pint spirit kettle, to allow water to be boiled without the expense of a bedroom fire.38


Elsewhere, the poor clerk is advised to buy ‘guttapercha collars’, which look ‘quite as well as those of linen’ but which ‘seldom got dirty, and could be cleaned in a moment with cold water and a flannel’ (71). At these moments the book takes on the characteristics of a self-help manual and appears to forget its novel status. In the final section of London Clerk, the full polemical significance of the novel is made clear. When Ormesby is finally able to utilise his industry and ambition to gain promotion and a handsome fivehundred-pounds-a-year salary, the illusory nature of this apparent success is swiftly established. The author depicts Ormesby as increasingly discontented by the sharp practice he observes in the City, asking himself ‘were his great resolves and noble aspirations, his reading and his study, to lead only to middle class comfort by means which were sordid and methods which were dishonest?’ (286). In contrast to Besant’s All in a Garden Fair, there is no character here (such as Will Massey) capable of providing a positive role model for modern clerking as a route towards middle-class comfort. Instead the anonymous novelist deliberately engineers the narrative to counter a perceived move by Board schools to encourage pupils to become commercial clerks. If this was indeed the case, as seems entirely probable, the Board school masters were simply following the ideas of the leading social economists of the day. Charles Booth, for example, in a volume of Life and Labour of the People of London, published in the same year as London Clerk, asserted: There is good reason for the flocking of young men into the ranks of clerical labour. There has been and there still is a growing demand for such services, and no services are more useful to the community. Beyond this the profession of clerk does seem to lead to a genuine rise in the social standard of living which is a worthy object of ambition.39 For the London Clerk author, this pervasive culture of ‘improvement’ is summarised in the then familiar phrase ‘getting on’. While Wells later suggested a positive value for this phrase in relation to the lower middle classes (see opening quotation in this chapter), this novel sees only its potential to encourage greed and selfishness. As Ormesby’s mentor asserts, ‘the policy of getting on simply for the sake of getting on is a pernicious policy, and no youth can pursue it long before losing his finer feelings, and abandoning his old enthusiasms … and his hopes and belief in mankind’ (282–3). As a counterweight to the apparent conditioning of youth at home and school, several scenes in the novel are designed to make the clerk


directly question the ‘true’ merits of the occupation he is encouraged to choose. Following an encounter, for example, with a contemporary from school who became an engine fitter, Ormesby is forced to revaluate his assumed superiority over blue-collar workers: And he had counted manual labour mean! And he had thought himself so much superior to the work of men’s hands! And he had dared at one time to look upon his old schoolfellow with contempt! What mistaken ideas he had held! Here was his friend now engaged in far more honest, far more responsible, far more useful labour than he had ever been able to undertake. What a man it had made of his companion, too! (292) The accumulated polemical weight of the final third of the novel leads towards a conclusion in which the City is abandoned. As was the case with Engledew in All in a Garden Fair, Ormesby’s escape from office work is facilitated by literature. In a passage that looks back to the earlier novel, Ormesby is described as finding solace in the literary world: ‘it was a relief to him to turn to … books, and lose himself among their pages for a time’ (281). London Clerk, however, sees Ormesby’s passion for print finding a release in a career as a bookseller rather than as a writer. This subaltern role would arguably have been viewed as more fitting to a character of Ormesby’s social rank. Also in contrast to Engledew’s situation in Besant’s novel, Ormesby’s escape from uncongenial work is seen as a philanthropic decision rather than one simply motivated by temperamental preference. In London Clerk, Ormesby’s choice is underscored by a quasi-religious conversion from indoctrinated capitalism to spiritual enlightenment through culture. Ormesby’s conversion evidently takes its inspiration from Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture spreading ‘sweetness and light’ among the masses, a theory which London Clerk’s author employs quite directly. Adopting the advice of a sage-like bookseller, Ormesby resolves to become an Arnoldian foot soldier. In the novel’s final pages, the former clerk opens a bookshop among ‘workpeople’s houses’, from where he can ‘direct the tastes of readers, especially among the young, just leaving school’ (314). Although the idealism and optimism of London Clerk’s ending are at odds with the practical detail and tone found elsewhere in the text, there is a touching sincerity about this coda. While the novel’s combination of elements works against any consideration of the book’s aesthetic integrity as a work of literature, it does perhaps increase its value as a social document. What makes London Clerk a particularly valuable


text is not just its illumination of humanist concerns about City work (Besant had already documented several of these issues), but rather the angle from which the book addresses these anxieties. Whereas All in a Garden Fair observes the ‘hopeless clerk’ from a middle-class viewpoint, London Clerk adopts a worm’s eye view of the situation. Writing for a specific lower middle-class readership, London Clerk’s writer is free from the constraints that had shaped Besant’s Engledew in the previous decade. What emerges, though an undeniably partial depiction of the clerk class, is an honest attempt to engage with and to directly address the concerns of this group. While by no means an influential novel like All in a Garden Fair, it does provide important evidence of the broadening of the range of fictional characterisation brought about by the evolution of audiences by the 1890s. Before Ormesby, print cultural clerks targeted towards the lower middle class market had either been those comical figures as discussed in Chapter 4, or Dickensian types like Frederick Wicks’ The Poor Clerk (1893); the latter text being a one shilling moral fable detailing an honest clerk’s eventual reward with a head bookkeeper’s position following the exposure of his corrupt employer.40 In its separation from what had gone before, London Clerk proves the extent to which in 1896, as Besant claimed, print culture had evolved ‘beyond the wildest dreams of twenty years ago’. * * * As a novel written about an office worker by a former solicitor’s clerk (Arnold Bennett) and published by an ex-railway clerk (John Lane), A Man from the North provides multiple evidence of how in 1898 H.G. Wells’ generation from ‘nowhere’ was ‘getting on’. Its status as a representative example of the progress made by lower middle-class literary production undoubtedly makes A Man from the North worthy of scrutiny, but the novel’s significance goes beyond its standing as a benchmark of cultural and social change. Bennett’s intention, when writing this novel, to impose a ‘science of construction’ upon British fiction provides the book with a literary import quite apart from more specific considerations of its sociological value.41 Writing four years after publishing A Man from the North, Bennett reflected upon his experimental work: It was to be entirely unlike all English novels … . There were to be no poetical quotations in my novel, no titles in the chapters; the narrative was to be divided irregularly into sections by Roman numerals


only; it was indispensable that a certain proportion of these sections should begin or end abruptly … . No startling events were to occur in my novel … no ingenious combinations, no dramatic surprises, and above all no coincidences … .42 We should of course acknowledge here, as Margaret Drabble has remarked, that Bennett makes these comments in a ‘deliberately flippant and provocative’ register.43 Nevertheless, Bennett’s feelings about the current stagnation of British fiction and its need for revolution are well documented in his letters and journals.44 These sources reveal a young man seriously intent upon reshaping the existing field of British fiction. A mark of Bennett’s success in achieving his artistic goal is recognised in an evaluation of the novel by Joseph Conrad. In a letter written to Bennett after reading the work ‘more than once’, Conrad declared himself ‘profoundly impressed with the achievement of style’. Furthermore, Conrad states, ‘I do envy you the power of coming so near to your desire … . To read it was to me quite a new experience of the language’.45 Of more immediate importance to Bennett was the admiration of John Lane’s reader, John Buchan, whose report on the novel recognised its ‘great knowledge and a good deal of insight … . [and] character delineated by a succession of rare and subtle touches’.46 As a result of Buchan’s recommendation, and only a few days after Bennett had posted his manuscript to the firm, Lane made an immediate offer to publish the novel. Whether or not the significance of A Man from the North in the wider context of late Victorian British fiction was as great as Conrad and Buchan (and evidently Bennett himself ) believed is open to a debate that goes beyond the limits of my topic. What is, however, indisputable is the freshness of vision that the novel brought to fin de siècle representations of the lower middle class. In a single work Bennett managed to shift the suburb-dwelling petit bourgeois clerk from the margins of British fiction to the centre of literary experimentation and debate. It may well be argued that Bennett was ten years late in his experiment. Certainly, his intention to ‘imitate … the physical characteristics of French novels’ had already been attempted in Britain during the mid1880s.47 George Moore among others had been inspired by the example of Emile Zola who in 1880 had proposed that the ‘experimental novel’ should provide a ‘literature of our scientific age’. Zola envisaged that this new age of literature would be marked by a radical change of artistic focus: ‘for the study of the abstract, the metaphysical man, it substitutes


study of the natural man subject to physio-chemical laws and determined by the influence of environment’.48 Moore’s response to Zola’s call for literary Naturalism is recognised in his early novels including A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer’s Wife (1885). The controversy caused by these novels and later by the 1889 trial of Zola’s English publisher Henry Vizetelly focused much critical and public attention on the ‘scientific’ response to realism during this era. But by the early 1890s, few serious attempts to engage with French Naturalism were evident in its British counterpart. Instead, as David Trotter has argued, Naturalism’s mark on the British literature of this period was little more than its capacity to generate ‘a subject-matter and a plot’.49 Bennett was addressing this apparent failure of British Naturalism with his own experiment in fiction. While he had admired Moore’s naturalistic work, Bennett still considered that the possibilities for literature opened up by modern French writers were largely undeveloped in Britain. In his own attempt to address these failings, Bennett looked beyond Zola who had provided the model for Moore, and towards other French realists such as the Goncourts and particularly Maupassant. For Bennett, the attraction of Maupassant’s approach to Naturalism is not difficult to establish. Writing in 1882, Maupassant had set out his own theory of modern literature. Arguing against a current tendency in fiction to focus upon either the high or low, the good or the bad, Maupassant called for writers to seek balance and harmony in their attempts to ‘reproduce life’: In the novel as it is understood today the effort is to banish the exceptional. We wish, so to speak, to hit the mean level of human events, to draw a general philosophy from it, or rather to derive general ideas from the facts, habits, ways of behaviour, and experiences which are most widespread. Hence the necessity to observe with impartiality and independence … . We should always incline to the mean, to the general rule. Thus to see in humanity only one class of people (be it high or low), one type of feelings, one sole order of events, is certainly a mark of narrowness of mind, a sign of intellectual myopia.50 Maupassant’s desire to widen the perspective of fiction to include the ‘mean’ as well as the extreme (he concluded this essay by arguing that the modern novelist should adopt the democratic motto ‘I do not wish anything human to be alien to me’) offered Bennett a licence to write about his experience of ‘ordinary’ modern life.51 Furthermore, Maupassant’s aim to imbue this democratic vision with impartiality and


independence liberated Bennett from the need to freight his work with irony, morality, sentimentality or the comic. The combination of these qualities allowed Bennett to attempt a work by which, in his own conception, ‘the Usual [was] miraculously transformed by Art into the sublime’.52 If one acknowledges that Bennett falls somewhat short in these lofty aims, this should not suggest that A Man from the North is a failure. On the contrary, Bennett’s novel is remarkably successful in adhering to and achieving its artistic goals. The contrast between this work and other comparable literary productions of the period indicates the significance of Bennett’s project. In Chapter 3, the differences between A Man from the North and Gissing’s depictions of urban lower middle class will become apparent. While we anticipate this comparison, it is valuable here to compare Bennett’s novel with the work of Edwin Pugh, another naturalistic writer whose work similarly focuses upon the suburban classes. Pugh, after eight years spent as a clerk in a City office, had achieved critical acclaim for his first collection of stories A Street in Suburbia (1895). This group of interlinked tales includes ‘The Story of Harry Cummers’ in which the literary aspirations of the title character (a clerk described as ‘clever, judged by the Board School standard of cleverness’) are examined.53 Cummers is depicted by the narrator, his neighbour, obsessively writing after his work in the City ‘in a huddled, cramped position, with his eyes close to the paper, and the yellow oillamp spluttering two inches from his tumbled hair’.54 The clerk’s failure to get any of his work published encourages him to pay twenty-four pounds to a vanity publisher to print his novel. Ultimately, a combination of the self-denial Cummers had exercised to amass the cost of the novel’s production, and his disappointment at the book’s abject failure, conspire to destroy the clerk’s health: His puffy face lost its puffiness, and his eyes grew mighty behind his pince-nez. At last he fell ill and died. He had never been healthy, and his end was sudden. His bereaved mother mourned him just six weeks.55 Although Pugh’s tale offers a veneer of Naturalism – the narrator’s perspective, together with sundry details of clerkly and Grub Street life, suggest a ‘scientific’ approach – it tends to collapse too easily into sentimentality and implicit morality. The narrator’s perspective, while suggesting a privileged and controlled glimpse of suburban life, in effect simply provides a standard middle-class view on the pathetic but


respectable poor. Whereas Pugh’s depiction of Cummers is therefore only superficially spiced with Naturalism, Bennett’s novel appears to engage seriously with the implications of this literary form. If the contrast between Pugh and Bennett is a little unfair to the former (Pugh was only twenty-one when he wrote the tale and he would go on to produce several novels of quality after A Street in Suburbia), it does at least reveal a necessary context in which to locate Bennett’s achievement.56 As one might expect of a novel that seeks to present the everyday through a lens of impartiality, A Man from the North is a designedly unremarkable work in terms of its plot and incident. In brief, the work recounts the story of Richard Larch who moves from his provincial solicitor’s office in the Potteries to a firm in the metropolis. While in London he embarks on several literary projects, all aborted, and receives successive promotion ultimately to the headship of a department and a salary of two hundred and thirty-four pounds per year. The novel’s ending sees Larch contemplating his marriage to a restaurant cashier while vowing to abandon writing. It is, in all essential qualities, Bennett’s own story without the literary success and with the addition of the proposed nuptials. What Bennett manages to capture here behind this unexceptional outline is an acute sense of the daily life – both inner and outer – of one of hundreds of thousands of City workers who might pass unnoticed in the street. The critical compliments that Bennett offers on Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife can just as easily be applied to his own novel: He writes of nothing which has not been observed – but he has observed everything. In the hands of a lesser artist such prodigious lore might have resulted in a orgy of fact; in the hands of George Moore its effect is merely to give the reader a sense of security and confidence amid the tumult of imagination.57 This notion of the reader’s security and confidence being won through the authority with which the commonplace is observed seems to summarise Bennett’s achievement in A Man from the North. Larch’s ‘paltry human faults’,58 such as his petty snobberies, his vanity, and his self doubts, attain penetration and verisimilitude as reflections of character precisely because they are rendered alongside ‘all the phenomena of humble life’ (82): A.B.C. cafes, a day trip to Littlehampton, the Putney omnibus, St Martin’s Lane public library, and the day-to-day office routine at Curpet and Smythe’s. As John Carey has suggested, Bennett manages here and elsewhere to convince us of ‘the depths that lie within ordinary, not particularly intelligent people’.59 This only becomes a


remarkable claim when one situates Larch in his literary context. Few other works of British fiction of this period share Bennett’s subtlety and integrity in attempting to render the unremarkable. Although A Man from the North is a far more important book than its recent neglect has suggested, Bennett himself was quite prepared to recognise the novel’s weaknesses alongside its strengths.60 In The Truth About an Author he acknowledged that the ‘grey, sinister, and melancholy’ shading of Larch’s life was introduced into the novel because he perceived these qualities as essential to the conventions of Naturalism.61 The unequivocal failure of Larch to achieve his literary ambition – thus according the fictional clerk’s story a negative parallel with Bennett’s own positive experience of ‘getting on’ – was, he later suggested, a fault of youth and inexperience: ‘As a matter of strict fact … I was having a very good time; but at twenty-seven one is captious, and liable to err in judgement’.62 In later novels, having abandoned his strict adherence to Naturalism, Bennett tended to present clerkly life in lighter and more optimistic tones: A Great Man (1904), for example, depicts a clerk who successfully abandons his office desk to become a writer of popular fiction, while in The Card (1911) Denry Machin rises from solicitor’s clerk to become the wealthy mayor of Bursley. In addition, Bennett wrote numerous articles and books specifically designed to assist autodidact writers like Larch to achieve their literary ambitions. These later affirmative accounts of urban lower middle-class life and culture are, to a considerable extent, designed to counter the gloom with which the suburban scene was characteristically depicted in British literature of the period. Bennett was well aware of the relative absence of writers in Britain (other than those writing light or comic fiction) who were prepared, if not to speak up for the suburbs, then at least to attempt to write about them with compassion. This more empathetic approach is anticipated in A Man from the North during an episode in which Larch and his fellow clerk Mr Aked attempt to write The Psychology of the Suburbs. The book is inspired by Aked’s notion that ‘People have got into a way of sneering at the suburbs’ (79), a belief that Larch himself has casually confirmed: ‘I think these suburbs are horrid, – far duller than the dullest village. And the people! They seem so uninteresting, to have no character!’ (76). Aked’s scheme is to eradicate the perception of uniformity attached to areas such as Walham Green and Fulham and to reveal instead their ‘character’ and ‘individuality’ (77). This concept inspires in Larch a sense of ‘the latent poetry of the suburbs’ which leaves ‘nothing common, nothing ignoble’ (81). But the conclusion of Bennett’s novel aptly illustrates the tensions that existed


between this sympathetic dissection of suburban life and the dictates of his adherence to Naturalism. In the final pages of the novel the admirable detachment with which Larch’s existence has hitherto been realised seems to evaporate. Bennett, needing an ending that would confirm the ‘very dolorous’ shading of the book, dictates that Larch’s future in the suburbs and the office (married to a woman destined to become ‘the typical matron of the lower middle-class’ (185)) will be one of ‘desolating suburban domesticity’:63 He knew that he would make no further attempt to write … . It would be impossible to write in the suburban doll’s house which was to be theirs. No! In future he would be simply the suburban husband – dutiful towards his employers, upon whose grace he would be doubly dependent; keeping his house in repair; pottering in the garden; taking his wife out for a walk, or occasionally to the theatre; and saving as much as he could … . Perhaps a child of his might give a sign of literary ability. If so – and surely these instincts descended, were not lost – how he would foster and encourage it! (186–7) Bennett’s belief that this gloomy end to Larch’s ambitions was appropriate to the style of literary work he was engaged upon is revealing in terms of more general depictions of this milieu. Naturalism may have offered young writers like Bennett a licence to discuss the rising urban classes but it also proscribed to them the mode of this discussion. The critical reception received by A Man from the North is also instructive in terms of its implications for the development of British literary culture. Although the book was well received by critics on publication (and as Conrad’s letter suggests, it continued to be well regarded in literary circles), it failed to make a second and cheap edition until 1912. The fact that the book was so widely recognised on its debut (Bennett himself counted forty-one largely positive reviews) was in the main due to Bennett’s choice of John Lane as publisher. As Peter D. McDonald has revealed, apart from the fact that Lane was well disposed to a ‘selfconsciously unconventional, even slightly risqué, first novel by a young writer’, the publisher was also able to provide welcome literary prestige: ‘Lane had established himself in the field as a leader of a new avantgarde generation and a recognised arbiter whose imprint was not merely a sign of legal ownership but a classificatory cachet’.64 Even allowing, however, for the fact that Bennett’s work achieved, via its publisher, what Pierre Bourdieu has termed ‘cultural capital’, this quality did not convince all critics of the artistic legitimacy of the novel’s subject matter.65


The Manchester Guardian’s anonymous reviewer points towards the difficulty faced by any able British writer who might wish to focus upon ‘commonplace’ subject matter: Granting that such a character is worth describing, it is well described. The writer is an uncompromising realist. He is master of all the little sordid details, the little sordid ambitions and loves and sorrows of lower middle-class existence; and he possesses the art of drawing lifelike portraits with a few touches. The subject is not a very attractive one, and the hero, it must be confessed, is a cold fish at the best. We have met him before in other walks of life. He has appeared in ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Virgin Soil,’ but the problems which palsied the wills of the heroes of those tragedies were worth solving. The difficulties of Richard Larch, we cannot but feel, might have been removed by a touch of vice. An English clerk, it is to be feared, would have solved them in this way.66 Class-bound criticism such as this remained a familiar element in the reception of British fiction depicting the suburban classes until the First World War. Writers as diverse as George Gissing and Arthur Conan Doyle received similarly negative critical reactions to their attempts to write serious fiction about clerkly life: Gissing, for example, although a respected British man of letters in 1898, was still described by Speaker in that year as ‘the man who writes the small-beer chronicle of [Brixton and Kennington]’,67 while Conan Doyle was accused by the periodical Literature of making ‘a rather daring experiment on the docility of his public’ with his suburban novel A Duet With an Occasional Chorus (1899).68 Although a consciousness of hostile criticism such as this no doubt spurred on writers like Bennett and Wells to champion the lower middle classes in their writing, it would hardly encourage would-be novelists (or commissioning editors) to focus their attention on this social scene. The twin influences of Naturalism and critical snobbery therefore both shaded and inhibited the development of the modern City worker in the more serious-minded literature of the 1890s. Following the polemical studies of modern clerking featured in the work of Besant and Hale White during the 1880s, writers became progressively more detached from the life of the clerks they described in their work. While the emergence of the lower middle classes in the 1890s as readers and writers had suggested that literary culture would embrace the diversity of this burgeoning group, what actually appeared in print was quite different.


Instead of a panoramic view materialising, one capable of reflecting the broadening nature of the British social scene, we are aware instead of just a series of glimpses of this environment.69 The repeated motif of the literary clerk, and his changing fortunes, suggests both the nature of these glimpses and also the way in which they were channelled and controlled by current literary trends and prejudices. These factors evidently ensured that while the clerk class themselves were ‘getting on’, as Wells had claimed, their fictional counterparts in literary culture appeared to mock the easy optimism of this phrase. British literature would have to wait – like Richard Larch – for the following generation before much of the critical establishment was convinced that a City clerk’s problems were really worth illustrating and solving.

3 ‘The Decently Ignoble – or, the Ignobly Decent?’: George Gissing’s Fictional Clerks

George Gissing’s position as the foremost chronicler of the late Victorian clerk in British fiction appears an undisputed one. No other writers of this era shared Gissing’s interest and energy in documenting the emergence of the modern white-collar workers and their particular social class. The following Spectator review of his novel In the Year of Jubilee (1894) confirms a truth that had become self-evident: Fifteen or twenty years ago, there was a vacant place in English fiction, waiting for a competent writer to fill it … . The class which waited for a delineator was a large and important one, – that vaguely outlined lower middle section of society … . The families of the imperfectly educated but fairly well-paid manager or clerk, of the tradesman who has ‘got on’ pecuniarily but hardly ‘gone up’ socially, and, to speak generally, of the typical ratepayers in an unfashionable London suburb, had not, perhaps, been entirely neglected, for Dickens and others had given them occasional attention; but they lacked a novelist of their own who should devote himself mainly or exclusively to them, and do for them what had been done by others for the classes and the masses. They have at last found one in George Gissing, who, for some years, and in various volumes, has delineated the members of this particular social grade – their manners and customs, their modes of thought and life, their relations to each other and to those who stand just above or just below them on the social ladder.1 This assessment has been further consolidated in the years since the revival of critical interest in Gissing’s work in the 1960s. Gillian 33


Tindall has argued, for example, that ‘if you want to understand about the … social aspirations among the lower middle class … [Gissing’s work] will become part of your own knowledge, permanently enlarging your view’.2 But Gissing’s putative role as laureate of the lower middle classes in late nineteenth-century Britain is a problematic and even a paradoxical one. A measure of the difficulty in assessing his legacy in relation to this social group was heralded in 1912 by Frank Swinnerton in the first full critical study of Gissing’s work: It is very surprising, when one considers the whole of his work, that Gissing should be persistently described as the realistic historian of the lower classes, and particularly the lower middle class … . Of clerks, and of the ordinary wage-earning members of the lower middle class, he seems to have made practically no use in his novels; and where they appear … they are generally so eccentric as to give the books no value as social studies.3 Swinnerton’s position was anticipated by a series of letters written by office clerks to the Daily Chronicle in 1898. These clerk readers wrote to the newspaper to complain about the inaccuracy of Gissing’s depiction of a suburb-dwelling office worker in his novel The Town Traveller. One of the Daily Chronicle’s correspondents, signing himself ‘A Minor Clerk’, indignantly declared that ‘Mr Gissing’s picture of our home life is as strikingly inaccurate as the rest of his descriptions’.4 We can to some extent account for these dissenting views by acknowledging what Walter Allen describes as the tendency for Gissing’s fiction to be ‘too personal’. Allen argues by way of explanation that Gissing’s work is marked by ‘the powerful expression … of a grudge … . Gissing remains the novelist of the special case – his own.’5 Even before Gissing’s biography became familiar to critics, the recurrent use of certain themes in his work – principally gender relations, class and money – alerted commentators to the potential for subjective preoccupations to influence his fiction.6 A review in the Manchester Guardian of Eve’s Ransom (1895) seemed instinctively to sense what Swinnerton describes as the eccentricity of Gissing’s clerk characters: Is it really true, one asks oneself, that the average clerk leads the consciously repressed starved life of Maurice Hilliard before his emancipation? In other words, is the case selected by Mr Gissing for

George Gissing’s Fictional Clerks 35

presentation typical? … [In] the end the conviction that Maurice Hilliard is and always will be an exception wins the day’.7 Although Gissing’s assumed lack of objectivity in characterisation might encourage us to exercise caution when discussing the sociological value of his work, it should not force us to follow Swinnerton’s lead in discounting the whole corpus as valueless. While Gissing’s fictional clerks are evidently exceptional and even eccentric, they remain a vital resource in our attempt to comprehend the social evolution of the office worker, and the representation of clerks in fiction at this time. Gissing’s own shift from socially committed accounts of the lives of ‘hopeless clerks’ in the 1880s, to detached and often cynical portrayals of City workers in the 1890s, is particularly revealing. These apparently incompatible perspectives reflect the ease with which the absolute realist writer Harold Biffen in Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) unconsciously reverses the contrary terms he uses to describe the ‘sphere’ of his work. At one moment Biffen defines his target as the ‘decently ignoble’, whereas elsewhere this group are described as ‘ignobly decent’.8 Although Gissing fails to comment directly in the text about this deliberate reversal of terms, his implication in using them appears clear. Biffen in his apparently unconscious movement between positions of empathy (‘decently ignoble’) and disdain (‘ignobly decent’) reflects upon Gissing’s own shifting focus. An understanding of the rationale behind Gissing’s changing relationship with his petit bourgeois characters helps us to interpret a similar movement that took place during this era in British print culture more generally. Even though Gissing’s relationship with the clerk class is a complex one, it does submit to interpretations which help us to make sense of its contradictions. * * * While it is an oversimplification to discuss Gissing’s clerk characters as representing either sympathetic or antipathetic tendencies, his career does, without the employment of critical sophistry, split neatly into two halves, with 1893 as the watershed. The implication of this dichotomy – that a specific event occurred during this year to encourage Gissing’s cynicism towards a group he had previously appeared, energetically, to defend – is, of course, insupportable. John Halperin’s biography of the writer convincingly demonstrates that the change in his attitude took place gradually, as one would expect from an individual whose natural tendency was towards moderation rather than radicalism: ‘Gissing was


in spirit and impulse – if not always in income – a member of the conservative middle class.’9 But the claim that Gissing had the capacity to create such antipathetic clerks in his later fiction seems, on the evidence of the earlier work, to suggest an unexpected progression. Gissing’s readiness, in the texts published prior to 1893, to cast as clerks those characters whose attitudes and situation closely resembled his own, confirmed his feelings of proximity to the group during this period. We can recognise the intimacy of Gissing’s relationship with the clerk class during the early part of his career in a letter written in 1880 to his brother Algernon: I write hard at small tales, of which I have several in the hands of Magazine editors. If none of these are taken, I shall be au desespoir. Then I must very seriously begin to think of some business or other, even if it be the position of draper’s clerk.10 Later in the same year, Gissing again wrote to Algernon following the publication of his first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), unambiguously stating the motivation behind his literary ambition: I mean to bring home to people the ghastly condition (material, mental, and moral) of our poor classes, to show the hideous injustice of our whole system of society, to give light upon the plan of altering it … . I shall never write a book which does not keep all these ends in view.11 This youthful idealism, inspired by a sense of closeness to the ‘poor classes’, is evident in much of the fiction that Gissing published during the 1880s. That Gissing included ‘hopeless clerks’ amongst these ‘poor classes’ is evident in his first significant clerk character, James Hood, who appears in A Life’s Morning (written 1885, published 1888). Hood, although superficially a respectable and established member of his community, is really a figure whose life is spent under the shadow of relative poverty. The summary of his working life, spent as ‘a struggle amid the chicaneries and despicabilities of commerce’, outlines what Gissing considered might, by the 1880s, represent the ‘typical’ story of a modern clerk’s existence.12 This existence Gissing defines in pseudo-apocalyptic terms: ‘He drifted into indefinite mercantile clerkships, an existence possibly preferable to that of the fourth circle of Inferno’ (64). Although Gissing suggests that Hood’s subsequent position in a worsted-mill is something


of a sanctuary after the Dante-esque complexion of his earlier working life, he still draws attention to the restricted quality of life available on a clerk’s meagre income. This topic, to which Gissing consistently returns in the first half of his career, is unsubtly drawn into all facets of Hood’s characterisation: physically, ‘he generally looked like one who has passed through a night of sleepless grief’ (71); mentally, his indigence has robbed him of ‘the conscious dignity of manhood’ (135); and in the general course of his life, poverty is proved to be the enemy of promise: ‘it was more than likely that the man might, with fair treatment, have really done something in one or other branch of physics’ (97). Thus Gissing’s delineation of Hood resembles the blend of indignation and social education evident in those depictions of ‘decently ignoble’ clerks produced by Besant and Hale White. But Gissing’s emphasis, in his representation of the poor clerk, makes important departures from those that underpinned either Hale White’s Mark Rutherford or Besant’s Allen Engledew. Of particular significance in recognising this distinction is that Hood is shown to be a career clerk, rather than a declassed individual who is forced into an office because of reversals in his (or his family’s) economic fortunes.13 This makes Hood’s appearance as a character in a British three-volume novel something of a literary breakthrough. V.S. Pritchett recognised the significance of this lowly clerk’s appearance when he argued that the character of Hood represents the arresting discovery ‘that in all character there sits a mind, and that the mind of the dullest is not dull because, at its very lowest, it will at least reflect the social dilemma into which it was born’.14 While Pritchett’s initial assertion, if fully endorsed, appears to offer a disproportionate significance to a relatively minor character, his latter claim is easier to endorse. If one focuses on the social dilemma evident in the concept of respectability, as reflected in the predicament of Hood, the novelty of this theme in the context of literature of the 1880s appears readily apparent. Neither Besant nor Hale White had placed much emphasis on this aspect of the poor clerk’s existence, but for Gissing, the need for a character of this class to maintain an outward respectability was seen as a major determining – and destructive – factor. A measure of Gissing’s consideration of the damaging effects of social convention is indicated by his decision to employ Hood’s fear of his loss of respectability as the starting point in a chain of events which goes on to provide the eventual motivation for his suicide. While the novel at the latter point of the chain descends into melodrama (with Hood being blackmailed by Dagworthy, his tyrannical employer), the events that precede this catastrophe are revealing. These involve Hood losing his


silk hat on a train when on his firm’s business and being compelled, by convention, to purchase a replacement: ‘it was impossible to go through Hebsworth [Leeds] with uncovered head, or to present himself hatless at the offices of Legge Brothers’ (134). Hood’s situation is complicated because he is forced to use his employer’s money to buy the new hat, and when he fails to replace the cash, he allows Dagworthy to effect his scheme of blackmail. This episode, ostensibly an unnecessarily laboured contrivance, arguably provides a more solid motivation for the plot than might now appear plausible.15 George Orwell recognised the problems inherent in attempting a reasoned appreciation of this portion of Gissing’s plot when writing in the 1940s about Hood’s hat: This is an interesting example of the changes in outlook that can suddenly make an all-powerful tabu seem ridiculous. Today, if you had somehow contrived to lose your trousers, you would probably embezzle money rather than walk about in your under-pants. In the ‘eighties the necessity would have seemed equally strong in the case of a hat. Even thirty or forty years ago, indeed, bareheaded men were booed in the street.16 These comments have implications for Gissing’s work that can be extended beyond the immediate consideration of the clerk’s clothes. At the very least they remind us that convention, an arbitrary force, is subject to abrupt changes (Orwell goes on to remark that hatlessness later became respectable ‘for no very clear reason’), and that these changes can severely impede our understanding of even relatively recent periods of time. As they relate to the clerk, our understanding of the effect of respectability is further distorted and diluted by the tendency of fiction to treat this theme as a source of comedy rather than tragedy. Much of the Grossmiths’ characterisation of Mr Pooter, for example, relies on the comic potential of respectability. For these reasons we are perhaps inclined to undervalue Gissing’s apparently neurotic convictions about the malign power of social convention. Gissing’s concentration in his fiction on the conventions of behaviour as dictated by class, although reflecting the depth of his own anxiety, does demand a serious reassessment of the effects of these arcane codes of conduct. In his attempt to address this subject, Gissing demonstrates the degree to which he empathised, at this juncture, with the clerk’s position. This is particularly evident when, after Hood’s suicide, he discusses the need for the ‘respectable’ clerk to live, in effect, a double life. He conveys this predicament by using a device that Besant had originally employed in


All in a Garden Fair. Besant used here the mistaken assumptions of a schoolmaster as a cue to present the narrator’s more accurate assessment of the ‘hopeless clerk’, and in so doing offered a straightforward slice of social didacticism. Gissing follows Besant’s format, employing the belated enlightenment of Mrs Baxendale, a politician’s wife, to uncover Hood’s true situation. Here Mrs Baxendale, established in the text as a wise judge, describes her concern at her earlier failure of recognition: Now think of this poor man. He had a clerkship in a mill, and received a salary of disgraceful smallness; he never knew what it was to be free of anxiety … . They were so perfectly quiet under it that no one gave a thought to their position … . Oh, don’t we live absurdly artificial lives? Now why should a family who, through no fault of their own, are in the most wretched straits, shut themselves up and hide it like a disgrace? Don’t you think we hold a great many very nonsensical ideas about self-respect and independence and so on? (209, 210) The need, ultimately discerned by Mrs Baxendale, for the respectable clerk to obscure all signs of his poverty beneath a veneer of relative plenty, was for Gissing at this point the central inequity of the clerk’s life.17 Gissing goes as far as to suggest that the acute self-awareness bred by the clerk’s tenuous position made his relative indigence more difficult to bear than the more obvious hardships of the working classes. In a characteristic comment, Hood’s daughter corrects her father, who, when observing colliers near his house, suggests ‘One might have had a harder life’, by retorting: ‘I think there’s a fallacy in that … . Their life is probably not hard at all … . They are really happy, for they know nothing of their own degradation’ (75). This perspective, so consistent with Gissing’s views on the cancerous nature of lower middle-class social conventions, also alerts us to his capacity for extremism and inflation. With the character of Hood, it seems, Gissing managed to prefigure both the passionate and prejudicial aspects of his own complex nature. The extent to which the latter quality is in evidence even when – and perhaps particularly when – Gissing is at his most zealous offers a valuable pointer to his later shift in perspective. It was Gissing’s fervent and highly personal evocation of the modern clerk’s existence that also characterised his depiction of Charles Scawthorne in The Nether World (1889). Scawthorne appears initially as a character distinctively distanced from the ‘hopeless clerk’ Hood: whereas Hood is trapped on the bottom rung of the clerical ladder with


no potential for improvement of fortune, Scawthorne appears to represent the dynamic and upwardly mobile clerk of his day. The latter clerk, having begun his working life with limited opportunities – leaving school at fourteen to become a copying clerk in a solicitor’s office – had harnessed ‘a wonderful power of application to study … [to work] himself up to a position which had at first seemed unattainable’.18 This position of articled clerk leads the way for him to accept a junior partnership in the firm, a prospective advancement which serves as ‘a testimony of the high regard in which Scawthorne was held by his employer’ (270). But instead of using this remarkable example of clerkly success to illustrate the potential for the modern and industrious Board school clerk, Gissing instead draws from it a message establishing the illusory nature of promotion and social advancement. The following extract – describing Scawthorne’s frustration at his circumstances – offers a sense of the way in which Gissing’s personal ‘grudge’ is permitted full rein in his fiction: The double existence he was compelled to lead – that of laborious and clear-brained man of business in office hours, that of hungry rascal in the time which was his own – not only impressed him with a sense of danger, but made him profoundly dissatisfied with the unreality of what he called his enjoyments. What, he asked himself had condemned him to this kind of career? Simply the weight under which he started, his poor origin, his miserable youth. However carefully regulated his private life had been, his position to-day could not have been other than it was; no degree of purity would have opened to him the door of a civilised house. (269) This meditation on the iniquity of the modern office clerk’s life is further extended to encompass Gissing’s reflections on exogamous marriage. Scawthorne’s thoughts on this subject are evidently intertwined with Gissing’s own: ‘Suppose he had wished to marry; where, pray, was he to find his wife? A barmaid? … Never had it been his lot to exchange a word with an educated woman – save in the office on rare occasions’ (269–70).19 John Halperin appears close to the mark with his assessment of Scawthorne as ‘a highly self-indulgent picture of the novelist’s own position before the publication of Demos’.20 While the self-indulgent characterisation of Scawthorne ultimately reinforces Swinnerton’s concerns about Gissing’s clerk characters, Edwin Reardon in New Grub Street (1891) seems to present a strong case for their worth. Although the central themes with which he is concerned in the


novel – exogamous marriage, the need to maintain standards of respectability in the face of relative poverty, and the occupation of writing – have obvious autobiographical relevance, Reardon nevertheless seems to offer a more objectified interpretation of these ‘grudges’ than those that informed the depictions of either Hood or Scawthorne. Whereas those earlier characters appear principally designed to objectify Gissing’s personal feelings of indignation and frustration, Reardon’s social function in the novel is more subtly and thus more successfully interwoven with his developing character. This maturity of characterisation, however, has its roots in a familiar scenario in which the young Reardon is forced by circumstances into a position in an estate agent’s office, which is apparently ‘the best that could be done for [him]’ (87).21 Further, Reardon’s fate conforms to a familiar narrative pattern, as witnessed in Lewes’s and Besant’s novels, in which the central character leaves his office desk to become a writer. Gissing, therefore both replicates and offers further impetus to the dominant motif of the literary clerk as discussed in Chapter 2. Rather than following those earlier fictional models, however, in imagining literary success for the clerk, Reardon’s fortunes in the literary world are mixed. The difficulty he experiences in securing a living through literature is mercifully eased by regular office work, during which time Reardon comes to appreciate the benefits of work ‘easily learnt and not burdensome’ (92). The emotional stability provided by a stable income after an extended period of financial uncertainty also helps to stimulate Reardon’s impulse to write. This position, while again reflecting Gissing’s own contemporary preoccupations (his precarious literary earnings at this time made the idea of a regular income a comforting prospect), also reveals an important aspect of office work. Because of the growing literary prejudice against clerical work in the 1890s, Reardon’s position here provides an illuminating alternative vision of ‘dull’ but regular and secure employment. The case of Edwin Pugh, a clerk-turned-writer who, as Frank Swinnerton remarks, ‘was encouraged to throw up a job in order to become a professional novelist, and … had not quite the moral stamina to support what followed’, situates this debate within a factual context. Pugh’s repeated requests for financial assistance from the Royal Literary Fund, and his eventual death from alcoholism, suggest the potentially stabilising dimension of secure office work.22 In New Grub Street, Gissing further examines the regular work/ authorship question by once again allowing Reardon to ‘recover his freedom’ (92) from office work when he receives a substantial inheritance. This second spell of full-time authorship brings with it both the critical plaudits that Reardon had desired, and also a wife – significantly


his social superior – whom he had naively regarded as ‘the crown of a successful literary career’ (95). Reardon’s career, however, proves to be anything but successful, and his temperamental inability to produce a regular income from his literary work results in a desperate financial crisis. Unable to contemplate an immediate resolution to his artistic impotence, Reardon pragmatically suggests a return to the virtual sanctuary of the office desk.23 This logical step is complicated only by his wife’s inability to come to terms with an action by her husband that she considers would represent a social suicide. It is her reaction to Reardon’s suggestion that provides Gissing’s most persuasive exposure of the nature and depth of late Victorian class prejudice. Here, the sense of hyperbole encountered in the self-indulgent characterisation of Scawthorne is circumvented by effective use of contextualisation. The following passages of dialogue offer some flavour of the clash of opposing philosophies held by Reardon and his wife: [Reardon:] Do you only love the author in me? Don’t you think of me apart from all that I may do or not do? If I had to earn my living as a clerk, would that make me a clerk in soul? [Amy Reardon:] You shall not fall to that! It would be too bitter a shame to lose all you have gained in these long years of work. (229) [Reardon:] Amy, are you my wife, or not? [Amy Reardon:] I am certainly not the wife of a clerk who is paid so much a week. (261) Amy Reardon’s attitude towards the general concept of clerkdom – coupled with the era’s condescending literary critical perspectives on lower middle-class characters – expose something of the culture of middle-class bigotry towards clerks that existed prior to the Great War. It is this culture of entrenched attitudes to class that New Grub Street eloquently and persuasively delineates, at a time when its familiarity and pervasiveness appeared to require little comment. Swinnerton, writing in 1912, and suggesting that Gissing’s work had nothing to tell us about the era’s social life, was probably too close to the scenes and settings described by the earlier writer. As a product of the clerk class himself, Swinnerton would have taken for granted Amy Reardon’s attitude to her husband’s voluntary decision to declass his family, and similarly assumed that her refusal to countenance his proposal to return to the office was a natural, if lamentable one, for a woman of her class.


This proximity made it impossible for Swinnerton to appreciate how the value of a clerk character such as Reardon might mature. In New Grub Street, Gissing showed himself to be capable of a balanced depiction of a clerk’s life that demonstrated its benign possibilities and also provided an index of the clerk’s social status in the early 1890s. Taking these positive qualities into account, it perhaps appears bewildering that the character of Reardon proved something of a watershed in Gissing’s relationship with the clerks. * * * Had the discussion of Reardon’s predicament proved Gissing’s final word on the subject of the clerk in late Victorian society, his literary reputation would have undoubtedly remained that of a sensitive observer of an otherwise relatively neglected social group. But during the middle years of the 1890s Gissing largely abandoned the empathetic social realism that had underpinned the depictions of Hood, Scawthorne and Reardon. In this later phase of his career, Gissing revisited several of those themes that he had solemnly discussed in connection with the earlier clerk characters, often refiguring them with remarkably different inflections. Gissing’s seemingly rapid change in relationship towards these characters is discussed by Raymond Williams in his study Culture and Society. Here, Williams plausibly argues that the novelist’s apparently passionate desire to expose social injustice was a precarious one that could not withstand a more rigorous examination. This was particularly true, Williams suggests, because Gissing’s advocacy of the victim’s case was the product of a personal motivation rather than a detached form of altruism: He [Gissing] came to be disillusioned, but the process of this, as one follows it in his novels, is less a discovery of reality than a document of a particular category of feeling, which we can call ‘negative identification’. Williams then offers a long quotation from Osmond Waymark in Gissing’s novel The Unclassed (1884), which, he considers, provides an accurate self-diagnosis by Gissing of the existence of this phenomenon: ‘That zeal on behalf of the suffering masses [I felt] was nothing more or less than disguised zeal on behalf of my own starved passions … . I identified myself with the poor and ignorant; I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs.’ Williams then returns to his


own argument: This is the negative identification which has been responsible for a great deal of adolescent socialism and radicalism, in particular in the adolescent who is breaking away from (or, as in Gissing’s personal history, has fallen foul of ) the social standards of his own class. The rebel … finds available to him an apparent cause, on behalf of the outcast of society, in a mood of rebellion. He identifies himself with this, often passionately. But the identification will involve an actual relationship, and, at this stage, the rebel faces a new crisis. It is not only that he will normally be reluctant to accept the discipline of the cause; it is also, and more essentially, that the outcast class, whom he has thought of as noble … are in fact nothing of the kind, but are very mixed in character, containing very good and very bad, and in any case living in ways that differ from his own … . The rebel will react within his own terms: either violently – these people are a menace … or soberly – these people cannot be helped – reform is useless, we need a deep, underlying change.24 While Williams intended this argument to apply to the generalised poor in Gissing’s early fiction, it can be more specifically applied to his relationship with the ‘decently ignoble’/‘ignobly decent’ of the clerk class.25 Increasingly, from 1893, Gissing ceases to identify with the predicament of the ‘hopeless clerks’ and instead begins to depict them in the ways that Williams anticipates. We might see Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (1893) as representing a pivotal work in his shift towards ‘negative identification’. This text presents us with one character, Widdowson, who looks back to the social concern invested in the Gissing alter egos of the earlier novels; and another, Mr Newdick, a City clerk who anticipates the later, more cynical, view of this group. Widdowson’s position in an identity parade that encompasses Hood in particular (and before him Besant’s ‘hopeless clerks’) is announced in a passage in which he (following his liberation via a legacy from office work), expresses a familiarly bleak but equally empathetic impression of the ‘hopeless clerk’s’ fate: I have always hated office work, and business of every kind; yet I could never see an opening in any other direction. I have been all my life a clerk – like so many thousands of other men. Nowadays, if I happen to be in the City when all the clerks are coming away from business, I feel inexpressible pity for them. I feel I should like to find


two or three of the hardest driven, and just divide my superfluous income between them. A clerk’s life – a life of the office without any hope of rising – that is a hideous fate!26 But this show of general sympathy and fidelity to the office worker’s cause is modified when refocused on Mr Newdick. Here, perfectly illustrated, is the conflict described by Williams in relation to Gissing’s generalised sympathy for an oppressed group, and its infection and eventual dissolution through its concentration on a specific and disillusioning case. Newdick, although a minor character, manages to demonstrate Gissing’s capacity to conform to, and augment, the stereotype of the ineffectual clerk; by way of introduction in the novel Newdick is identified as ‘musty and nervous’ and ‘trembling and bloodless’ (121). Even in his mild mockery of Newdick’s narrow-mindedness (the clerk considers Nice and Cannes to be full of ‘Queer goings on’ (159), Gissing’s growing disdain for City workers of this type is evident. It is further apparent in Gissing’s establishment of Newdick’s capacity to bore his company by holding forth ‘by the hour on the history of the business firm which he had served for quarter of a century’ (157). This tedious subject, which ‘alone could animate him’, was, Gissing’s superior narrative voice announces, ‘the oddest idea of talk suitable to a drawing-room’ (157). While Mr Newdick is a mere sketch, occupying only a few pages of a three-volume novel, this character appears to have alerted Gissing to the potential for further fiction of this type. Gissing recognised that City clerks like Newdick would be ideally suited to the requirements of the lucrative magazine market, which, in recognition of his growing reputation, was now requesting his fiction. The suitability of the lower middleclass clerk to these new commissions was suggested to Gissing by Clement Shorter, who in March 1893 had asked him to write short fiction that would mirror the scene of the Bank Holiday crowds in his earlier novel, The Nether World (1889).27 While considering the ways in which to manage this assignment, Gissing recognised that the suburban type that Newdick represented was well placed to provide the sort of comic or ironic twist with which these stories conventionally concluded. Gissing’s rapid output of new stories (he completed more than thirty tales between 1895–96 alone) necessitated the employment of a writing formula which, in relation to his clerk characters, meant a division into two stock types: the pathetic, doomed victim, or the pretentious encroacher; this division again conforms to both ‘sober’ and ‘violent’ aspects of Williams’ ‘negative identification’ theory. In the first category


the clerk was required to be little more than underbred and inert, providing, like the ‘bloodless’ Mr Newdick, a physical embodiment of their unenviable lives. Thomas Bird in ‘The Salt of the Earth’ (1894), for example, possesses the gait ‘of a man who takes no exercise beyond the daily walk to and from his desk’;28 the man who ‘seemed to be some species of clerk’ in ‘The Tout of Yarmouth Bridge’ (1895) presents a ‘bloodless face and a tired, anxious expression’;29 while Robert Winder (‘A Well Meaning Man’ (1895)), has a ‘pallid, amiable countenance, [and an] air of nervous conscientiousness’.30 Typical also of these characters (and a quality which distinguishes them from earlier Gissing clerks) is their weakness in using aspirates, and the fact that like the clerks in ‘Simple Simon’ (1894), they are ‘not unimpeachable in the article of grammar’.31 In this use of language as a means of characterisation, Gissing brings his characters into line with those cockney types who appeared in the popular slum fiction of the 1890s. This tendency to verbally as well as physically caricature the ‘hopeless clerk’ is demonstrated to good effect in the portrayal of Jonas Warbrick in ‘Under the Umbrella’ (1893). Warbrick, a ‘young City clerk of small personal attractions’, a lack accentuated by his ‘defective stature’, is possessed of a keen ambition ‘to be a man’.32 The need to prove his masculinity is, for the clerk, combined with a desire to find a suitable wife, and one evening while walking on the Embankment, he perceives the opportunity to simultaneously achieve both aims. His plan is, however, complicated by his intended wife’s prior engagement to another man. Warbrick, having initially ‘quaked with ecstasy’ at the thought of a triumph over his rival, finds his courage evaporating as the encounter with his adversary, a brewer’s drayman, looms: ‘Jonas fought his tremors, and strutted like a bantam’.33 The conclusion of this affair, which takes place on Lambeth Bridge, subverts the expected conclusion to the uneven contest between meek clerk and angry brewer’s drayman. Rather than providing the anticipated music hall finale to the contest, Gissing instead offers a pathetic one: Jonas stood on the spot for two minutes, motionless. Then he began to move slowly forward, across the foot of the bridge. When he was on the Embankment again, in dark and solitude, he shed tears.34 This image of the ‘good little soul’ being bettered by a member of the adjacent class (either above or below), looks back to those earlier satirical depictions of clerks popular during the 1830s and 1840s. Like these earlier fictional office clerks, Gissing appears deliberately to satirise


Warbrick’s masculinity, controlling it by illustrating its ridiculous nature. The other genus of clerk cast by Gissing after 1892 is typified by those individuals of a more pretentious nature, a stock type already familiar to the late Victorian music hall audience. John Sloan notes that the pompous office worker was, by the 1890s, a recognised stereotype amongst comic singers who ‘began to poke fun at the social pretensions of the clerks and other desk-men who made up a large part of the audience’.35 In the group of stories that dealt with this subsection of clerkdom, Gissing enjoyed the chance to mock his subject’s affectations. In ‘Simple Simon’, for example, the devotion of a clerk to abstinent ideals is joyfully exposed as hypocrisy, while ‘A Capitalist’ (1893) tells the story of Ireton, a pound-a-week clerk, whose wounded pride prompts him to buy a picture beyond his means, after he is told that it is ‘too much money for [him]’.36 Similarly, in ‘The Scrupulous Father’ (1899), a snobbish clerk who wishes his daughter to make a good marriage, and who attempts to fend off the advances of a ‘small clerk, or something of the sort … [who] had no business whatever to address us’, is eventually forced through his daughter’s guile into allowing the ‘small clerk’s’ suit.37 Additionally, ‘A Freak of Nature’ (1894) witnesses a clerk visiting the countryside and finding himself impersonating his employer to impress a local clergyman; the clerk escapes later that evening from his new acquaintance’s house by jumping through a window, farcically landing, in the process, on top of, and crushing, his silk hat.38 Gissing’s mocking irony, used in several of these tales as a mild form of corrective, is tame in comparison to that which he employs in a story which attacks what for him was the cardinal vice of intellectual charlatanism. In ‘The Pessimist of Plato Road’ (1893), Gissing focuses on the life of Philip Dolamore, a clerk who, while holding a ‘mercantile post in the Borough’, cultivates the image of one whose brilliant mind is thwarted by circumstances outside his control. To the suburban family with whom he lodges, Dolamore displays his ‘simulated knowledge’ and bewails the irony of his existence: ‘I sit all day at a desk. I do the work that might be done by any washerwoman’s boy fresh from a boardschool.’39 For Gissing, the poseur Dolamore embodies some of the worst aspects of late Victorian life, which he suggests are brought about by ‘sham education, and the poisonous atmosphere of sham culture everywhere diffused by newspapers, books, and lectures’.40 Anticipating E.M. Forster’s depiction of Leonard Bast, Gissing takes malicious delight in bringing the clerk to a realisation of his folly. The clerk’s rude awakening occurs in Gissing’s tale after Dolamore has willingly engineered


his dismissal from his ‘unsuitable’ office job and plans to martyr himself in a suicide which he pompously announces in a letter to the Daily Telegraph: Sir, – I am about to take a step which to me is of some importance, and also, I cannot help thinking to the world at large … . Is it, Sir, or is it not, a matter of any account to a civilised nation, that the most intellectual of its sons should be enabled to lead a life distinguished in outward respects from the meanest and the most ignorant? I should have thought so: yet here I am, a highly educated and thoughtful man, unable to find any means of supporting myself save by that office-slavery which even the vulgar shrink from … . Under these circumstances, I cannot hesitate how to act; in a world so basely ordered, I refuse to live longer. As a student of philosophy, I claim the right to put an end to my life; and when you receive this letter, my being will be dispersed into its elements.41 Following the botched suicide, which he attempts with the landlady’s daughter, Dolamore, fearing prosecution, runs away to the country, where he earns ‘a wretched living in ways unspecified’ and (in a final knife thrust from Gissing), ‘no longer felt the thrills of vanity’.42 This story, better than any other, illustrates Gissing’s capacity to treat ironically a subject, here that of the intellectual exile, that he had previously treated with great seriousness. Dolamore’s thwarted desire to ‘associate with the leading minds of the day’ appears little removed from the aspirations of Scawthorne (and by extension those of Gissing himself ), but the story in no way suggests Gissing’s desire to satirise himself. Instead it unambiguously represents the writer’s sense of exasperation at those people he perceived as assuming an intellectual position without the intelligence that this role demanded.43 Education reforms, Gissing now felt, were churning out a generation of ‘quarter-educated’ young men – like Dolamore – who considered themselves above the sort of routine work to which they were in fact entirely suited. Dolamore’s role in ‘The Pessimist of Plato Road’ allows us to recognise the more extreme effects of ‘negative identification’ at work. In particular, the depiction of Dolamore conforms to the violent reaction that Williams suggests will emerge when a threat of ‘menace’ is recognised in a previously sympathetic subject. The climax of the later phase of Gissing’s representation of clerk characters is reached in the depiction of Christopher Parish in The Town Traveller. This novel, although considered by Gissing to be ‘poor rubbish’, was financially amongst his most successful works.44 A causative


link between the representation of Parish and the book’s financial profit can be claimed, if one takes into account the media attention focused on this character in the correspondence columns of the Daily Chronicle. These letters, which offered welcome publicity for Gissing’s novel over a number of weeks following its publication, were generated by a review of the work. The reviewer, who included ‘with intense delight’ (according to one of the letter writers) a quotation of the episode in which the gauche clerk is overawed by a waiter in a restaurant, seemed to touch a raw nerve with the Chronicle’s black-coated readers, galvanising them into defensive action. The clerks’ reaction appears to reflect a growing sense of resentment at the types of office workers that had appeared in Gissing’s work throughout the 1890s. Parish’s role in The Town Traveller indeed suggests that this clerk character represents something of an amalgam of the features that Gissing had cumulatively attributed to other similarly pathetic and pompous types. Parish has, for example, an unheroic physique: ‘slim, narrow-shouldered … with the commonest of well meaning faces’.45 In addition, as a cockney clerk, Parish displays a weakness in grammar and aspirates: ‘It never came into my “ead” (132). Furthermore, Parish demonstrates a pompous and tiresome tendency, like his progenitor Newdick, to chatter “ceaselessly” about his firm, ‘the great house of Swettenham brothers, tea merchants’ (35). Gissing also demonstrates in Parish his now recognisable capacity to rework in a satirical vein a theme which he had previously discussed in a serious manner. In The Town Traveller we observe this in the way in which Gissing handles Parish’s sensitivity towards his limited finances. Whereas the clerk’s lack of money had proved a potentially tragic agent in the earlier novels, here it is engineered simply for comic purposes. This is evident both in the conclusion of the controversial restaurant scene – lighted upon by the Chronicle reviewer – in which Parish pays the bill ‘right bravely’, adding a sixpence tip for the overbearing waiter, ‘though it cost him as great a pang as the wrenching of a double tooth’ (36), and also in another episode where Parish is reluctantly involved in a clandestine chase in a hansom carriage. The latter incident, which concludes with Parish being forced to hand over to the driver a precious half-sovereign in payment for a less expensive fare (another instance of a clerk being bettered by a member of a proximate class), once again makes the reader complicit in a sense of amusement at the clerk’s obvious discomfort: So grievously did he feel for the loss of that half-sovereign that for some moments he could think of nothing else … to pay ten shilling


for a half-crown drive! A whole blessed half-sovereign … . On he plodded, heavily, angrily … . Unaccustomed to express himself with violence, Christopher at about half-past twelve found some relief in a timid phrase or two of swearing. (143–4) Parish’s preoccupation with his misfortune continues when he is reunited with his girl, ensuring that he misses the longed-for opportunity to kiss her: ‘Alas! He did not look into Polly’s face, which in the dusk of the doorway had turned towards his’ (144). The condescending tone Gissing’s narrator had earlier used in his portrayal of Newdick is again encountered in the following meditation on Parish’s attitude towards his lost cash: ‘It did not occur to Mr. Parish that such details might be left unmentioned. In these matters there is a difference between class and class’ (143). Gissing plays to the gallery at these moments in ways that unmistakably anticipate the supercilious tone of Forster’s narrator in Howards End when describing Leonard Bast’s anxiety over his lost umbrella at the concert hall: ‘Behind Monet and Debussy the umbrella persisted, with the steady beat of a drum. “I suppose my umbrella will be all right,” he was thinking.’46 That Gissing’s relationship with the clerk is, by the late 1890s, analogous with that of the Edwardian liberal intelligentsia – discussed in Chapter 6 – is indicative of the distance which the older Gissing had travelled from his youthful and socially committed self. This schism is underscored in the Daily Chronicle letters, which offer a rare glimpse of reader response to the mature Gissing’s ‘negative identification’ with office workers.47 The similarity in tone of these communications, largely submitted by clerk correspondents, is revealing in the way in which it offers their sense of frustration at the emergence of yet another caricature (on this occasion from a respected and influential author) representing their class as servile and ineffectual. One gains a sense, from the letters, of a diffuse group of individuals who remained puzzled at the failure of literature to reflect their existence as anything other than downtrodden. The initial correspondent, who signed himself ‘A Minor Clerk’ (in ironic response to Gissing’s sarcastic description of Parish as belonging to ‘the great order of minor clerks’ (34)), acknowledged a similarity of income with his fictional counterpart (two pounds a week), but claimed that he was ‘utterly unable to find [amongst his friends and acquaintances] any one resembling in any way “Christopher Parish” ’. He offered to take Gissing on ‘a tour of inspection round our homes’, to show the novelist that his fellow clerks ‘are not in the habit of dropping our aitches’ and furthermore, lived in ‘a standard of


refinement and culture which, though he [Gissing] might very probably style it suburban, nevertheless is certainly not the environment which breeds a “Parish” ’. In conclusion, the ‘Minor Clerk’ communicated the frustration he shared with his fellow clerks, as Mudie’s Library subscribers, at finding ‘ourselves the objective of the glib pens of almost the whole noble army of “new humorists”, in whose ranks Mr. Gissing is apparently the latest recruit’. Continuing with this grievance more specifically, another clerk (‘G.S.B.’) wrote, ‘It is rather a pity that the clerk of fiction should be always – or nearly always – drawn from what I call the “bar parlor” type, and it is easy to understand your correspondent’s resentment at being lumped with this immature product of an imperfect system of education.’ He goes on to look forward, hopefully, to the emergence of a literature that would better reflect his section of society: We possess our souls in patience … and hope that another writer will arise who will do us justice. Then the world will know there are clerks and clerks, that some at least of those who sit ‘perched like a crow upon a three legged stool’ have minds as wide, manners as good, and reading as extensive as any of their fellows. The reasonable plea made here and in many of the other letters was for variety in representation. While some readers recognised Parish as a prototype of certain colleagues in their offices, the majority understood his type to be a mere fraction of the whole clerkly community. This fraction, the correspondents asserted, had been misleadingly exaggerated by contemporary literature (as epitomised in Gissing’s work) into spurious prominence. We know from his diary that Gissing avidly tracked the publication of these letters, and his close attention was also evidently shared by other influential observers.48 This is confirmed by the publication in the Speaker of an article that, sensing the newsworthy nature of the correspondence, offered a review and commentary on its contents. Here the Speaker’s columnist, employing a heavily sardonic style, observed that Gissing had ‘caused a serious commotion amongst the Minor Clerks’, adding that ‘sooner or later somebody in Brixton or Kennington was bound to turn upon the man who writes the small-beer chronicle of those districts’. With the arrival of the Daily Chronicle letters, the observer archly asserted ‘the worm has turned at last and Kennington is angry’. Following a summary of the complaints against the novelist, the article went on to satirise the clerks’ over-sensitivity, and suggested that


this misplaced delicacy was to be expected from such a lamentable band. The Mudie’s subscription, proudly acknowledged by the ‘Minor Clerk’, became a particular target for mockery, with the article contending that ‘the wisdom of a circulating does not always educate’, and further noting: that it may leave a man narrow, dogmatic, and incapable of drawing elementary distinctions. When a reader finds in a novel a character from the class to which he belongs, and exclaims, ‘This must be a libel, because it is not in the least like me!’ he merely shows that his educational process is incomplete. There is no obvious reason why the portrait should be like him, whether he be a Minor Clerk or a much more exalted member of society … . It is not the duty of a novelist when he lights upon a remarkably original piece of character, to say to himself: ‘No, I must not reproduce this, for few people will recognise the truth of it, and many would say I was libelling a respectable and very distinguished body of citizens.’ His duty is to be no respecter of persons, whether they belong to county families or to the Order of Minor Clerks.49 These final comments are, of course, indisputable, used here only for their rhetorical weight. Their significance lies more in the fact that they imply the commentator’s blithe assumption of the existence of a body of literature that might offer a balanced view of the lower middle class. If a more inclusive vision in relation to the clerk class had developed in the late nineteenth century, there would be little ground for the Parish protests to be respected. But, in contrast to Thackeray’s ‘eccentric’ characterisation of Sir Pitt Crawley, cited in the article as ‘unlike any other baronet in fiction’, Parish lacked a wider literary landscape in which he might be located.50 This narrowness of focus, overlooked by the Speaker’s correspondent, but not by the Daily Chronicle’s clerk readers, had been greatly consolidated by the formulaic characterisation latterly undertaken by Gissing. In one of the more shrewd comments included in the Speaker article, the writer suggested that Gissing might seize upon the defensive claims of the clerks to provide material for a later work: ‘a united front [by the clerks] ought to be offered to the enemy’. Gissing’s position as the ‘enemy’ of the ‘hopeless clerk’, so unexpected a role for him to assume in the context of his earlier career, was not such a surprising role in view of the characterisation of Newdick, Warbrick, Dolamore and Parish. Although the last of these characters was for Gissing an insignificant one in an inconsequential


novel, Parish becomes representative of the generalised cultural attitude that had developed during the 1890s towards a new social phenomenon. The role Gissing played in shaping this cultural attitude should not be underestimated. Although it is an exaggeration to suggest that Gissing was single-handedly responsible for determining the literary profile of the new urban classes, he did play a vital role in forming this literary stereotype. Gissing’s work was able to dictate literary trends in this field because of the high critical regard in which his work was held. The combination of his impressive reputation as a writer, together with his standing as a specialist in depicting the lower middle classes ensured that other writers followed his lead. This tendency of Gissing’s fiction to set a precedent for literary forms was certainly helped by the new accessibility of his work as it appeared in popular periodicals; with their large circulations, the publications carrying Gissing’s short stories brought his new fiction to a much wider readership than that reached by his earlier three-volume novels. Evidence of Gissing’s growing cultural capital in the 1890s is discovered in the work of those other writers who also concentrated on lower middle class subjects. Among the most revealing of these is found in Bennett’s A Man From the North during a scene set in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In this scene Mr Aked tells fellow clerk Richard Larch that he was there because he ‘particularly wanted some of Gissing’s – not for the mere fun of reading ’em of course, because I’ve read ’em before’ (57). Aked later reveals that the ‘special purpose’ for which he wanted to consult Gissing’s work is a planned scholarly work, The Psychology of the Suburbs. This small exchange in the Museum tells us much about Gissing’s standing in relation to the suburbs during this era for factual counterparts of the fictional Aked. A further impression of Gissing’s status at this time can be gauged in the comments of Shan F. Bullock, another notable contemporary writer on the clerkly scene. In an article in the Chicago Evening Post, Bullock argued of Gissing’s novels that ‘A good dozen of them are in the first rank of fiction’, adding that ‘His tragedies were not the everyday tragedies of poverty and neglect, of striving and despairing; they were tragedies of the soul and mind and conscience … . Even at his grayest it was always a delight to read him.’51 Bennett and Bullock, writers who came to prominence after Gissing’s death in 1903, suggest here his position as the pre-eminent observer of this scene in British fiction of the fin de siècle. Gissing’s ability to command respect among his fellow novelists ensured that his opinions were closely watched and that a certain mirroring of his ideas and attitudes took place.


When we assess Gissing’s relationship with the clerk class, therefore, we realise the problematic nature of this dialectic. While the Spectator review quoted at the start of this chapter had proclaimed Gissing as the ‘novelist of their own’ for the clerk class, he was by the mid-1890s an unlikely candidate for this role. His eventual rejection as the awaited delineator of this class, was, in fact, anticipated later in the same Spectator article. Prior to the emergence of Parish and his counterparts in the short stories, the Spectator reviewer had shrewdly predicted the growth of tension in the relationship between subject and artist: we think it very probable, indeed almost certain, that though the portrait-painter [Gissing] has come, the sitters (at any rate those of them who subscribe to a circulating library) will turn away from the finished work ‘as if dissatisfied’. They will not be able to dispute its knowledge or deny its skill … they will only feel in a vague, uncomfortable, resentful sort of way that the general effect is false, misleading, even libellous; that it is in essence caricature … .52 The reviewer, again anticipating the Daily Chronicle clerks, pleads for the more democratic frame of reference in contemporary literature which Gissing had failed to provide: ‘even in a cheap suburb life may be lived well, – certainly not less well in the main than in any other civilised human sphere’. Gissing, having read the review, was somewhat piqued by what he considered to be a ‘careful and well written attack’.53 His sensitivity to this criticism was arguably caused by the recognition of his problematic relationship with the suburbans whose lives he had spent much of his career dissecting. At once the novelist who focused much welcome and compassionate attention on a neglected group, Gissing was equally their ‘enemy’, capable of representing them through a series of demeaning stereotypes. Whereas Jasper Milvain in New Grub Street needs to ask whether his fellow writer Biffen’s work focuses upon ‘the decently ignoble – or, the ignobly decent?’ (305), Gissing ultimately left little doubt about his own approach. His ‘negative identification’ with the first of these types almost inevitably drew him towards a sense of the ignobility of the clerks and their social class.

4 The Day of Inconceivably Small Things: The Clerk in Comic Literature 1888–1900

During the winter of 1888–89, in which George Gissing’s ‘hopeless clerk’ James Hood first appeared in A Life’s Morning, the forerunners of the modern comic clerk were also making their debut. Whereas Gissing’s Hood (along with the era’s other serious studies of office workers) have largely faded from critical consciousness, the seemingly ephemeral comic characters – Mr Pooter and Jerome’s Three Men – have proved more enduring representatives of their social scene. Indeed, to a considerable extent, the literary profile of the clerk and the urban lower middle class in the late Victorian period rests upon these figures. This claim would have astonished George and Weedon Grossmith, the writers of The Diary of a Nobody (published in book form in 1892), and Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat (published in both book and serial form in 1889). Neither the Grossmiths nor Jerome considered that their comic works would enjoy such enduring popularity and cultural significance. George Grossmith fails even to mention the Diary in his autobiography Piano and I (1910). Jerome, for his part, declared in the ‘Author’s Advertisement’ to the 1909 edition of Three Men that he could ‘hardly remember’ writing the book, adding that he was quite unable to account for the ‘merits justifying such an extraordinary success’.1 This lack of regard is perhaps explicable when we re-examine the two works in their original serial form. Punch, which published the Diary anonymously in irregular weekly half-page chunks for a year from May 1888, seems to have made little of the work, fitting the Grossmiths’ text around other columns and cartoons.2 Similarly, Home Chimes, which issued Three Men in ten monthly instalments from February 1889, accorded Jerome’s story less prominence than it gave to its main serial writers of that year, William Sime and H.E. Clarke.3 On their debuts, 55


therefore, there was little indication that these works would emerge from obscurity to assume the status of classic works of comic literature. In attempting to account for this extraordinary and somewhat unlikely promotion to the front rank of British literary comedy, we are inclined to look no further than the gentle and ironic humour with which both novels abound. While these qualities have ensured the continuing affection of readers, I would argue that critics have consistently underestimated the role of the books’ publisher in securing a wide readership for the novels and thus allowing them to establish their deserved reputations. Without incorporation into J.W. Arrowsmith’s Three-andSixpenny Series, and the subsequent ‘push’ provided by this firm, it is quite possible that the two comic works would have remained forgotten products of their season. Arrowsmith, a relatively new and highly energetic firm, provided a solid platform upon which the books were able to build their popularity alongside a number of other works commonly associated with the ‘new reading public’. These included novels by Eden Philpotts, Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, Fergus Hume, and Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)). Although the role of Arrowsmith’s has been little remarked upon to date, it would appear that this publisher played a key role in providing the lower middle class of the late Victorian era with a distinctive literature of their own. While an investigation into Arrowsmith’s role in promoting the Diary and Three Men might help to explain why these novels gained a substantial readership in the first instance, it fails to explain their long afterlife. Again, it is insufficient here to suggest that the light social comedy employed by the Grossmiths and Jerome has alone protected these texts from the vagaries of taste during a century of change. While it is a perennially difficult task to justify the lifespan of individual jokes, it is possible here to hint at common elements in the Diary and Three Men which explain their mutual endurance. One clue can be found in an 1895 newspaper review that obliquely identifies the qualities that link together these comic novels. This review in The Times of William Pett Ridge’s collection Minor Dialogues (1895) – also published in Arrowsmith’s ‘3/6 Series’ – asked: ‘have we endured education, culture, progress, and civilisation generally, for no better end than this world of vulgarity, this day of inconceivably small things?’4 The fact that the critic’s final withering remark might describe the material used in any of the comic works under discussion in this chapter helps to suggest a coherent thread which links these books together. While it is excessive to describe the Arrowsmith writers as forming a discrete and conscious movement, their concentration on the chaff of daily life does set their work apart from other literary forms of

The Clerk in Comic Literature 57

the day. In their focus on ‘inconceivably small things’, the Grossmiths, Jerome and Pett Ridge discovered a distinctive and accessible literary formula with which to explore the changing social scene. * * * When The Diary of a Nobody was first published in Punch on 26 May 1888, the target of its satire was announced in a footnote appended to the first column of text: As everybody who is anybody is publishing Reminiscences, Diaries, Notes, Autobiographies, and Recollections, we are sincerely grateful to ‘A Nobody’ for permitting us to add to the historic collection, – Ed.5 It was in this capacity, as a spoof on current trends in publishing, that the Diary originally appeared in Punch alongside other comic examples of life writing: these included ‘Extracts from the Diary of a Dyspeptic’, ‘Diary of a Pessimist’, and a regular column entitled ‘The Diary of Toby MP’. The form, rather than the content, of Mr Pooter’s diary was therefore intended as the primary satirical focus in the conception of the piece. Following the further expansion of the magazine market after 1890 the ‘modern’ clerk would become a familiar character in comic literature, but in 1888 it was not surprising to find Pooter taking second satirical billing to his diary.6 Given the novelty of their ‘incidental’ focus on suburban life, we can appreciate the relative freedom enjoyed by the Grossmiths in their depiction of Pooter’s world. This licence allowed the Diary a measure of satirical flexibility that prevented it from becoming a straightforward bludgeoning of suburbia. Kate Flint succinctly establishes this point in her assertion that the Diary is ‘at one and the same time a celebration and a gentle critique’.7 Without this dual focus of celebration and critique it seems inconceivable that the Diary would exist as both a Punch serial and as an Arrowsmith’s book. The market for Punch was unlikely to relish a series of comic pieces which in essence celebrated the lives of Hollowaydwelling City clerks. As the satirical weekly of the middle classes and the establishment, Punch had no qualms about publishing a serial in which a petit bourgeois ‘nobody’ was firmly put in his place. By contrast, Arrowsmith’s putative lower middle-class readership would hardly welcome a work of bourgeois satire primarily designed to put them in their place. What appears most remarkable, given these two opposed sets of reader requirements, is that the Diary managed to make the


transition from Punch serial to Arrowsmith volume without fundamentally altering the balance of its satirical perspective. The only noteworthy alterations made between the serial and book formats involved the addition of extra material to bring the text up to book length, the freshening up of outdated topical references, and the addition of Weedon Grossmith’s excellent illustrations. It would not appear, however, that the Grossmiths manipulated their textual material to protect a potential crossover market for the book. The four years between the Diary’s two versions (and George Grossmith’s own apparent lack of regard for this work) suggest a much less calculating attitude towards potential book publication than that evident in the case of Jerome and his Three Men. What is clear is that the Diary was, from its first week in Punch, deliberately formulated in ways which ensured that its satire remained humane and unpatronising to the class that it depicted. These qualities ultimately broadened the appeal of the text and thus helped to secure the ensuing Arrowsmith contract. To protect the Diary’s humane credentials in the face of the day-to-day indignities that Pooter suffers, the Grossmiths needed to guarantee that two key elements of the clerk’s life were unquestioned by their readers. First, we are never invited to doubt the genuine affection that the diarist has for his family, home and work. Pooter’s good nature is established in the opening lines of his diary in which he refers to his ‘dear wife Carrie’, their ‘nice six-roomed residence’, and old, ‘intimate’ friends, Cummings and Gowing.8 This tone of security and companionship, once in place, is reinforced throughout the text in ways which appear unforced and unselfconscious. Second, and equally important, although Pooter’s dignity is consistently bruised by a wide variety of people that he encounters in his daily life – junior office colleagues, tradesmen, neighbours, cab drivers – he is never put down by another character who is above him in the social scale. This vital point is epitomised in his relationship with his paternal employer Mr Perkupp. In the following exchange, which provided the final episode of the Punch serialisation, Pooter thanks his boss for accepting his son Lupin into the firm: ‘MR. PERKUPP you are a good man.’ He laughed at me for a moment and said, ‘No MR. POOTER, you are a good man; and we’ll see if we cannot get your son to follow such an excellent example.’9 This aspect of the text, arguably unremarkable to the Punch readers, becomes a key issue in relation to the social sensibilities of a wider


audience. With the solid foundations of affection and respect firmly in place – here topping and tailing the original serial text – the Grossmiths were free to send up almost all other areas of their clerk’s life. The significance of the Grossmiths’ approach to their depiction of suburban life and character is better understood when examined alongside a comparable work from this era. Barry Pain’s Eliza stories, collected together in volume form in 1900, share several features in common with the Diary. Both, for example, render the ‘unintentionally’ comic musings of minor City clerks living in the suburbs of London. Pain, like the Grossmiths, also makes extensive use of the trivial detail of everyday suburban existence (‘inconceivably small things’) to create a distinctive impression of clerkly life: a random selection of minutiae selected by Pain might include gas bills, visiting cards, tonic wine and glass-cloths – ‘those with the red border were threepence a dozen dearer than the plain’.10 Furthermore, clerks in both texts are preoccupied with protecting their fragile dignity and respectability, and these concerns, often indexed through reference to trivial properties, provide much of the comic energy in the texts. Unlike Pooter in the Diary, however, Pain’s clerk (known only as Eliza’s husband) projects little sense of the potential for pleasure in his home and City office. Pain replaces Pooter’s ultimately reassuring image of suburban life with a vision marred by dissatisfaction and discontent; these feelings are captured in the petulant assertion of Pain’s clerk that his rented suburban house ‘does not represent the summit of my tastes and ambitions’.11 In addition, that cornerstone of Pooter’s security, his relationship of mutual trust with his employer, is for Eliza’s husband an uncertain and shifting bond. This is evident even when Pain’s clerk recalls winning a coveted promotion to the position of senior clerk. Instead of reflecting upon the nobility of his boss at this point, Eliza’s husband recalls his sense of foreboding at entering Mr Bagshaw’s room, convinced that he is about to be sacked rather than promoted.12 While not directly rejecting City and suburban life and values (Eliza’s husband, like Pooter, enforces these values by taking on the role of unofficial policeman of local standards of behaviour), Pain’s satire is not underpinned by any sense of the compensations that this environment might afford. Taking into account the picture of the suburbs and the City that emerges here, we can better understand why the Daily Chronicle clerk correspondent (quoted in the Chapter 3) bemoaned the treatment of himself and his peers as ‘the objective of the glib pens of almost the whole noble army of “new humorists” ’. By the mid-1890s, it seems, the hardening of cultural attitudes towards clerks and their


suburbs had already left the humane Diary (like that prototype of suburban life, Wemmick’s Walworth Castle in Great Expectations) appearing something of a historical relic. In offering this comparison between the two comic texts, it is not my intention to suggest that the Diary is a bland work when measured against Pain’s edgy social satire. Any implied judgement of the two texts needs to be balanced by the acknowledgement that both accomplish the first principle of a comic work in amusing their readers. But the popular conception of the Diary as a gently humorous work, coupled with its positioning as a cosy Betjemanesque account of the suburban scene, have tended to underemphasise the book’s significance. Far worse than seeing the Diary as a piece of harmless nostalgia, however, is criticism which casts the Grossmiths as agents of middle class social control. Arlene Young falls into this trap when she argues that Pooter ‘is the crowning achievement of bourgeois class propaganda, lower-middle-class man so reassuringly tamed … that he and his entire class seem no more threatening than the family dog’.13 The idea that Pooter must pose a threat in order to justify the existence of his character is patently a wrong-headed one. Pooter and his diary, rather acting as instruments of bourgeois propaganda, instead operate as a validation of the class depicted in the text. That is to say, the Diary establishes the substantial character of a class replete with its own distinctive houses, workplaces, amusements, culture and codes of behaviour. In this way the social existence of an erstwhile vaguely defined class is mapped out complete with fixed cultural reference points. My interpretation may not capture the overt intention of the Grossmiths in writing the Diary, but it is the logical outcome of their careful delineation of subject and scene. No earlier work of fiction appears to offer a better claim to this status. By way of illustration of this point, we might recall the way in which the Diary was used by London’s Geffrye Museum to provide a focus for their exhibition examining suburban life in the 1880s. This exhibition, ‘Mr. Pooter’s London’, mounted in 1988 to mark the centenary of the Diary, provided the first serious acknowledgement of the text’s potential importance for socio-historical scholars. By undertaking a rigorous comparison of the Diary’s contextual material with factual sources, the exhibition’s curators established that the book provided ‘an extremely accurate account of lower middle class life’14: Weedon Grossmith’s illustration of Pooter, Cummings and Sarah, the maid (Figure 4.1), offers a case in point. Having proved the bona fide nature of the textual material, the exhibition was then organised around a variety of topics considered representative of the Diary’s era: sections included ‘The Suburbs’, ‘The Suburban Home’, ‘The House Beautiful: Decorating and


Figure 4.1 Weedon Grossmith’s illustration for The Diary of a Nobody: Cummings, Mr Pooter and Sarah in the parlour. By permission of V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum.

DIY’, ‘Housework’, ‘The Cost of Living’, ‘Work in the City’, ‘Insider Dealing’, ‘Transport’, ‘Railways’, ‘Holidays’, ‘Margate & Broadstairs’, ‘What People Did’, ‘What it Cost’, ‘Theatre and Music Hall’, ‘Irrational Dress: Women’s Fashion’, ‘Male Fashion’, and ‘The Oriental Influence on Design in the 1880s’.15 This recognition of the Diary’s value as a historical source gives Mr Pooter the last laugh in connection with his musings on the potential worth of his diary. His apparently ridiculous comparison between himself and other notable diarists such as Evelyn and Pepys (‘it’s the diary that makes the man’ (101)), becomes, in the light of the exhibition, the remark of a suburban prophet. It will of course be argued that the buffoonish figure of Pooter undermines any potential that the Diary has for providing a benchmark for a new class. Pooter, after all, appears an unlikely and perhaps unwelcome figurehead around which to reconstruct existing models of society. Michael Irwin anticipates and persuasively refutes this criticism: In many ways Pooter is a figure of fun, staid, nervously respectable, sometimes priggish or pompous, and regularly subject to petty


mortifications, which he painstakingly records. It would have been easy for Grossmith [sic] to settle into collusion with the reader, inviting us to join him in patronising the hapless clerk – but he resists that temptation. In doing so he stands out against a British tradition so powerful that, by association, it can probably still induce a misreading of Grossmith today.16 This anticipation of the patronisation of a lower middle-class character, an approach conditioned by the familiarity of this method elsewhere in British literature, seems to dictate Young’s interpretation of the Diary. In this context indeed, who can blame critics for assuming the presence of authorial condescension? Like Irwin, however, I would argue that cynical readings of the Diary work against the grain of the Grossmiths’ characterisation of Pooter and thus run counter to the angle from which they evoke his world. Rather than patronising their subject, what the Grossmiths attempt and succeed in achieving is the creation of a comic account of suburban life that refuses to pass anticipated moral or social judgements. While we might expect to encounter these judgements in the text, they prove to be refreshingly absent. Because what amounts to authorial neutrality in the Diary is easy to overlook (it is, after all, discernable only in its absence from the text), it is valuable here to illustrate the Grossmiths’ approach to this aspect of their work. An episode which demonstrates the writers’ refusal to take sides occurs when Pooter and his son Lupin clash over their contrasting attitudes to work. The young, energetic and brash Lupin here provides a counterpoint to his conservative father’s role as loyal senior clerk to the paternal Mr Perkupp. Rather than remain with his father in Mr Perkupp’s eminently traditional office environment, Lupin’s approach to employment is captured in his expression ‘I want to go on’ (153). This ambition leads Lupin to recommend Perkupp’s most valued customer to a rival City broker’s firm, a move which Pooter describes as an ‘act of treachery’ (148). The rival firm, ‘Gylterson’, considered by Lupin to be ‘the firm of the future!’ (153), rewards his recommendation initially with £25, and later with a £200-a-year position. The punchline of this diary entry occurs when Pooter records that Lupin’s starting salary is uncomfortably close to his own earnings, received only after ‘twenty-one years’ industry and strict attention to the interests of my superiors in office’ (113). This outline of the joke – as joke outlines generally do – fails to do justice to a scene which works well in context. We do not need, however, to move far into this contextual material to establish that the financial philosophy of neither the father nor the son is selected here for especial


criticism or approbation. At the end of the novel version of the Diary, although mutual incomprehension remains between father and son, both appear satisfied with their opposing choices, and on good terms with each other. This cheerful resolution is underscored in a conclusion which sees both father and son rewarded rather than punished: Mr Pooter receives the freehold deeds of his beloved Brickfield Terrace as a gift for loyal service from a grateful Mr Perkupp (171); while Lupin, who refuses to ‘rot away [his] life in the suburbs’, apparently prospers among fashionable apartments in Bayswater, rented at an ‘extravagant’ two guineas a week (164). If this is not a social satire in which individuals get their comeuppance, neither is it apparently a more general attack on the evils of modern commerce. Whereas the flashy Lupin might be expected to implicitly subject the get-rich-quick business world to criticism, the text offers little scope for interpretations of this sort. The filter provided by Pooter’s impressions of his environment tends here and elsewhere to defuse any critical attempt to pinpoint a single ideological perspective underpinning the text. What is found at this point, in the absence of the anticipated satire of business, is instead a comedy which wryly focuses upon the generation gap. This democratic application of the Diary’s material serves to establish Pooter and his class, not as a collection of tame dogs, but rather as an assortment of fallible – sometimes ludicrous, sometimes endearing – human beings. * * * With the passage of time, The Diary of a Nobody and Three Men in a Boat have tended to become grouped together in literary terms as quintessential examples of popular and successful British comic literature. In many ways it is logical that the books should be linked, taking into account their proximity in terms of date, original publisher, class focus and mutual concentration on what V.S. Pritchett has called ‘misleading accounts of humiliating trivia’.17 In addition to these contextual and thematic similarities, the two texts are now united as models of effective comedy in prose. Paul Theroux, interviewed in The Independent, articulates a widely held view: ‘It’s like people telling you how hard it is to write. I don’t want to hear about that either; just show me the finished product. When it’s humorous, it’s justified: The Diary of a Nobody, Three Men in a Boat.’18 The original critical reception of the books, however, suggested little of this eventual recognition of excellence. While the Diary gained favourable if not fulsome reviews (the Academy called it ‘clever’ and praised Weedon Grossmith’s drawings),19 Jerome’s Three Men


was by contrast mauled by the critics. Typical among these attacks was The Saturday Review, which after describing Jerome’s book as ‘poor and limited, and decidedly vulgar’, went on to bemoan the ‘narrowness and poverty of the life [that the text] only too faithfully reflects’.20 Similarly, The Observer’s critic sniffily remarked that ‘personal emotions scarcely afford a sufficiently permanent subject for “chaff” and it must be confessed that Mr Jerome’s idea of a humorist is that of a person who must always be churning his emotions into comic copy’.21 In the same vein, the Spectator review of Three Men attacked Jerome’s style of comedy: ‘We found the straining after humour, we must own, somewhat tedious. But the occasional specimens of serious writing do not make us wish for a change.’22 Reviews of this type represented a familiar response to Jerome’s work for the first twenty years of his career, leading him to consider himself ‘the best abused author in England.’23 To better understand the differing reactions to the seemingly uniform Arrowsmith volumes, we need to recognise the contrasting artistic profiles of the Grossmiths and Jerome in the late Victorian era. George and Weedon Grossmith, at this time, had already established reputations as, respectively, a star of musical comedy (George was a celebrated Savoyard), and as a successful painter, actor and theatre manager. By contrast with these recognised and respected ‘names’, Jerome was in 1889 a relatively unknown solicitor’s clerk who had enjoyed some popular success with two earlier collections of comic pieces published by Field and Tuer: On the Stage – and Off (1885), and The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886). Taking the contrasting backgrounds of the writers into account, we can readily see how the Diary and Three Men became separated in the eyes of the critic. This separation was characterised in contemporary terms as representing on the one hand the work of acceptable amateur humorists and on the other hand as the production of a professional ‘new humorist’. This distinction would be further reinforced for contemporary commentators by the locations in which the books had originally appeared in serial form. Whereas Punch provided a respectable place of literary birth, the Three Men had emerged in the suspiciously suburban Home Chimes. The latter magazine, founded by the popular novelist F.W. Robinson in the mid-1880s, had proved successful, according to Jerome’s biographer Joseph Connolly, because it had adopted a ‘very informal approach’.24 This strategy, though clearly a popular one with the new reading public, was unlikely to endear the publication or its contributors to the critical establishment.25 In spite of routinely hostile criticism, however, Jerome and his fellow clerks-turned-writers (including W.W. Jacobs and W. Pett Ridge) enjoyed


considerable commercial success in the period before the Great War. This success was in large part due to the opportunities opened up by publications such as Robinson’s Home Chimes which provided numerous outlets for the work of a new generation of late Victorian professional writers. Jerome’s early life in many ways offers the typical background of this new Grub Street breed. Born in 1859, the son of an ironmonger, Jerome left school at fourteen to take up a post as a ten-shillings-a-week railway clerk at Euston Station. During this period of clerking, Jerome lived in a succession of London boarding houses (like his exact contemporary Gissing), wherein he was well placed to witness the rapidly changing city. While he later had a variety of other jobs, including acting and school teaching, he returned during the 1880s to the relative stability of the office, becoming a solicitor’s clerk. During this period Jerome wrote Three Men in a Boat, in his spare time after office hours.26 The book’s scene and events also evolved directly from Jerome’s periods of free time, drawing on his experiences of Sunday rowing trips with friends on the Thames. In a prefatory note to the book’s first edition, Jerome recorded the practical nature of his literary research: ‘Its pages form the record of events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them’.27 One senses here Jerome recognising the commercial wisdom in making this connection with his prospective audience. While sitting behind his office desk, travelling to work or rowing down the Thames, Jerome was clearly weighing up how best to establish a relationship with his future readers. The practical application of this empirical knowledge is demonstrated in Jerome’s correspondence with his publisher J.W. Arrowsmith. Writing in March 1889, shortly after Home Chimes had begun its serialisation of his tale, Jerome here offers a valuable insight into the intricacies of the publishing industry during this changing period: I don’t like a 1/- edition, at least not to begin with. It doesn’t give a proper profit either to publisher or author. Another thing is, I am better known to the, say, 3/6d. public than I am to the 1/-. The 1/-public only take a book that is a rage, a 3/6d. public know an author and look for him. I am sure we could get a good sale at 3/6d. – and then – come to a 1/- issue after. The two classes of buyers are so distinct. I had some splendid notices for a 1/- book some years ago, and all who read it were enthusiastic over it, yet it never reached half the sale of my next at 2/6d. This one will be quite as big as Vice Versa [F Anstey’s popular success in 1882] which sold for 6/-, and I would suggest having it humorously


illustrated by small blocks among the letterpress … . All this would lighten and make the book attractive. My name is well-known to the book world, and I am sure at 3/6d. both you and I would do much better!28 While Jerome protests a dislike of the shilling edition on grounds of profit margins, it is rather the hint of practical snobbery in his argument that prevails. This attitude is apparent in the attention Jerome pays towards the physical quality of a book which he felt would be capable of luring a ‘3/6d. public’.29 Aside from the illustrations that Jerome proposed to lighten the text, he also knew the likely value of a blue-green cloth binding with gold spine lettering for an edition destined to grace a suburban parlour bookshelf. Jerome’s attention to detail would, he considered, be complemented by his choice of J.W. Arrowsmith as publishers for the book. In another letter to the firm in March 1889, Jerome suggests that their ambition matched his own: ‘I know yours is for energy and push, I suppose the leading firm now’.30 This vigour would, Jerome trusted, allow the book to capitalise upon the lucrative railway bookstall market: a further letter to the publisher suggests ‘this would be a good time for the holiday season and Smith & Co. [W.H. Smith and Son] … would give it a good display as they must know my name very well’.31 Jerome’s assessment of Arrowsmith was more than that of a young writer attempting to flatter a prospective business partner; Arrowsmith had anyway already offered Jerome a deal to publish Three Men at the time when these letters were written. Arrowsmith, although not a new firm (their origins dated back to the 1850s) had by the late 1880s built a reputation as a dynamic publishing firm following their remarkable success with Hugh Conway’s novel Called Back in 1884. John R. Turner notes that the profits from this novel offered Arrowsmith ‘stability and confidence’, leading them to discover ‘successful authors and books in almost constant succession’.32 The business marriage of Jerome with Arrowsmiths was therefore one well calculated to bear fruit. That the relationship was not a one-sided affair is reflected in Arrowsmith’s decision to launch their ‘3/6 Series’ with Three Men in a Boat. This marketing decision, recognising Jerome’s shrewd reading of the changing book buying habits of the late Victorian market, proved to be a highly successful one. In general terms, the ‘3/6 Series’ attracted a remarkable number of best-selling writers and titles (the Diary and The Prisoner of Zenda were number 11 and number 18 respectively in the 3/6 list), and in the more immediate context,


Three Men had already shifted 42,000 copies four months after its initial publication in September 1889.33 Taking into account the close attention Jerome gave to selecting his publisher and in anticipating the prospective readership for Three Men in a Boat, it is unsurprising that he had already taken considerable pains with the characterisation and setting of his literary ‘product’. Rather than providing his anticipated clerkly readership with a straightforward mirror of themselves and their lives, Jerome decided to offer to his audience characters and scene which reflected social aspirations within their sphere. To put it another way, Jerome constructed in Three Men the sort of lifestyle that, say, Lupin Pooter begins to live only after he assumes his £200-a-year position with Gylterson. A pre-promotion Lupin Pooter might indeed have provided Jerome with his likely target market; one can easily imagine the appeal to impoverished clerks of the selfconfident demeanour and leisured indolence displayed by Jerome’s ‘Men’. Jerome helped to manufacture this atmosphere of indolence by consciously excising occupational work from the book. While work is mentioned as a comic concept – ‘I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours’ (144) – only George’s job as a bank clerk is defined in any detail. The lightly fictionalised Jerome, called ‘J’ in the novel, neglects any mention of his place in the solicitor’s office, something that, given the anecdotal nature of the work, might appear a surprising omission. Only when we accept that this absence is a deliberately calculated decision on Jerome’s part, does the lack of context here become explicable. Where the banker’s occupation was sufficiently prestigious to warrant incorporation in Jerome’s scheme, casting a mere solicitor’s clerk in the boat might bring into question the status of the seemingly urbane Men.34 Jerome’s decision to ‘forget’ to give J an occupation was evidently designed to avoid the impression that his characters were in fact ‘cockney’ clerks aping their betters. Jerome elaborated this relative embourgeoisement of his clerks in Three Men in a number of ways. Although he shows George and J living in furnished lodgings, he gives little impression in the story that they live on a modest income. During the time when Jerome himself was a Thames-rowing clerk he was earning about 25 shillings a week at the solicitor’s, but his fictionalised counterpart offers few signs of these limited finances. Details casually dropped into the text imply a relaxed attitude to money: the ‘Men’, for example, routinely tip, thinking nothing of slipping half-a-crown into the hand of a railway engine driver to persuade him to change his timetable (48); they enjoy ‘the odour of Burgundy, and the


smell of French sauces’ (184); and whereas other contemporary fictional clerks meticulously record the extravagance of a rare cab journey, here there is an easy familiarity with this form of transport (47). Elsewhere J additionally gives the impression of being on equal terms with the professional classes, describing, in an early passage concerning hypochondria, a medical man as ‘an old chum of mine’ (9). It is, however, the presence of the dog that constitutes the most obvious affectation. Jerome admitted in his autobiography that Montmorency was an invention ‘evolved out of my inner consciousness’,35 and, all things considered, it could not have been otherwise. The type of lodging-house life and office routine known to Jerome would offer little scope for dog ownership. In the novel, however, the presence of the dog emphasises the general atmosphere of the leisured Englishman on holiday (see Figure 4.2). The very name ‘Montmorency’ seems deliberately evocative of the established middle and upper classes. Jerome’s determination to control the social typing of his characters is also intriguingly revealed in a small but significant textual amendment that was made between the serialised and single volume versions of the tale. At the opening of the Home Chimes version, Jerome has his first person narrator J remarking: There was George, and Bill Harris, and me – I should say I – and Montmorency. It ought to be “were”: there were George, and Bill Harris, and me – I, and Montmorency. It is very odd, but good grammar always sounds so stiff and strange to me. I suppose it is having been brought up in our family that is the cause of this. Well, there we were, sitting in my room … .36 This self-conscious grammatical slip is excised by the time of the Arrowsmith’s version of the tale: ‘There were four of us – George, and William Samuel Harris, and Myself, and Montmorency’ (7). Jerome made very few changes between published versions of the tale (indeed the 3/6 Arrowsmith’s edition was published before the four-penny serialisation was completed in November 1889) and so this amendment to the introductory sentence appears to carry additional significance. Did Jerome decide between published versions of the tale that he wanted his narrator to appear a more cultured and a better educated guide? Did the weakness in grammar signalled in the original introduction place the speaker a little too close to the new breed of cockney upstart clerk that was then becoming widely recognised? While Jerome


Figure 4.2 A Frederic’s illustration for J.W. Arrowsmith’s edition of Three Men in a Boat: Harris, J and Montmorency waiting for a cab.

and his friends were not men of independent means they would also have considered themselves as quite distinct from the cockney ‘Arrys much discussed in the contemporary press.37 In an apparent effort to establish this distinction conclusively, Jerome has his Three Men witnessing a separate boating ‘party of provincial’ Arrys and ‘Arriets, out for a moonlight sail’ (88). The exchange between groups is notable for the way in which the cockneys refer to J as ‘sir’ and as ‘a gentleman’. Jerome clearly felt that this social disparity between the two parties on the Thames was, given the current social climate, a vital one to establish. The alteration of the tale’s first lines, like this class marker, appears similarly designed to strengthen this distinction in readiness for its anticipated ‘3/6 public’.


Reading Three Men in a Boat over a century after its original publication, it would appear that Jerome was successful in achieving the above aims. Throughout the tale he manages to lend a bourgeois gloss to a narrative rooted in a distinctly autobiographical framework. The idyll he defines offers the impression of middle-class ease, in a setting and form of transport familiar to, and within reach of, the majority of young clerks in London. Jerome was apparently so effective in creating the appearance of relative affluence for his characters that later dramatisations of the novel have tended to overlook the elements of the work that might suggest the ‘Three Men’s’ more modest background. Instead, the characters in film and television versions of the work commonly affect the plummy accents and the carefree manners that imply a familiarity with an English Public School environment rather than a Board school one: in the 1957 film version, for example, the indisputably middleclass actors Jimmy Edwards and David Tomlinson were cast as Harris and J, whilst the 1976 Tom Stoppard television adaptation similarly employed Michael Palin and Tim Curry in these roles. This popular reinvention of the book seemingly inflates the social status of the Three Men to higher echelons of the middle class than those which Jerome had intended for his characters. Indeed, one feels that this reconfiguration of the work in later twentieth-century book illustrations and dramatisations risks making ‘swells’ out of the Three Men. While Jerome was careful in the text of Three Men to ensure that his characters were not mistaken for ‘Arrys’, he was equally determined that the men were distinguished from ‘swells’. When they reach Maidenhead, for example, J records that the town is ‘too snobby to be pleasant’, adding that ‘it is the haunt of the river swell and his overdressed female companion’ (117). One suspects, however, that any recasting of Three Men in this fashion would have bothered Jerome less than some of the readings of his characters and scene made by his early critics. These tended, as we have seen, to depress rather than inflate the social status of the Men, seeing them less as swells and more as clerks out on a spree.38 In his autobiography, Jerome was able to wryly recall specific examples of the criticism that dogged him during and after this period: Punch invariably referred to me as ‘Arry K Arry,’ … . As for The National Observer, the Jackdaw of Rheims himself was not more cursed than was I, week in, week out, by W.S. Henley and his superior young men … . Max Beerbohm was always very angry with me. The Standard spoke of me as a menace to English letters; and The Morning


Post as an example of the sad results to be expected from the overeducation of the lower orders.39 These damning judgements appear all the more ironic when we take into account Jerome’s care in shading and manipulating Three Men’s textual content. Given that the people and scenes out of which the novel evolved were avowedly autobiographical, the criticism must have proved particularly stinging. Jerome reflected that although he ought to have ‘felt complimented’ by the critical attention paid towards his work, he then ‘took it all quite seriously, and it hurt’.40 More than the injury caused by the personal affront to his dignity as a writer, however, Jerome must have feared that the snobbery of his patrician critics would serve to undermine his careful marketing plans. To have his work branded as ‘vulgar’ might have proved disastrous in view of the perceived sensitivity of his readership. It appears that Jerome was pronounced guilty of ‘vulgarity’ in the critical courtroom primarily because of the dialogue he chose for his ‘Three Men’. The criticism of The Saturday Review (quoted in the opening section of this chapter), was typical in basing its attack on Jerome’s extensive use of slang. While The Saturday Review’s critic does offer praise for Jerome’s skill in recording the current clerk’s argot, the compliment is heavily qualified: For the future student of late Victorian slang, Three Men in a Boat will be invaluable, if he is able to understand it … . In some of the sporting newspapers slang of this kind, and indeed of a much worse kind, may be discovered, but we do not recollect to have met any other book entirely written in it. In a sense, too, Three Men in a Boat, is a much truer specimen of lower middle-class English than are the paragraphs in the coloured newspapers, because they are exaggerated and non-natural, while Jerome is amazingly real. That it was worth doing, we do not say; indeed, we have a very decided opinion that it was not.41 The tone and angle of attack of this criticism was echoed in a Punch review, published in February 1890, by which time the tale had already proved a popular success. The Punch criticism usefully provides an index of the expressions which it considered particularly irksome: ‘bally idiot’, ‘doing a mouch’, ‘boss the job’, ‘put a pipe in his mouth, and spread himself over a chair’, ‘land him with a frying pan’, ‘fat-headed chunk’, and ‘who the thunder’.42 These expressions, Punch’s critic ‘Baron de


Book-Worms’ scathingly suggested, were imported from ‘Yankee-land, and patented here by the Sporting Times and its imitators’, and had then trickled down into the parlance of the tale’s characters. Jerome was later to recognise in this attack on his use of slang the existence of a double standard. In an article published in his own magazine, The Idler, in 1897, he argued that Kipling had contemporaneously used slang expressions such as ‘bally’ and ‘rot’, but had been more aware of the prejudice of the critics and had therefore ‘taken the precaution to make his characters the younger sons of noblemen, so the language in that case was allowed to be perfectly correct’.43 Kipling’s prestigious position as the established spokesman of Empire clearly rankled with Jerome when he considered his own critical reputation as a reviled cockney upstart and ‘new humorist’. In view of the critical reception of Jerome’s work, it appears that all of his painstaking attempts to create around the Men an atmosphere of studied insouciance proved ultimately futile. Given his decision to place ‘slangy’ characters in a boat on the despoiled Thames, he was, in 1889, an easy target for his critics. The thought of these boating ‘barbarians’ sipping burgundy, savouring the smell of French sauces, tipping extravagantly and freely mixing with the professional classes, was clearly destined to provoke patrician critics keenly alert to social encroachment. In this context it is likely that reactions to Jerome’s use of slang became emblematic of a wider set of apprehensions. The brash confidence suggested by this esoteric use of language implied the emergence of a generation who had little regard for a rigid social order. These fears can only have been exacerbated by the evident commercial success of Three Men: a publishers’ announcement in the 1909 reissue of the tale stated that British sales alone at this time stood at over 200,000 copies sold at 3/6 per volume.44 In the 1897 issue of The Idler quoted earlier, Jerome attempted to make sense of the class-based opprobrium that had been heaped upon his work: The public and critics seem to estimate the quality of literature according to the social quality of the characters. One book-reviewer, referring to Mr. Wells’ Wheels of Chance, wrote, ‘It does not need very great insight to analyse the feelings of a draper’s assistant’ … . I was never favourably reviewed myself by the superior critic until I had gumption enough to make my hero marry the daughter of a peer.45 Jerome, although recognising the potentially limiting nature of this state of affairs, also realised the importance of conformity for a writer in


his delicate financial position. To alienate his socially mobile readership with a succession of books labelled ‘vulgar’ by influential critics might prove disastrous in the long term. Although the extraordinary commercial success of Three Men had suggested that the general reading public were little influenced by ‘superior’ criticism, it would be far better to try to bring the critics on side as well as the readers. With this in mind, it was a logical move to elevate his characters into the established middle classes and to overlook those others whose social origins were closer to his own. This intention is seen in practice in Three Men in a Boat’s sequel, Three Men on the Bummel (1900), in which J and his fellows lose any trace of slang from their language, and swap their London lodging house and double-skulled skiff for country house, Club and yacht. While this move ultimately failed to convince the critics of the ‘legitimate’ nature of his comic prose, it at least closed off one avenue of their attack. As long as the modern clerk and the lower middle class at large remained literary pariahs, the professional English comic writer was, it seems, best placed simply to promote his characters into the adjoining class. * * * Jerome’s anxiety concerning the social status of his characters necessarily left a gap to be filled by a writer who shared his background but not his sensitivity to criticism. This position became occupied from the mid1890s by W. Pett Ridge, who was to remain for the following thirty-five years the foremost chronicler of the London lower middle classes in comic and light literature.46 Like Jerome, Pett Ridge belonged to the first generation of Board school educated clerks (in his case in the Continental goods office of a railway), and had similarly begun his literary career by submitting short pieces to the popular press.47 Pett Ridge had additionally taken advantage of the new learning facilities available to those who had, like him, left school feeling that their ‘abridged education in the country had not sufficiently furnished [them] for City life’.48 During his evening classes at Birkbeck College he had encountered other like-minded individuals with literary aspirations such as W.W. Jacobs, then a Civil Service clerk but later to become one of the best paid writers in the country. In this environment Pett Ridge was able to hone his writing skills and seek advice from those established literary figures who offered the institution their support. Utilising this advice and encouragement, Pett Ridge, in common with Jerome and Jacobs, eventually felt secure enough about his ability to earn a living through


fiction to hand in his notice at the office: I did not leave the City until I was earning by the pen about three times as much as the office gave me. A moment arrived when some changes were made [at work], and I was asked to accept another £50 a year, and this seemed to be an opportunity for saying good-bye. (There was also a hint of additional work which might have proved discommoding to enterprises in fiction.)49 Although Pett Ridge’s style and subject matter came to follow a distinctive formula over the course of his sixty published works, his early depictions of the emerging lower middle class in London are of considerable interest.50 Indeed, prior to the Second World War, the quality of Pett Ridge’s work was widely recognised, with leading writers of the period acknowledging his accomplishments: G.K. Chesterton commended his ‘vital and genuine humour’ and additionally noted his use of ‘mild and humane irony’;51 H.G. Wells, writing to an aspiring short story writer, suggested that Pett Ridge’s ‘clever work … would give [him] a model’ for his efforts;52 and George Orwell included him in his Tribune essay entitled ‘Good Bad Books’, in which he discussed books which had ‘no literary pretensions but which remain readable when more serious productions have perished’.53 It was further indicative of the growing respect with which Pett Ridge’s work was accorded that, five years after his Minor Dialogues was so venomously reviewed by The Times, the same newspaper was able to offer a contrasting assessment of his work: ‘Mr. Pett Ridge is a master of the social microscope, and seems to have a suburban Asmodeus for his familiar … . He is the Thackeray of the households of struggling clerks’.54 Although this review ended by suggesting that Pett Ridge had ‘the capacity for serious work’ (presumably work that focused on a ‘better’ class of character), the critic’s acceptance that studies of ‘insignificant’ individuals could represent literary merit suggests a softening of critical attitudes to this social milieu. At the very least it implies that by 1900 Pett Ridge’s decision to concentrate his literary efforts largely on his own class seemed vindicated. More importantly his decision to offer the lower middle class a literature which reflected themselves during a period of rapid change (but was not self consciously dictated by considerations of the critique of a ‘superior critic’) ensured a body of work of honesty and integrity. It is the unapologetic nature of Pett Ridge’s fiction that is of greatest importance in his contribution to the development of the fictional clerk. Whereas other late Victorian writers – Besant, Hale White, Gissing,


Jerome, Pain – all consciously examined this class with varying degrees of authorial detachment, Pett Ridge was unashamed to acknowledge his membership of this group. The ensuing sense of fellowship results in the depiction of an environment in which class considerations are, if not absent, certainly removed from the foreground. Pett Ridge was able to sidestep the preoccupation with questions of propriety seen elsewhere because he situated his fiction in self-contained social environments. This is immediately clear in Minor Dialogues, a selection of short theatrical sketches that were written in response to the popularity of Anthony Hope’s The Dolly Dialogues (1894). Minor Dialogues, also published in 1894 (as number 24 in Arrowsmith’s 3/6 Series) appropriates Hope’s literary method, but refocuses his class bias. Whereas Hope’s work was concerned with London’s high society, Pett Ridge’s collection looks instead at the London’s upper working and lower middle classes. The titles of Pett Ridge’s ‘Dialogues’, which originally appeared in a variety of magazines and journals, offer an indication of London life for these classes in the mid-1890s: ‘The City at Four’ (set in a City tea room), ‘At a Smoker’ (located in a music hall located above a public house), ‘In the Lowther’ (a London arcade famed for selling childrens’ toys), ‘At Molesey Lock’ (on the Thames), ‘Art in the City’ (a shop selling affordable art during the City lunch hour).55 These scenes are studded with verbal transcripts of conversations taking place between the patrons of the featured locations. Rather than present the dialogues in a manner designed to patronise or burlesque the speaker, Pett Ridge instead offers us samples of speech to acknowledge the humour routinely generated in casual conversation. In a ‘Dialogue’ entitled ‘The 8.30 a.m.’, for example, Pett Ridge imagines a ‘crowded compartment of [a] morning train hurrying Citywards’.56 The dialogue moves around the carriage, as if recorded by a roving microphone, overhearing the first speaker asking another to come to his house to hear his family singing: ‘you’d say you’d never heard anything like it before’ (60); a second tells his companion of the activities of dancing-girls in Paris: ‘well, that takes the Huntley and Palmer, that does’ (58); and a third clerk voices his concerns as he plays Nap with the train’s card school: I don’t half like the idea of playing cards going up in the morning like this. Looks so bad if any of your chiefs should run across you. Diamonds? Haven’t got a single one. Mind you, I’ll shuffle next time. (Plays the hand with much moodiness). (57) While the lightness of Pett Ridge’s touch (like that of the Grossmiths) does not submit well to the removal of his material from its context,


these extracts are able to offer something of the essence of his style. Here and elsewhere in his work Pett Ridge’s aim is to render a vision of London populated by a lively and diverse community going about its daily work and life with optimism and good humour. It is the cheerful aspect of Pett Ridge’s City and suburbs that appears to have worked against the establishment of his posthumous reputation. In one of the few critical appraisals of Pett Ridge’s work since his death in 1930, Vincent Brome summarily dismisses his fiction thus: He was a writer unaware of the wider implications of what he wrote. This lack of depth of awareness marks the limitations of his work. In some of his novels he was the expositor of one popular Victorian myth … . [That is] the truism that aspiring Cockneys can transcend their environment. In other words, given enough character, circumstances do not matter.57 This appears a harsh judgement on a writer without pretension to the type of literary gravitas assumed by a writer such as Gissing. Pett Ridge was providing a kind of fiction avowedly different from Gissing’s, and in doing this he created a body of literature capable of providing a necessary counterweight to the characteristically bleak accounts of clerkly life found elsewhere. Considered in this context, we recognise that Pett Ridge was well aware of the wider implications of what he wrote, and that this awareness was sincere in offering optimism rather than false hope to his readers. Clearly, relative poverty and status anxiety existed in the clerk class (as it also did in adjacent classes), and literature needed to engage with these issues. Equally, however, this class included individuals who felt secure and contented with their environment and prospects and this group also deserved representation. This was clearly Pett Ridge’s creed and he set about recording this latter group in numerous sketches, stories, and novels: The Bookman records that by February 1896 Pett Ridge had already written 250 short stories, and many more sketches and dialogues.58 Criticism of Pett Ridge’s choice in adopting an optimistic approach in his texts surely says more about a pervasive suspicion of sanguinity in Victorian texts, than it does about the individual significance of his work. Strong evidence for the significance of Pett Ridge’s work is provided by Outside the Radius (1899), arguably his finest work. Here, he harnesses the short story form (his forte in fiction writing) into a novel by linking together several tales that take place in a single suburban location. This setting, ‘The Crescent’, was intended to represent a typical example of


the type of development that had become increasingly familiar as London pushed out from its centre into an increasingly distant suburbia.59 To contextualise this housing development he informs us that it had ‘been built for something like twelve years, and is thus an historic road compared with other streets near, which are one day blank spaces, next day a row of thirty-five-pound villas’.60 Pett Ridge is not blind to the problems inherent in this rapid and often indiscriminate building strategy, illustrating on several occasions the pitfalls of construction of this type: ‘perhaps it is because of our age that now and again a house in The Crescent splits down near to its bow windows and has to be doctored and sticking-plastered and furnished with wooden supports, for crutches’ (4). But he envisages the inhabitants of ‘The Firs, The Oaks, The Elms … Ben Nevis, Beethoven Villa [and] St Moritz’ (6), as generally contented with this suburban existence. Indeed in his relaxed and goodhumoured way, he implicitly asks his critics why they should necessarily assume that his positive reading of the suburban scene was unrealistically Utopian. Pett Ridge reinforced this evocation of suburbia with his description of the City workers’ journey to and from work. Elsewhere in contemporary literature this quintessential aspect of suburban life had been represented as either a procession to hell, or more comically as a daily battle for dignity against fellow travellers and transport workers. Pett Ridge, aware of these other interpretations sees his commuters as romantic adventurers: Presently the detachment which went off in the morning to attack the City and to loot it, returns, without perhaps any exuberant signs of triumph, but still preserving the small brown bags, and seemingly ready for the dinners whose perfumes stroll in The Crescent. The younger men come out in startling change of costume, having put aside the silk hat and frock coat which constitute the armour they wear in attacking the City, and appear in white flannels and straw hats, which straw hats are lifted as white-shoed young women trip also in the direction of the tennis ground … . (16) From this general snapshot of sunny suburbia in 1899, Pett Ridge then proceeds to examine the lives of individual members of The Crescent. He does this via the medium of an avuncular narrator who, far from suggesting a sense of separation from his neighbours, is quite at ease in using the pronoun ‘we’ to define his relationship with them. In confirmation of Pett Ridge’s general perspective on this scene, and his wish to


challenge the existing literary wisdom with which it was characterised, the narrator offers the following statement: ‘I find that to declare life in The Crescent as dull and monotonous is a mere pretence; outwardly that may be so; in point of fact there are romances in every house’ (20). Comments of this kind may now appear as complacent reflections on the life of the residents of ‘The Crescent’, but taking into account the vision of clerkly life witnessed elsewhere in contemporary literature, these remarks appear more like gestures of defiance. Amongst the ‘romances’ making up the novel is a tale which suggests a dialectic with a type of clerk character already familiar from Gissing’s work. This is the young man whose pretensions to culture and learning lead to a sense of superiority and a desire to educate others. In Gissing’s story ‘The Pessimist of Plato Road’, Dolamore, the ‘quarter-educated’ clerk, had attempted to impose his ‘simulated learning’ on his landlady’s daughter, and this pathetic exercise concludes with a suicide pact bungled by the inexact nature of the clerk’s learning. Pett Ridge’s Outside the Radius tale ‘The Progress of Amelia’, by way of contrast, sees a thirty-shillings-a-week clerk’s attempts to educate a City waitress end in ironic comedy rather than near tragedy. In Pett Ridge’s story, the clerk (Mr Walmer), concerned that Amelia (the waitress) has never read a book, proposes a programme of improvement with suitable literature. As part of this programme the clerk persuades her to accompany him to the local Free Library: Young Mr Walmer told her how to pronounce the name ‘Ouida’ correctly, but on Amelia expressing an opinion that this writer’s books should be interesting, definitely barred ‘Ouida’ and would allow her to have none of them. (298) Later, after being embarrassed at a dance which he agrees to attend in exchange for Amelia’s trip to the library, Mr. Walmer takes secret dancing lessons. To enable him to do this, ‘his English literature night at the local polytechnic had to give way … [and] his debating society likewise’ (301). After completing his dancing course, he returns triumphantly to the tea rooms ready to impress Amelia, an enthusiastic dancer, but finds her somewhat altered. At the conclusion of the tale, when Amelia is asked by her Aunt if she has enjoyed a night out with Mr Walmer, she replies ‘I have not enjoyed the dance; I should have been happier here with my books … . I agree with Thomas Carlyle’ (310). This tale exemplifies the ‘humane irony’ identified in Pett Ridge’s work by Chesterton. Rather than recognising Mr Walmer’s behaviour as being inspired by the poisonous results of the over-education of the


masses, Pett Ridge more generously sees it instead as a wider expression of youthful folly: a folly (like that of Mr Pooter) that would evidently cut across class boundaries. Commenting on Gissing’s fiction in his autobiography, Pett Ridge outlined the essential difference of approach that separated the outlook of two writers whose work often focused on the same social group. Writing in 1923, at a time when Gissing was dead and his fiction largely unread, Pett Ridge praised the ‘fine work and enormous patience’ of his contemporary’s novels, and went on presciently to comment that ‘published now they would receive an attention they did not encounter in their day’. But he also registered his incomprehension at the insistent ‘gloomy’ quality of Gissing’s work, illustrating this by discussing one of Gissing’s plots: It is in The Whirlpool that a young couple having, after a sufficient number of tribulations, contrived to get married, go to live for two agreeable years in Wales; these years Gissing deals with in hurried pages, and then brings the pair back to London, and to all the discomforts of home.61 To a writer of Pett Ridge’s temperament, Gissing’s obsession with exposing misery and ignoring happiness was baffling. The ‘other side’ of modern London that Pett Ridge recognised, a city full of energy, diversity and potential was, arguably because of Gissing’s pervasive influence, a ripe and largely unexplored subject. It was, additionally, one entirely complementary to his skills as an observant and humorous writer. Here he was able to identify the world of the ‘Aerated Bread Shops’ populated by Chancery Lane clerks (‘with paper protectors on their cuffs and the mark of the desk barred across their waistcoats’), who after failing to impress the waitress left their drinks ‘moodily’, suggesting ‘nother time we’ll go to Lyon’s’;62 here he could witness the clerk’s occupation of the new maisonette flats growing up around London, replete with pianoforte, ‘standard lamp with the pink shade’ and ‘pictures by Marcus Stone’;63 here he observed the offices of the changing City, in which the young clerks duplicated letters by giving ‘a twist to the copying press’;64 and here he equally recognised the presence of the antique clerk who, on his last working day after forty-five years at a wine merchant’s, writes ‘in his careful, old fashioned hand, a letter to the firm’s agent’, while thinking of the ‘the newest youngster who arrived from the Board School with shorthand and typing at his fingers’ ends’.65 Far from seeing this ‘day of inconceivably small things’ as a lamentable reflection of the rise of a ‘quarter-educated’ mob, Pett Ridge saw in it much to celebrate.


When in 1898 the Daily Chronicle clerk correspondents, in response to Gissing’s latest novel, lamented the absence of a writer who might ‘do us justice’, they failed to recognise that this messiah had in all likelihood already emerged. It is unsurprising with hindsight that this literary saviour had appeared under the radar of the Chronicle’s clerk readers. To individuals conditioned to revere an Arnoldian sense of real culture in opposition to ‘ordinary popular literature’, the products of ‘Arrowsmith’s 3/6 Series’ appeared unlikely vehicles for the establishment of a fitting cultural identity for their class. In this cultural climate, a clerk-turned-writer like Pett Ridge whose books were readily associated with railway journeys (a Punch review of his work claimed ‘You will find them, in the main,/Good companions for the train.’)66 was almost bound to be overlooked. This is not to heap criticism upon the clerk readers for their myopic vision; it is more a reflection of the understandable, if nonetheless regrettable, cultural inflexibility of the era. Had the Daily Chronicle readers adopted a more inclusive approach to forms of ‘acceptable’ literary depiction, they might have discovered in the Arrowsmith writers the alternatives to Gissing’s clerks that they were looking for. V.S. Pritchett’s remark that the Diary of a Nobody provided ‘the sane answer to the sentimental realism of Gissing’, can easily be extended to the other Arrowsmith writers discussed here.67 Pett Ridge, Jerome and the Grossmiths certainly found in Arrowsmith an energetic firm that was sensitive to the requirements of a changing literary marketplace. More preoccupied with good sales than good reviews, Arrowsmith continued to commission work which permitted a high profile outlet for depictions of the emerging lower middle classes. These works, typically building up pictures of clerkly life with fine mosaic pieces, allowed this milieu to be captured in a breadth of tones not embraced elsewhere in contemporary literary culture. More vital perhaps than this longer term service to literary culture, Arrowsmith’s provided their Victorian readers with highly effective comedy at a time when, as Pritchett also noted, ‘the need for laughter was obviously urgent’.68

5 Degeneration in the Edwardian Office

The Edwardian era witnessed an increased willingness by writers to depict the clerk’s life within as well as outside the office. The new confidence with which literature began to delineate office life appeared to reflect a growing desire from outsiders for information about this closed world. Three works published within months of each other in the middle of the period illustrate this new curiosity. In these texts, clerks are asked by inquisitive wives and girlfriends to provide details of their working lives and colleagues: Edward Darnell in Arthur Machen’s ‘A Fragment of Life’ (1906) is criticised by his wife who claims that ‘you never tell me about the men in your office’;1 the wife of insurance clerk Ralph Smith, in Keble Howard’s The Smiths of Surbiton (1906) echoes these sentiments, demanding to know how he spends his day: ‘I often wonder what you’re doing at a certain hour, and it’s rather annoying not knowing’;2 similarly in Shan F. Bullock’s Robert Thorne (1907) a tax office clerk describes his future wife’s desire for information about his working day: In questioning me, Nell, as was natural I suppose, showed most interest in what may be called our official humanities. She wanted to know, for instance, what the office was like, how many rooms it had and how these were papered and furnished, whether the windows had blinds, whether we had carpets and hearthrugs on the floors, and whether we sat on stools or chairs … . Also she inquired closely into the affairs of our luncheon club, and was not content till I had explained the co-operative system on which it was worked … . Then also I must say how we passed our time, what amusements we had and what we talked about.3 More than just the satisfaction of idle curiosity, these enquiries suggest a greater purpose in opening up offices to literary scrutiny. 81


This concentration of focus upon the clerk’s whole life, both working and domestic, is consistent with new imperatives in the social surveillance of this group at the start of the twentieth century. These fresh imperatives had surfaced during the South African War when concerns about the effects of modern city life on Britain’s fighting forces acquired a new urgency. Bill Nasson argues that the rejection of ‘virtually one-third of army recruits because of poor physical condition, made the experience of 1899–1902 seem a low point in the physical health of the British nation’.4 This climate of anxiety about the fitness of Britain’s yeoman stock led the Balfour government to commission the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904). Although this report concluded that national standards of health were actually improving rather than declining, fears persisted about the physical wellbeing of the British population; G.R. Searle notes, for example, that during this period ‘journalists and politicians continued to discuss the problem of ‘physical deterioration’ in ‘language which often bordered on panic’.5 Fears about the degeneration of the nation’s health were, of course, nothing new at the time of the South African conflict. As Daniel Pick reminds us, these debates had matured and compounded from the middle of the nineteenth century to provide a ‘plurality of … connotations’: ‘the language of degeneration should be understood in relation to a long and complex process of political definition and redefinition in European culture and society’.6 By the time of the War, therefore, journalists and politicians possessed an established framework of reference with which to encode growing fears about the fitness of the nation’s physical stock. We can recognise the gathering importance of this debate in C.F.G. Masterman’s contribution to a collection of essays entitled The Heart of the Empire (1901). Masterman, a future Liberal Cabinet minister, delineated here what he described as ‘a characteristic physical type of town dweller: stunted, narrow-chested, easily wearied; yet voluble, excitable, with little ballast, stamina or endurance’.7 This description, although relating in the context of Masterman’s essay to the general mass of working-class town dwellers, might just as easily describe a clerk in one of Gissing’s short stories. I want to suggest, by introducing this connection, the extent to which the emerging urban lower middle classes were drawn into the debates on degeneration alongside the denizens of the slums. Although we might consider that the dividing line between an abyss-dwelling underclass and the suburban clerk was clearly recognisable (Masterman’s later work The Condition of England (1909) serves to establish and police these seemingly shifting urban

Degeneration in the Edwardian Office 83

boundaries), this dichotomy was by no means readily apparent in Edwardian social debates: E.M. Forster’s portrayal of Leonard Bast provides a prima facie case of the prevailing liberal sense of the proximity of apparently distinct urban types. The experience of the South African War indeed served to bring the clerk class into the centre of now pressing debates about national fitness. Richard Price has identified the social and historical reasons why this should be the case: [The] relationship between class and eagerness to volunteer was indicative of the acceptance of patriotism as a motive for volunteering and was probably strongest amongst those groups who were working class in origin but middle class in status and pretension. The clerk was an example of this and formed a very large element of both the Imperial Yeomanry and the CIV [City Imperial Volunteers]. This class-related patriotism is revealed, as Price’s research shows, ‘by the fact that young clerks were more eager to volunteer than young labourers’.8 When this knowledge is considered alongside the remarkable numbers of new wartime recruits (242,808 men joined the Volunteers during the War), we begin to understand the wider implications of the statistics.9 Under these circumstances, the extent to which British Imperialism had now become reliant on a Volunteer force personified by the City clerk, ensured that the mental and physical health of this group became a matter of urgent national concern. While the supposed effeminacy of office clerks had formed a staple element of British literary comedy since the 1840s, in the post-war environment this trope became a serious rather than a laughing matter. The knowledge that the clerk with his high hat, wing collar, and rolled umbrella might form a second line of defence in future conflicts, led fiction writers, alongside social commentators like Masterman, to discuss the physiological effects of modern urban life and work. Daniel Pick has recognised the significance of imaginative literature in the discussion and dissemination of current bio-medical theories at this time: ‘contemporary fiction registered that wider social, scientific debate, sometimes challenging, sometimes simply assuming the stock assumptions of its language’.10 Fiction in this way provided an important conduit for the wider debate of frequently conflicting hypotheses on the future of the race. One result of the ensuing dialectic between culture and science was that the business office (a space largely unexamined after the death of Dickens), once again emerged as a significant location in British fiction. To those for whom office clerks were known until this time only as


silhouettes on London Bridge or as subjects of newspaper speculation, fiction provided a lens with which to examine the fitness (in the Darwinian sense) of the individual, while also offering a privileged view of the clerk’s otherwise obscure working environment. Many of the works of fiction that emerge from this context focus upon the attempts of a featured clerk to gain promotion from office stool to boardroom. In this way, writers were able to create necessary narrative tension while simultaneously investigating the mettle of the central character. The period’s changing commercial climate had already ensured that questions of advancement in commercial work – in particular, the difficulty in securing genuine promotion – were increasingly apparent to the reading public. Gregory Anderson argues that while clerks employed in banking, insurance, and the top commercial firms could still, at this time, expect mobile careers, their prospects of attaining managerial positions were gradually diminishing: ‘even for these well-placed clerks, the growing scale of office organisation and the trend towards amalgamation before 1914, may have served to slow down the rate of entry into management’.11 Anderson supports this claim with research into the London-based Royal Exchange Assurance. His findings confirm that opportunities for clerks to rise to managerial levels were significantly reduced during this period: in 1840, 48 staff were divided between 6 departments; by 1900, 149 employees were occupied over 7 departments; and by 1914, staff numbers had increased to 314 in just 8 departments.12 In this competitive business climate, the likely prospect for the ambitious Edwardian clerk was, as Anderson remarks, typically reduced to the more modest outcome of ‘job security and income mobility’.13 Ford Maddox Ford’s collection of essays, The Soul of London (1905), serves to confirm the widespread understanding of decreasing chances of promotion for ambitious employees. Here, Ford remarks upon two clerks whom he had overheard in a London coffee shop discussing a millionaire who had, like them, originally arrived in London as a clerk: I do not know whether they [the clerks] possessed his tremendous energy, his industry, his nerve, his knowledge of the market – whether they possessed even a shade of his temperament. It is obvious, however, that the great majority do not, that the chance against any average young man is a ‘thousand to one’.14 This sense of the narrowing of opportunities for Smilesian-inspired models of exemplary progress offered fiction writers a perfect opportunity


to interrogate modern commercial conditions. Would the lack of opportunity to ‘get on’ result in a sense of resignation among town dwellers, who were (according to Masterman) increasingly lacking in stamina and endurance? Or, would ever more competitive working conditions produce a new breed of übermensch clerks determined to be the one out of a thousand who succeeded? * * * Among the first texts to examine questions of promotion in the modern office was Rudolf Dircks’ ‘The Two Clerks’ (1897).15 In this story, Dircks demonstrates a fine understanding of the dynamics of a large departmentalised City Assurance Company, and skilfully exploits the potential of this environment to furnish an effective literary narrative. Johnson and Edwards, Dircks’ eponymous clerks, are depicted as heads of matching departments, working in identical partitioned offices, and both travelling to work together on the train from their indistinguishable suburban terraced homes (‘Daisyfield’ and ‘Belle Vue’ (21)). Dircks establishes his clerks as unremarkable examples of conscientious and efficient office workers, both wedded to notions of duty and service. The seemingly emasculating routine in which their lives are destined to run is only disturbed by the sudden death of their Company Secretary. Following the resulting job vacancy, Dircks begins to imagine the changes in the relationship between the two men. For Edwards and Johnson, the possibility that either man might be promoted over the other’s head leads to a simmering rage that threatens to explode into violence. Edwards experiences dark thoughts about his colleague when walking in his suburban back garden: ‘the animosity in his heart against Johnson grew and grew’ (36). Johnson, for his part, becomes subject to similarly aggressive emotions which threaten his clerkly control: ‘when Edwards enters my head my blood boils, I never felt quite like it before, so angry, so positively savage. I feel as if I should like to horsewhip him’ (37). This atavistic force transcends more immediate issues of promotion for the clerks and becomes instead, according to the omniscient narrator, a desire ‘to beat each other, for the brutal pleasure of victory’ (38). Although these ‘savage’ qualities quickly recede when neither man receives promotion (the vacant Company Secretary post is given to a friend of the Chairman), the emergence of these latent impulses is telling. The conclusion of the story which sees the clerks resume their old routines after accepting salary rises (a reflection of the era’s job security and income mobility) implies suppression rather than the


extinction of their ‘primitive’ instincts. While Dircks introduces these issues into his text in a playful rather than a portentous manner, they are nevertheless charged with a suggestive force. The publication of Dircks’ story in the wake of the 1895 British publication of Max Nordau’s sensational study Degeneration provides us with a key intertextual connection. Although Nordau’s work primarily targeted the upper classes and cultural intelligentsia, his often ‘imprudent generalisations’ ensured that his work was widely discussed and applied.16 William Greenslade confirms this connection in his observation that Nordau’s work ‘achieved the distinction of becoming a familiar and early point of psychological and criminological reference within contemporary fiction’.17 In a popular work of fiction such as Dracula (published in 1897, the same year as Dircks’ ‘The Two Clerks’), for example, Bram Stoker was able to cite Nordau’s ideas secure in the knowledge that these would be familiar – at least in outline – to a non-specialist readership.18 With the public profile of degeneration theories raised to this extent, Dircks’ apparently comic images of savages in business suits were now open to more sinister interpretations. Dircks’ assertion of latent atavistic violence in the modern City worker would, one senses, have come in for even closer scrutiny following the South African War. Shan F. Bullock’s novel Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk (1907), although ostensibly located in the 1880s and 1890s, is very much attuned to the debates surrounding the physical and mental qualities of the Edwardian office worker. Set in the Tax Office of Somerset House, a location already familiar from the work of Lamb and Trollope, Bullock’s text closely observes the conditions of the working and domestic life of its eponymous character.19 It is a mistake, however, to consider Robert Thorne as simply a polemical novel focused exclusively upon degeneration anxieties precipitated by the recent War. In the wider context of this study, it is a much more versatile text. Bullock’s painstaking descriptions of Thorne’s office and home provide an unusually detailed account of its subject matter. While a full evaluation of this aspect of Bullock’s novel is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is perhaps sufficient to record that Robert Thorne is among the only texts to date to offer a meaningful engagement with the clerk’s daily tasks and working conditions. Whereas other ‘clerk’ novels might vaguely describe the casting of a ledger or the copying of a letter, Robert Thorne actually delineates the physical qualities (and mental demands) of these duties at length.20 Bullock’s decision to record Thorne’s experiences by adopting the clerk’s own first-person narrative voice, (described by Bullock, the text’s putative editor, as providing ‘the chaste beauty


of … official style’ (vii)), adds additional credence to the documentary quality of the book. Although by no means a complete realisation of Harold Biffen’s experimental novel Mr Bailey Grocer, described in Gissing’s New Grub Street (‘absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent’),21 long passages of Bullock’s text seem to aspire towards this theoretical ideal. Notwithstanding its painstaking and generally affectionate record of clerkly life, Robert Thorne is consistently shadowed by broader questions regarding the clerk’s status in society.22 Even when Thorne describes his early experiences in the convivial atmosphere of the Tax Office’s ‘big ledger-room’ (‘work went the pleasanter for a joke, a story, a little skylarking on occasion’ (47)), one senses little opportunity for the clerk’s long-term physical welfare and/or mental fulfilment in this environment. An anticipation of the darkening mood of the text is developed in the novel’s opening passages in which he describes his ancestor, also Robert Thorne, who had ‘followed Cabot in attempting the North-West passage’ (1). The latter day Thorne, the ‘lank and narrow-chested’ (3) son of a Devonian schoolmaster, provides a dispiriting contrast with his swashbuckling forbear.23 This contrast is placed in further relief when Thorne’s father responds to his son’s decision to become a London clerk: You want to be … perched on a stool all day with your nose in a ledger. You want [a] pale face, and [a] slouch, and [a] simper … . Haven’t I taught you that what a man owes to himself is to strive after manhood. A clerk with a clerk’s narrow little soul – is that your idea of a man! … . You have the spirit of a slave, sir. A clerk! A creature with a pen behind its ear! (6–7) While the novel subsequently settles into the detailed account of Thorne’s life and working routine outlined earlier, the issue of masculinity is again foregrounded when opportunities for promotion are discussed. During a conversation with an older colleague about advancement in the Civil Service, Thorne’s interlocutor, in accounting for his fellow clerks’ lack of militancy, laments that ‘there’s something in the breed of us’ (41). This pessimistic assessment captures precisely the more general anxieties about the weakness of town-bred stock in the aftermath of the South African War. Following a family holiday in the Hampshire countryside, Thorne’s discontent, until now only permitted to surface in parenthetical form, is belatedly (after 275 pages) allowed to erupt. When away from the office, Thorne encounters ‘real men and women, living real lives in real


conditions of life’ (279), and this familiar literary dialectic of town and country provides him with a fresh perspective on his fellow City workers. At this point the earlier balanced account of the clerk’s working life is abruptly abandoned, replaced instead with Thorne’s now undisguised contempt for his occupation. The clerks, Thorne concedes, may be ‘good fellows all of them’, who possessed ‘fine natural qualities, excellent gifts and acquirements’, but ‘they knew better. That was the pity’: For sake of safety, a small chance, a sure future, they were content to sell their birthright and plod in a rut. Clerks. Servants. Tame cats. Machines. And not they only. We were all the same. The blackcoated brigade. Miserable little pen-drivers. All of us, everywhere … . (281–2) Thorne, now cognisant of his father’s warnings – the emasculating (in this context) pen again features as a pitiful tool of his trade – realises his pressing need to adopt a more manly existence. The example of his brother who had earlier emigrated to New Zealand (‘he started on nothing; but now has a farm of his own, [and] has built a house upon it and is going to get married’ (236)) becomes for the London clerk a quintessential image of masculinity and health. In a final rejection of city life, Thorne, inspired by this image of hope, decides to follow his brother overseas: I want to get the children away – quickly – quickly – to see them grow up strong and well, to give them a chance of being something better than typists and clerks. Clerks? Never in this world! I’d rather they had never been born … . (283) Thorne’s desire to give his children a ‘chance’ appears crucial here. Unlike the pathetic hope for his offspring imagined by Richard Larch at the conclusion of Bennett’s A Man From the North (‘perhaps a child of his might give sign of literary ability’ (187)), Bullock’s Thorne understands the need to resort to more radical methods to re-establish the vitality of his race. While Thorne himself can only ‘try to be a man’ (289) in New Zealand, it seems that his children might recover the dynamism of their Cabot-following forbear away from degenerate London. This notion of returning town-bred stock back to the health-giving countryside would, as Chapter 6 suggests, became a familiar literary response to current anxieties. Bullock’s own solution, to use the wide open spaces of the Empire to rejuvenate an etiolated stock, must take place, he implies,


while this option still exists. Like the Roman Empire before it, the degenerate modern City might live to regret its own complacency. * * * Alongside those accounts of clerkly life which offered a straightforwardly pessimistic account of town-bred degeneration were a number of texts which adopted more complicated perspectives on this issue. These works tended to focus upon the one successful clerk in a thousand whom Ford Maddox Ford had imagined as offering inspiration to ambitious workers in the Edwardian City. In doing so, these tales of opportunity and success in commerce seemingly set out to challenge the (by now) familiar literary image of the stunted and regressive clerk. What appears of particular interest in examining these masculine and dynamic clerks is that their evident ‘success’ fails to become the cause for optimism. Although distanced physically and mentally from the ‘tame cats’ epitomised by Bullock’s Thorne, the übermensch clerks (found in Mark Allerton’s24 Such and Such Things (1910), and Oliver Onions’ In Accordance With the Evidence (1912)) are not intended to provide Smilesian role models for their often inert counterparts. They are instead depicted as sociopaths who represent aberrant variations of an otherwise regressive stock. Rather than providing resistance to pervading images of clerkly degeneration, therefore, these accounts of singular ambition and determination appear ultimately to reinforce and even exacerbate current anxieties. Before going on to examine these ‘super-clerks’, it is important to recognise another type of successful fictional clerk who also emerged in this period. This category of City worker provides the focus for J.P. Blake’s The Money God (1904), a novel which attempts to speak up for commerce and the City. Blake, a future Olympic athlete and Chairman of the London County Council, was evidently frustrated by the effeminacy and immorality with which the business world was imbued in literary representations. Similar frustrations had earlier inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to include the manly and morally upright clerk Mr Hall Pycroft in his Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Stock-Broker’s Clerk’ (1893). Doyle, no doubt cognisant of the popularity of his Strand Magazine stories among City workers, sought to provide this element of his readership with an affirmative self-image: The man whom I [Dr. Watson] found myself facing was a well-built, fresh-complexioned young fellow with a frank, honest face and a


slight, crisp, yellow moustache. He wore a very shiny top-hat and a neat suit of sober black, which made him look what he was – a smart young City man, of the class who have been labelled Cockneys, but who give us our crack Volunteer regiments, and who turn out more fine athletes and sportsmen than any body of men in these islands.25 Notable here is Doyle’s assertion of the general health and patriotism of this unequivocally masculine group, alongside a recognition of the ways in which their public image was calculated to deny them these noble qualities. Doyle’s affirmation of the rude health of these City men, we should remember, takes on a special significance here because it occurs alongside his more general support for modern degeneration theories.26 Blake, in making his own reassessment of City men, shares Doyle’s tone of defiance towards conventional representations of this group. Like Doyle, Blake stresses the healthy mind and body of smart young City men, while also building into his text an explicit acknowledgement of the literary prejudice against a seemingly ‘degenerate’ subject. We can recognise this approach in the early chapters of The Money God in which March joins a City stockbroker’s firm as a junior clerk. On his first day at work March is informed by a fellow clerk (in a manner that anticipates Robert Thorne’s own experience) of the relative hopelessness of his situation: ‘The city … is a kind of well, very deep and hopeless to ascend from; and far away above you is a faint gleam of light, which is the real world of honour and contentment’ (20). After early years in the City well, during which March sees his contemporaries rise above him ‘under the reflection of their father’s wealth’ (24), the gleam of light is permitted to shine when his potential is duly recognised. The clerk repays the trust placed in him by the Company Chairman in making a success of the new position to which he is promoted: that of a 250 pounds per annum Company Secretary, a similar position to the one earlier coveted by Dircks’ ‘Two Clerks’. Later March continues his ascent by becoming Managing Director of a dynamic new company, and further consolidates his status by marrying the daughter of his former chairman, the latter action offering the archetypal confirmation of clerkly success. Along the route that promotes March from office stool to boardroom, Blake takes the opportunity to challenge both the ‘trivial pessimism of the unobservant’ (33) and also the ‘warped prejudice’ (113) of those who criticise commerce while relying for their comforts on its rewards. The former perspective, Blake implies, is perpetuated by the press which sees City clerks only in terms of stock characters. March’s colleague, an


experienced City man, reacts angrily to the journalistic image of himself and his fellows as ‘grey-faced toilers’: There may be grey-faced toilers in the city, but the expression is none the less unfortunate. The city is not the only place where men have to work; it is what they are made for. But a man must come to the city to qualify for the term. To me it appeals as the feeblest form of cant. Life in the city is assuredly not a picnic, but, on the other hand, in the large majority of cases it is no serfdom. I doubt, indeed, that there is another calling whereby men, without special education or influence, can obtain so much leisure or opportunity as in this much-derided city life. (34) The clerk’s frustration in this respect is summed up in the following equation: ‘I am a clerk, and my garden is a villa garden, and therefore I am a mediocrity and a fool’ (34). Blake appears to find bourgeois snobbery towards commerce even more objectionable than this journalistic pessimism. When a ‘cultured and ingenious gentleman’ asserts ‘the general degradation of commercial manners and morals’, March claims that this ‘supersensibility was not admirable’, but was instead, ‘the warped prejudice of a recluse removed from the working world, a world which in spite of all cant to the contrary, was habitable only because of the trade which was plied upon its shores’ (113). Blake’s tactic here is to characterise the sensitive man of culture as the degenerate party and to cast the City man as the embodiment of physical health and moral rectitude. Unlike the Schlegel sisters (in E.M. Forster’s Howards End ) who recognise their dependence on a business world represented by Henry Wilcox, Blake’s targets remain hypocritically disdainful of this environment.27 The result of this detachment is a readiness to dismiss anyone directly connected with commerce as degraded and degenerate: as the ‘cultured gentleman’ remarks to March about his work, ‘I wonder that you endure it’ (111). While bourgeois and popular culture consistently taints the City and its workers with associations of disease, the commercial world – according to Blake – is generally ineffective in countering this attack.28 In this way, The Money God is designed to provide a view from within of a world that had become shaped, imprinted and categorised by individuals who were determined to remain outside it. Blake’s valiant if largely predictable defence of the City offers a useful point of comparison with other narratives of clerkly success. In the ‘super-clerk’ novels by Allerton and Onions, Such and Such Things and


In Accordance with the Evidence, clerks also rise from the ranks to take up partnerships in their firms, but these texts fail to accord positive values to their exemplary accounts of self-help. Whereas Allerton’s David Logan and Onions’ James Jefferies share March’s commendable energy and single-mindedness, these ‘other’ characters lack their fellow clerk’s gentlemanly desire to place honour before ‘unworthy profit’. Logan and Jefferies thus seem designed to provide an answer to March’s own rhetorical question: ‘was it not possible in the city to be honourable and manly and sincere – and yet to succeed?’ (81). Blake’s inclusion of the masculine element in this question provides an intriguing link between these three victorious clerks. While Blake appears to consider that success obtained by dishonour and insincerity is necessarily effeminate, Logan and Jefferies are characterised as antithetical to the diminutive and pathetic City man: Jefferies, as first-person narrator, comments on his own ‘unusual size and unusual strength’,29 while elsewhere his hand is described as ‘a magnificent engine of sinew and bone and muscle, powerful and heroic’;30 Logan provides a similarly physical presence with his ‘very broad shoulders’, ‘big hands and big feet’ helping him to attract ‘attention by the magnetism of sheer matter’.31 This accentuation of overt masculinity and strength provides a direct and deliberate challenge to more complacent assumptions of wholesale urban regression. In characterising these ‘other’ clerks, however, Allerton and Onions do not so much refute theories of urban degeneration as to refine the application of these ideas. They achieve this by interpreting the emergence of the übermensch clerk as the form of natural selection inherent in a competitive commercial environment. Daniel Pick’s recognition of the importance of the image of the parasite in the biological theory of degeneration is helpful here. Pick notes, in particular, the influence of the work of the Zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester, whose work Degeneration, a Chapter in Darwinism (1880) revised and extended Darwin’s theory of evolution. In Pick’s reading of Lankester’s work, he notes that Lankester demonstrated ‘the possibility of a successful evolutionary adaptation to the environment’ but that this adaptation really exemplified degeneration, the return from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, the complex to the simple. Darwin it seemed had been too optimistic, had suggested, despite his relative caution in extrapolating from the biological to the political, that evolution and progress were tied together. He had thought too little about who and what might best survive in an arguably noxious and degenerate environment – late-nineteenth-century London for instance.32


This sense of the survival of an organism which was able to adapt to a ‘noxious and degenerate environment’ seems to summarise perfectly the apparent advancement of Logan and Jefferies. Rather than becoming a cause for hope in the evolution of this type, their strength and intelligence, in their current context, seemed to mock more optimistic claims for clerkly fitness and progress. In their respective novels, both Jefferies and Logan, in the manner of parasites, adapt their faculties to feed from the decaying body of capitalism. Their ‘success’ therefore is merely a manifestation of a prevailing disease which infects even the more physically robust members of this tribe. When Mark Allerton pioneered this type of character in Such and Such Things contemporary critics only registered the text’s novelty in indirect ways. The Manchester Guardian review, for example, although describing Allerton’s depiction of the advancement of Logan as ‘creditable’, qualified this complement by arguing that ‘David Logan is a mean brute, and it is hard to believe that people of any gentility or generosity could tolerate him for an hour’.33 Allerton would, one senses, have considered this remark an endorsement of the effectiveness of his depiction of a clerkly ‘parasite’. In his attempt to evoke a fictional clerk quite different from earlier counterparts, Allerton avoided all the characteristic elements that had come to be associated with this character. Apart, for example, from Logan’s physical size and strength, his origins lack the wholesome familiarity of, say, the English provinces. Instead, Logan is depicted as the product of a Glasgow Board school and an upbringing in the Gorbals. Disillusioned by his father’s own miserable experience of commerce, and ‘longing for a wider field of enterprise’ (20), Logan travels to London ‘determined to be one of the conquerors’ (87). Although this youthful ambition appears merely to echo that of the young Robert Thorne (as he looked from Devonian home towards the opportunities of London), Logan’s desire for success is envisaged in much more specific and calculated terms. When accepted into a London drapery firm, Allerton’s clerk, unlike Bullock’s Thorne, methodically plots out the future trajectory of his attack: He calculated that if the junior member of the staff got seventy pounds a year the senior would get quite a large salary. It was to the post of head of the office he was attracted at the time. He gave little thought to the post that was vacant – it was merely a beginning, an opening, a chance. He believed that a chance was all he needed to attain success. He cultivated the art of making the most of his chances. (54)


Allerton goes on from this point to define Logan as a clerk capable of unswerving commitment to his ambition. This desire to succeed sets a ‘wary and silent’ Logan apart from his fellow clerks: attempts by colleagues to befriend Logan are met with suspicion: ‘what did they want out of him?’ (86). His enforced isolation in his office allows him to concentrate on mastering all aspects of the firm, to the point that ‘soon there was no aspect of his business that he did not know’ (117). Although even Logan’s inexorable rise is seen to require time and patience (including ‘five quiet, uneventful years of hard work’ (147)), his commitment eventually brings him a coveted partnership in his firm. Far, however, from commending and celebrating the clerk’s dogged pursuit and attainment of promotion, the novel charts Logan’s achievement with evident reservations that in many ways echo Dickens’ earlier perspective on that other parasitic clerk, Uriah Heep. Allerton stresses the cost of Logan’s success, suggesting the level of sacrifice and degree of single-mindedness that would be necessary for a fellow clerk to follow his route. The obsessional nature of the clerk’s desire to ‘conquer’ must, it seems, excise from his life the compensations of companionship or of interests outside his work: he is depicted wandering the streets at night ‘his thoughts … never very far from Cannon Street. He determined to do a hundred things the next day’ (118); on another occasion he engineers a week’s notice for a typist whom he had once kissed, but subsequently thought might ‘prove a blight’ (211) on his ambition. Moreover, Allerton depicts Logan as being unable to moderate his restless ambition even after achieving his original goals. A lasting image from the latter portion of the novel witnesses Logan, now in charge of the office, wandering restlessly among the clerks’ desks wondering ‘if he could do without anybody and how he could get more efficient work out of the machine’ (234–5). Ironically, however, members of the new breed of clerk employed in Logan’s sterile though super-efficient office identify their superior not as a tyrant, but as an inspiration: They did not love David Logan; but they respected him, and set him as their model. He had risen from the ranks. He had shown them what could be done, and each and all of them tried to do the same. And David Logan was glad in his heart. (288) That a new generation of Robert Thornes might find a source of inspiration in Logan’s apparent triumph is, Allerton implies, an unavoidable consequence of modern capitalism. Anything less than Logan’s monomaniacal pursuit of advancement must result in the acceptance of an


emasculating life demanded by a business world in which ‘young clerks worked as for dear life at their desks’ (287). Although Allerton evidently considers that Logan is exceptional, there is equally an indication here that the modern commercial conditions are perfect ones in which to breed this type of rebarbative individual. Oliver Onions later extended and nuanced this depiction of clerkly ‘evolution’ with his novel In Accordance With the Evidence (1912). By choosing to investigate the life of an agency clerk, Onions focused upon the most precarious form of white-collar employment. Onions describes here in detail the insecure and often brutalising existence of a clerk supplied to a firm by an agency on a ‘contract for the supply of “office labour” of all grades’ (17). Jeffries, one of eight clerks employed in this way by a single firm, here reflects upon the hopelessness of his situation: There was no chance that I should ever get more than eighteen shillings. Ask for nineteen and the telephone rang, the agency was informed of your request, and … well, three times I had seen that happen. (17–18) There was, however, one chance of escape, which Jeffries argues was calculated by the firm to ensure the agency clerk’s efficiency and attention: It was by way of what I may call the permanent junior clerkship. The permanent junior clerk was, as it were, breveted with the rank of real clerks in the inner office; and so was Hope dangled over the heads of eight of us … . That or nothing. I need hardly say that jealousy, espionage, and scheming besmirched our souls. (18) Onions goes on to describe with insight the atmosphere of an office in which these qualities predominate. He captures effectively the climate of mutual suspicion existing amongst the competing clerks during a passage in which Jeffries remembers glancing over the little brass rail at his desk-head and meeting ‘another furtive pair of eyes meeting his own and looking almost guiltily away again’ (53). In this hostile environment a more ruthless Jefferies evolves from the shell of the embattled agency clerk. He becomes conditioned to exploit any chance that might be presented to him either legitimately or otherwise: legitimately he assiduously pursues qualifications at a business college, working ‘with an almost demoniac energy by night in order that I might not miss


a single one of these tickets of authenticity’ (48); more dubiously, he has no compunction about blackmailing a fellow clerk to protect his tenuous office position (46). Throughout this depiction of Jeffries’ movement through the commercial world, Onions, has his clerk reflecting on the ways in which his environment has conditioned his resolve to succeed: ‘I now believed in myself … and … grimly resolved that others should respect me’ (145). Jeffries’ rise from agency clerk to board member forms the central element in a plot that is essentially a crime story based around Jeffries’ murder of Archie Merridew, his fellow business student and rival in love; Jeffries ingeniously commits the crime after engineering a confession of suicide from his victim under the guise of a Pitman’s shorthand speed exercise. After the murder, Onions dramatically closes the novel with the defiant words that confirm Jeffries’ separation from earlier fictional clerks: ‘No: nobody has paid. Nobody ever will’ (285). While Onions later diluted this striking conclusion with two rapidly produced sequels, the original ending had suggested a much darker evocation of the sort of single-minded and ambitious clerk depicted by Mark Allerton. Jefferies’ extension of this earlier characterisation to suggest the extremes to which a ‘parasitic’ clerk might go when attempting to progress suggests a particularly Edwardian nightmare. Just as that later angry young man, Joe Lampton (in John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957)) would become a promise/threat of the breaking down of social barriers for 1950s Britain, Jefferies’ unstoppable rise was calculated to unsettle an earlier bourgeoisie. Far, therefore, from easing fears of the degeneration of urban stock, Jefferies served merely to redirect existing anxieties into new and more sinister channels. The preponderance of clerks in Edwardian literature who appeared to represent the extremes of feebleness and failure or ruthlessness and success serves to intensify our interest in identifying those who might occupy a more liminal position between these poles. The relative absence of this type appears in itself interesting, suggesting an unwillingness by writers and publishers to countenance a serious office novel which centred on the life of a generally contented, relatively successful, and physically healthy clerk. Keble Howard’s The Smiths of Surbiton (1906) was initially intended to address this lack, depicting Ralph Smith as a suburbdwelling insurance clerk delighted when eventually promoted to head clerk. Moreover, as Howard confirmed in the preface to the 1925 edition of his novel, ‘the story was to be absolutely realistic, entirely free from exaggeration and fictitious excitements’. Prior to its original serial publication in the Daily Mail, however, Howard was instructed by Leicester


Harmsworth (his commissioning editor) to transform Smith from ‘lowly circumstances’ to the comfortable middle classes, and to an income of ‘£600 a year’.34 This instant embourgeoisement removed Smith at a stroke from the sphere of the average office worker, making him instead into an aspirational model of clerkly affluence. Only at the end of the Edwardian period, in the work of Frank Swinnerton, can literary examples of this unremarkable type of clerkdom be identified. In three novels published before the First World War (The Merry Heart (1909), The Young Idea (1910) and On the Staircase (1914)), Swinnerton provided a sympathetic representation to the office clerk and his putatively unfashionable class. Later, in his critical survey The Georgian Literary Scene (1938), Swinnerton went some way towards explaining these sympathies when, during a discussion of Howards End, he challenged E.M. Forster’s characterisation of Leonard Bast: As for the uneducated Cockney clerk and his wife, my knowledge of clerks is very extensive, and I have never met one who would be overwhelmed by decent behaviour on the part of an undergraduate, or one to whom such decent behaviour would seem less than his due. A consciousness of condescension would seem rather to belong to the undergraduate. How can I possibly believe in a being so uncouth, when I am told that he springs from a class which I know to be above all others decent, well behaved, and self respecting?35 From another source these final ‘compliments’ might imply a snide criticism of the clerk’s conventionality and petit bourgeois manners, but from Swinnerton the values defined are perfectly straightforward. His affinity with the subject and the class inspired him to attempt the depiction of the office scenes in his work in a fresh and distinctive manner. Indignant at the manner in which the London clerk had typically been characterised as a degenerate specimen, Swinnerton decided to write a series of novels capable of offering this group a belated justice. Rather, however, than provide this justice in the form of propaganda (as in Blake’s The Money God ), Swinnerton’s approach was to provide a slice of the lives of those ‘decent, well behaved, and self respecting’ people he saw about him. This approach appears a perfectly reasonable choice for an author who wrote his first novel, The Merry Heart, while himself a twenty-threeyear old clerk at the publishing firm Chatto & Windus. Like the previous generation of lower middle-class writers, Swinnerton had served his literary apprenticeship in the world of the new publications that


emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, working from the age of fourteen in the offices of a number of magazines including The Scottish Cyclist, The Estates Journal and Jottings. This experience encouraged Swinnerton to attempt to fill a gap that he felt existed in the literary depiction of the sort of modern London life that he was familiar with. Swinnerton later recognised the flaws in the structure of The Merry Heart, but he also perceived, along with its reviewers,36 strengths in its construction of character and background.37 The up-to-date office milieu that Swinnerton evokes is especially notable, in that it depicts the kind of mixed-sex environment that was, by 1909, becoming more familiar in the City: the 1911 census shows that women by this time represented 18.1 per cent of the total number of clerks employed.38 In this novel, Swinnerton was able to branch out from the consideration of promotion which had dominated the narratives concerned with single sex offices, and additionally incorporate flirtation, romance and jealousy into his office scenes. Only with the novel’s melodramatic conclusion, in which the clerk Lockery is discovered to be the son of an Earl, does the work’s earlier distinctiveness become somewhat diluted. The promise of Swinnerton’s first novel was confirmed in The Young Idea (1910), which offered a plot similarly set amongst a mixed group of modern young office workers. Here Swinnerton abandoned the more whimsical aspects of The Merry Heart and concentrated instead on building upon the successful elements from the earlier work. The resulting novel focuses primarily on Eric Galbraith, a flat-dwelling clerk, possessed of a combination of qualities suggestive of both ambition and humility. This complementary blend of attributes is evident in Galbraith’s reaction to his first job in London. During this employment, while working in a large over-staffed office, he is frustrated by a prevailing culture of indolence among his fellow clerks: They read the paper, and talked largely of sport and politics, yawning behind their hands, all grouped about the fires until the appearance of a principal caused a half-hearted break-away. It had been too much for Galbraith’s warm blood and fresh vision: he sought for prospects … .39 Galbraith’s ‘warm blood and fresh vision’ are seen as healthy alternatives to the effeminate ‘vice of contentment’ (158). This form of complacency leads to an atmosphere, Galbraith argues, in which ‘most people don’t mind just jogging along as miserable as driven cattle’; because they have stopped looking forward, these clerks have necessarily abandoned ‘any real hope to keep them striving … . They don’t try to be better, or happier’ (163). The last sentence here provides the key to recognising the difference between Swinnerton’s own positive model of progress


and evolution in the workplace, and those other paradigms of regression and parasitism. Unlike that of the latter types, Galbraith’s energy is channelled in a positive way which ensures that while he overcomes ‘an environment calculated to emasculate [him]’, he achieves this in a manner ‘wholly devoid of artifice’ (58). In this way, Swinnerton reconciles single-minded ambition with achievement in the commercial workplace. The business office thereby becomes an environment capable of nurturing rather than degrading young minds and bodies. Notwithstanding this positive profile, Swinnerton’s intention here was not to create a saintly paragon. It was instead to offer – in Galbraith’s experience of work in a London office – a reasoned account of the chances of progression for the young, ambitious, robust and honest clerk of the day. To this end, Swinnerton shows Galbraith surviving a period of stasis (‘he wanted work that he should find difficult; and he got routine labour that demanded only care’ (64)) apparently common to all clerks, without either sinking into soporific complacency, or alternatively redirecting his energies along immoral lines.40 Galbraith instead remains singularly focused on his original goals, with no suggestion that this is either a compromise career choice, or the option of an unmanly individual incapable of tackling a more strenuous occupation. His unfeigned delight on the eventual news of his promotion carries with it no hint of patronising laughter at the pathetic triumph of the clerk. Rather it suggests a celebration of a worthy individual given a deserved chance to achieve his goal: ‘God!’ he said, with concentrated passion. ‘At last I can DO!’ (70). The moment of opportunity, like the period of stasis, is a familiar motif when defining the parasitic clerk, but rather than tracing Galbraith’s path along the anticipated route of opportunistic marriage and partnership, Swinnerton’s narrative adopts a more sober path of progression. He achieves this by defining Galbraith’s resourceful formulation of a new scheme of publicity for his firm. This scheme, the product of the clerk’s own initiative, is designed by him to dramatically improve the office’s efficiency. It crucially, therefore, offers distinct benefits for the firm as well as the clerk, as the following passage implies: Galbraith sat down again, and looked at his papers with pride. He felt as though this was his work, his own earnest of ultimate triumph. For if the scheme were passed, his resourcefulness would be taxed daily; he would have responsibility, and that sense of honest apprehensiveness that makes a young man self-reliant. It was great! (170–1) For Swinnerton this satisfaction, potentially obtainable by any intelligent clerk, provided its own reward.41 Galbraith, in a final debate with


his manager concerning the adoption of his scheme, reveals that if it was not accepted by the firm he could not be relied upon to stay: ‘I should feel … as though I wasn’t earning my salary’ (235). That the employer’s acceptance of the scheme provides the conclusion of the novel offers an index of the importance of this idea to its author. As is evident from this summary, The Young Idea, in an appropriately modest manner, represents a crucial stage in the development of the fictional clerk. Swinnerton, a product of the generation that followed – on one the hand Gissing and Bennett, and on the other hand Jerome and Pett Ridge – was able to maturely reflect upon a large body of fiction that attempted to represent the modern clerical population. Although Swinnerton had witnessed the beginnings of a sympathetic recognition of the wider lower middle class in the writings of Wells and Bennett, he had (to date) failed to encounter a representative reflection in English fiction of the sort of modern urban society with which he was familiar; Swinnerton, we remember, could find little ‘real’ trace of clerks in Gissing’s work. This he attempted to remedy in his first two novels, and augmented with On the Staircase (1914), which he considered the best of his early works.42 The new direction taken by Swinnerton’s fiction was recognised by at least one critic, Hubert Bland, who in a New Statesman review of On the Staircase dubbed the text a ‘slice of life’ novel, and went on to argue that ‘in the record of such people’s lives it is idle to expect thrills or even emotional tension. The utmost you can hope for is that you may get interested in one or two of the characters considered as psychological studies and analyses’. Bland acknowledged that Swinnerton’s novel achieved these aims by employing ‘keenly observed and adroitly individualised’ characters.43 And although Bland declared his personal preference for a more dramatic plot, he evidently endorsed the writer’s ambition to build an intelligent, credible fiction around the kinds of ordinary people who constituted Swinnerton’s peers. The emergence of a novel capable of conveying this assurance was timely, coming as it did in the same months that Leonard Bast emerged. While Forster’s clerk showed the enduring and continuing nature of the literary stereotype of the degenerate clerk, Swinnerton gave notice of an alternative to this dominant image. Although Swinnerton’s own vision of an alternative literature for his society would require a World War to see it fully blossom, his novels had already begun to prepare the ground for a more egalitarian literary landscape.

6 The Friends and Patrons of Leonard Bast: Liberal Anxiety and the Edwardian Clerk

E.M. Forster’s Leonard Bast and Frank Swinnerton’s Eric Galbraith are characters close enough in conception to represent two independent readings of the same individual. Whilst there is no suggestion that either character was written in response to, or even with knowledge of the other (Forster’s Howards End and Swinnerton’s The Young Idea were published within weeks of one another in 1910), the points of correspondence between the two intriguingly reveal their shared pedigree. Both are youthful, first-generation London clerks, Galbraith first arriving in London to work for ‘a large, over-staffed firm’ (59); Bast, who had also been ‘sucked into the town’ (122) (his parents having ‘been in trade’, his grandparents ‘agricultural labourers and that sort’ (234)), is similarly employed in a large modern office: the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company. Bast and Galbraith are additionally depicted as sharing a common domestic life, both living in the cheaply built flats that became a familiar feature of the London skyline in the Edwardian era: Galbraith in the grandly titled, but match-board partitioned Culverin Mansions, Maida Vale (‘small, unpretentious and fairly cheap’ (15)); Bast in a ‘semi-basement’ in Camelia Road, Brixton (‘an amorous and not unpleasant little hole’ (60)). The two clerks also, significantly, excise from their lives the types of entertainments that C.F.G. Masterman considered were typical of their class: ‘the rejoicing over hired sportsmen who play before him, the ingenuities of sedentary guessing competitions, the huge frivolity and ignorance of the world of the music hall and the Yellow newspaper’.1 Instead, Galbraith and Bast embrace the cultural and intellectual diversity of the modern city: Galbraith reads Plato, writes published pamphlets on social reform, and argues passionately for 101


novelists to ‘grapple with great social problems, the poor, and the way real people live’ (154); Bast similarly reads Ruskin in preference to comic papers and chooses to spend his meagre wages on classical concerts rather than the music hall. Examining these outlines, one would assume that the clerks defined by Swinnerton and Forster represented more or less interchangeable individuals, who typified the aspiring, intelligent and healthy young clerk in 1910. This supposition, however, swiftly collapses when one looks beyond the generic aspects of the two characters. If one focuses, for example, on Galbraith and Bast in terms of their functions in the narratives their fundamental dissimilarity soon becomes apparent. The gap between Swinnerton and Forster’s impressions of modern clerks can be assessed in the following passages, the first from Howards End: [Bast] was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as loveable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. (58) The second passage is from Swinnerton’s description of Galbraith’s corresponding qualities in The Young Idea: He was wholly devoid of artifice, and despised the tricks of the average young man of mystery … . His eyes were bright-shining and honest, and his voice perfectly clear, without the booming note of the assured honest man. Indeed, Galbraith was as little offensive to his less immaculate fellows as a young man with principles can be. His health was so patent to all that they were ready to look complacently upon him at the same moment that they sighed enviously for his strength and cleanness of outline and movement. (58–9) The extent to which similar templates produce such diverging fictional characters is revealing. They indicate the wide range of registers in which liberal expressions of broadly sympathetic attitudes towards the clerk could be rendered in the years prior to the Great War. That Forster’s earlier comments on Bast do indeed represent a compassionate perspective (given their apparently disdainful elitism), might appear difficult to comprehend for readers removed from ‘the fag-end of Victorian liberalism’.2 The extent of these sympathies are, however,

Liberal Anxiety and the Edwardian Clerk 103

usefully illustrated by Rose Macaulay, a friend of Forster, who had already also discussed the modern clerk’s life in her own novel The Secret River (1909). In Macaulay’s critical study The Writings of E.M. Forster (1938) she offered an analysis of Bast’s character which emphasised Forster’s compassion and benevolence: Mr. Forster introduces him to us with sympathy; he represents the half-submerged whom the rich plunder and oppress. But he is kept in proportion, he remains (like Kipps) a naif and half-literate youth, pathetic, sensitive, ingenuous, badged with the inglorious genteelisms of his class. Whether he and one of the Miss Schlegels, so much by him admired, respected, and envied for their unattainable culture, would have become sudden lovers for a night, has already been questioned. But it does not affect our estimate of Leonard: it seems merely a sudden and not unreasonable demand made on him by his friend and patron Mr. Forster, that his story may be worked out according to plan. Leonard, obliging and loyal, in this as in other matters does his best, allowing himself to be discredited, ruined, even killed, in the service of his friends.3 That Macaulay, writing in 1938, could still read the relationship between writer and character in such a positive manner, offers us a window through which to observe Forster’s own perspective. The description of the loyal servant Bast, happy to sacrifice himself in the service of his friend and patron Mr Forster, alerts us to the comprehensive changes in British intellectual attitudes in the second half of the twentieth century. Taking into account this change, we can appreciate the extent to which Forster would be puzzled by our tendency to accentuate his condescension rather than his more benign intentions towards the clerk. Forster clearly considered himself, together with other writers who shared his liberal humanist leanings, to be (in line with Macaulay’s assessment) the friend and patron of the social type that Leonard Bast represented. It is only when we unearth the other contemporary depictions of clerks by authors who shared Forster’s liberal social conscience that we discover the extent to which Bast, far from being the simple product of a snobbish impulse, instead represents something much more complex. Indeed, Bast is arguably so unsuccessful as a character because he is forced to absorb the compound weight of these earlier perspectives.4 Together these influences help us to understand why Bast


is, as Wilfred Stone aptly remarks, ‘one of the most interesting and least convincing characters in the book’.5 * * * Central to our understanding of prevailing liberal influences on Forster is a recognition of his admiration for the social commentary of C.F.G. Masterman. Nicola Beauman persuasively argues that Masterman’s influence provided the central motivation behind the writing of Howards End: Masterman stirred Morgan’s social conscience more than any writer since Ruskin. He made him want to write a novel that was not merely amusing, or perceptive, or critical of suburban values, or a plea for individual freedom: he made him want to write about English society at that moment.6 If we accept this judgement, we need to pay particular attention to Masterman’s study The Condition of England, which was published just one year before Forster’s novel emerged. In his text, Masterman presented a series of essays which examined the state of the nation as it appeared in the late Edwardian period. Among these was a chapter entitled ‘The Suburbans’, which in discussing the position of the suburbdwelling clerks, anticipated Forster’s own perspectives on this group. While Masterman’s vision of their future was generally offered in a more optimistic fashion than that evident in Howards End, both writers remained troubled about the present lifestyle of the clerk class. Forster, following Masterman, blamed their current plight on the fracturing of an ancient relationship between yeoman stock and nature; Bast in becoming ‘sucked into the town’ is defined as ‘one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit’ (122). This concern led both writers, in contrasting ways, to attempt an assessment of the practicalities of re-engaging the modern urban clerk with the ‘ancient sanities of existence’.7 Masterman had proved an early champion of Forster’s talents, hailing Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) as ‘a remarkable novel’.8 This admiration was reciprocated by Forster, who had, Beauman remarks, ‘been reading and admiring Masterman’s articles in the Independent since 1904’.9 Forster had discovered in Masterman’s later Nation essays (collected together to form The Condition of England) a personal meditation on the state of Britain which nevertheless managed to gain widespread


recognition in their day: six editions of Masterman’s text were published between 1909 and 1911. An immediate connection between The Condition of England and Howards End is witnessed in the decision of both writers to imagine Edwardian English society as split into distinct groups. But whereas Forster only extends his horizon to the various divisions of the middle classes (famously declaring in the novel that ‘the very poor’ were ‘unthinkable’ (58)), Masterman attempts to encompass the wider social spectrum. He argued that the nation consisted of four discrete categories: ‘The Conquerors’ (the established middle classes), ‘The Suburbans’ (the lower middle class), ‘The Multitude’ (the working class), and ‘Prisoners’ (the underclass). Masterman, in employing these divisions, placed greater emphasis on the importance of the clerk class than previous social commentators.10 The key to this increased awareness of the growing importance of Suburbans as a group lies in Masterman’s observations regarding their political significance. As a Member of Parliament, he was naturally sensitive to changing trends in voting patterns, and when London’s system of government was overturned during the 1908 elections, he was quick to recognise the underlying factors precipitating this change. He argued that this reversal had occurred because Lord Randolph Churchill’s Progressive Party had misjudged the electorate, forgetting the dimensions and latent power of those enormous suburban peoples which are practically the product of the past half-century, and have so greatly increased, even within the last decade. They are the creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business activities of London. (57) For Masterman, this election defined the arrival of the Suburbans as a political force, and he suggested they were unlikely to be overlooked again. But in addition, he recognised their potential to offer other qualities that might have a lasting effect on the fabric of British society. Although Masterman was quite capable of discussing his Suburbans in the familiar patrician tones of the Liberal intelligentsia – ‘they lack organisation, energy and ideas’ (56) – his general assessment of this social group gave them a remarkable vote of confidence. Instead of discussing the Suburbans in terms of an unpredictable and unwelcome threat to the status quo, Masterman saw in them the potential to provide the nation with a fresh and much needed yeoman stock. To support this claim he listed a variety of positive qualities which he considered to be particularly evident in the London suburbs: among these were several


commendable characteristics which his fellow liberal-minded writers (Forster included) were largely unable to recognise: ‘family affection’ (61), ‘good nature and ready generosity, the cleanliness of life, [and] the still unbroken family tradition’ (66–7). In addition to these character traits, he singled out the suburban secondary schools as providing ‘the best education which England is giving today’ (58). These schools, he argued, were the key to England’s future prosperity, nurturing ‘the swarms of happy, physically efficient children, [who] are a storehouse of the nation’s energy’ (65). Collectively, in Masterman’s opinion, these properties provided the perfect conditions from which to breed ‘the healthiest and most hopeful promise for the future of modern England’ (76). One only needs to contrast these ideas with those other post South African War perspectives on the degenerate modern clerk – included in Chapter 5 – to understand how radical Masterman’s thinking must have appeared in 1909. But against these optimistic predictions, Masterman also voiced his concerns for the current lifestyles of the Suburbans. He was particularly disturbed by the lack of any ‘altruistic and impersonal ideal’ (72) to fill the void left by the decline in religious observance. Masterman (in common with Gissing before him) suspected that this gap was, instead, being filled by ‘mere childish absorption in vicarious sport and trivial amusements’ (73).11 These frivolous pleasures, he considered, were particularly appealing to office workers who typically spent ‘considerable hours … in not too exacting but conspicuously cheerless occupations’ (73). Again, however, Masterman was quite prepared to take a sympathetic view of these concerns, arguing that the present laxity probably represented ‘but a passing phase in a progress towards intelligence and a sense of real values’ (76). Masterman was unspecific about how or when this progress might be made, but he did anticipate the key conditions necessary for its fulfilment. These, he claimed, would rely on the reunion of the city worker with his roots: progress would be aided by any loosening of the city texture by which, and through improved means of transit, something of the large sanities of rural existence could be mingled with the quickness and agility of the town. (76)12 Masterman, therefore, appeared to advocate the continuation of the Suburban’s working life (as a politician he had to remain realistic about the necessity for commercial and business activity), but envisaged the possibility of this occurring in an environment which protected ‘the


realities of life’ (75). Here, away from the ‘artificial city civilisation’ in which the clerk had become a mere ‘unit in a crowd’, he might recapture ‘the ancient sanities of existence’ (75).13 It appears unlikely that Masterman would find in Leonard Bast a realisation of his enthusiastic projections. Initially there seems little to suggest that the unhealthy, nervous, isolated clerk, with the ‘half-baked’ mind, possesses the raw material from which a new yeoman stock might be bred. But Forster’s vision of Bast’s role is ultimately closer to Masterman’s than it ostensibly appears. This is evident at the conclusion of Howards End when Bast does indeed, in line with Masterman’s ideas, provide the fertile seed for the replanting of the nation, though admittedly this can only take place on Forster’s strictly controlled terms. These terms dictate that while a suburban child born to, say, Bast and his ‘wife’, the demonised Jackie, could never realistically join the new elect, a child which utilised the clerk’s latent yeoman spirit, combined with Helen Schlegel’s qualities as a cultured liberal idealist, would represent a worthy heir for England. Peter Widdowson goes further when he argues: Leonard has to die to clear the way for his son to be ‘Liberal England’s’ heir untrammelled by the drab reality of his father’s life and class; Leonard himself would not fit into ‘Howards End/England’ but the child, brought up in the right environment, will. And Helen could not credibly have married a Bast.14 Whilst Forster therefore supports something of the general thrust of Masterman’s ideas, he finds himself resistant to a more whole-hearted acceptance of them. The impression is of one who would like to embrace fully the thoughts of an inspirational writer, but who finds, on closer examination of these ideas, a profound unease in accepting the concessions that their realisation would require. The episode in Howards End which illustrates both Forster’s adherence to Masterman’s ideas and his temperamental opposition to them is that in which Bast describes his country walk. Leonard, in telling the Schlegel sisters about this nocturnal ramble, provokes in them ‘a thrill of approval’ (125) at the clerk’s instinct for spontaneous discovery. This quality is one singularly absent from both their own lives (‘you’ve not been content to dream as we have’ (128)), and that of the middle-class capitalist Wilcoxes, who ‘seemed paralysed’ by luxury (217). The instinctive nature of Bast’s walk seems particularly significant, offering a glimpse of an impulse that predates his modern urban existence. But Forster ironically depicts Bast as an inferior recipient of this impulse,


quite unable to share his interlocutors’ thrill at its meaning. His account of the events for the benefit of the Schlegels shows the extent to which he, though impelled to return to nature, has become divorced from Masterman’s ‘ancient sanities of existence’: Looking back, it wasn’t what you may call enjoyment. It was more a case of sticking to it. I did stick. I – I was determined. Oh, hang it all! What’s the good – I mean, the good of living in a room for ever? There one goes on day after day, same old game, same up and down to town, until you forget there is any other game. You ought to see once in a way what’s going on outside, if it’s only nothing particular after all. (127) This places Bast in a double bind, both understanding the meaninglessness of his life in Masterman’s ‘complex, artificial city civilisation’ (75), yet simultaneously alienated from the sanity of the unfamiliar organic world outside. Values that would have seemed eternal to Bast’s grandparents are for the degenerate clerk swiftly dispatched by tiredness and hunger. Forster’s scepticism regarding Masterman’s optimistic though vague proposal for the Suburbans’ return to a prelapsarian state finds its outlet in this cynical and comically expressed irony. This tendency of Forster to burlesque Bast (described by one critic as ‘cheap playing to the Bloomsbury galleries’)15 seems to hobble the characterisation, emphasising Forster’s uneasy fellowship with the more humane Masterman. * * * In the work of his contemporaries, Forster would have encountered an existing strain of literature which attempted to resolve the collapse of the modern clerk’s relationship with his antecedents’ rural roots. In the same way that Masterman helped to shape Forster’s characterisation of Bast, prototypes of Forster’s clerk are also recognisable in several earlier works. Forster’s text is, for example, anticipated in Arthur Machen’s novella ‘A Fragment of Life’ (1906), which also focuses on a clerk instinctively drawn back into nature from the metropolis. Prior to this mystical journey, Machen wryly evokes suburban life by depicting Edward Darnell and his wife adrift in the trivial detail of modern consumerism. In the following passage the Darnells are absorbed in a vital debate concerning the prospective purchase of a kitchen range: But the ‘Glow’ seemed equally seductive, and it was only £8. 5s. as compared with £9. 7s. 6d., and though the ‘Raven’ was supplied to


the Royal kitchen, the ‘Glow’ could show more fervent testimonials from continental potentates.16 The Darnells, divorced from Masterman’s ‘ancient sanities of existence’, have become convinced that ‘reality’ is a matter of kitchen ranges and the decoration of back bedrooms. This perversion of values, evidently unquestioned by Machen’s own Suburbans, results in them ‘strangely mistaking death for life, madness for sanity, and purposeless and wandering phantoms for true beings’ (35). Like Bast, however, Darnell carries with him into the City the latent spirit of his earlier existence. We are made aware of this inheritance in the physical characteristics of both clerks: Bast retains ‘hints of robustness’ and ‘more than a hint of primitive good looks’ (122),17 while Machen’s Darnell has about him ‘the curious hint of a wild grace, as if he had been born a creature of the antique wood’ (3). For both characters these latent qualities are returned to the environment in which they were engendered, during evening walks into the country which each clerk appears compelled to undertake. Whereas Bast’s walk is, however, remembered in terms of tiredness, cold and hunger, Darnell’s is evoked as a mystical and meaningful experience. Although Machen’s clerk is at a loss to explain the specific significance of what he calls a ‘strange episode’, his intense reaction signifies his appreciation of its general import: he describes the pavement as feeling like ‘some very soft carpet’; the air as sweet smelling ‘like the incense in Catholic churches’; his breath as coming ‘queer and catchy, as it does when one gets very excited about anything’ (46); and the sense of time similarly becoming disturbed and dreamlike, making his eight mile walk appear to take only a matter of minutes. He concludes his account with the sort of remark that Masterman would have looked forward to from his Suburbans once they had been successfully loosened from the grasp of the city: It was all so different, you see, to what I had been doing all my life, particularly for the year before, and it almost seemed as if I couldn’t be the man who had been going into the City every day in the morning and coming back from it every evening after writing a lot of uninteresting letters. It was like being pitched all of a sudden from one world into another. (47) Unlike Bast, whose experience confirms to him that ‘nothing particular’ goes on outside his immediate frame of reference, Darnell’s walk begins the process of his repatriation. Later, following a bus journey to


his ‘mechanical work’, his earlier ‘vague and floating fancies’ become shaped into ‘the form of definite conclusions, from which he could no longer escape, even if he had wished it’ (84). Gradually, but inexorably, the full extent of his earlier delusions becomes clear: Again and again the spirit of nonsense that had been implanted in him as in his fellows assured him that the true world was the visible tangible world, the world in which good and faithful letter-copying was exchangeable for a certain quantum of bread, beef and houseroom, and that the man who copied letters well, did not beat his wife, nor lose money foolishly, was a good man, fulfilling the end for which he had been made. But in spite of these arguments, in spite of their acceptance by all who were about him, he had the grace to perceive the utter falsity and absurdity of the whole position. (85) The story concludes with the liberated clerk reborn from the world of falsity and absurdity into the natural existence of his ancestors: ‘So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood … . And a form came towards me from the hidden places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well’ (109). Machen’s earlier wry and witty tone is here uncomfortably exchanged for a seemingly vapid acceptance of the mythical transformation. He later acknowledged his difficulties in providing a consistent conclusion to the story, calling the published ending ‘an utterly bad one’.18 This admitted failure seems to point towards a fundamental problem inherent in stories of this type: that of convincingly resettling the modern clerk back into the ‘ancient vegetable world’; the vision of the newly liberated suburban Darnells united by the pastoral well appears more conditioned to provoke laughter than awe. The problem, put simply, is that having earlier discussed in fine detail the familiar imperatives of modern life, it then becomes difficult to blithely dismiss these when embracing a bucolic finale. M. Urquhart’s The Fool of Faery (1910) attempts something of a resolution to this difficulty, by allowing nature to reclaim a lost soul through death. Prior to this conclusion, Urquhart seemed to have followed Machen’s earlier work closely, showing the Local Government Board clerk, Hilary Gibbon, slowly taken over by his ‘true’ self. Like Darnell, Gibbon finds that his monotonous work allows this more mystic dimension to his character room to flourish: The real self was free of its prison-house. He knew it by the superior lightness and flexibility which was his; he could look down on


himself writing in the heavy room; if he chose, could even smell the smell of pickles in the clerks’ club dining-room, or read the letters which that other self of his was copying so minutely. It seemed to Hilary that he could see himself going to the office, seated in the office, and returning by the 5.45 train at one and the same time.19 Left with the inevitable ascendancy of Gibbon’s ethereal self, and arguably aware of Machen’s unsatisfactory ending, Urquhart engineers the clerk’s death by drowning during a heroic attempt to save a child’s life. Absolved of the necessity to imagine the clerk’s new bucolic life, his liberation can be imagined in suitably poetic terms: ‘Gillian wondered if he [Gibbon] were doing something better in the other world that lies behind the moon’ (371). But although this might effect a more satisfactory denouement to the plot than that achieved by Machen, it still cannot begin to reconcile the workaday world with the fantastic. Rather, the ultimately mythic tone of these works seems to emphasise the impossibility of providing the suitable resolution to the earthly dilemma which the stories apparently demand. It is perhaps in reaction to these fey approaches to the modern clerk’s predicament (and also arguably to Masterman’s own vague proposals) that Forster’s apparent cynicism when discussing Bast’s reaction to the countryside is conditioned. Forster appears to have drawn somewhat darker inspiration from a further Edwardian text that explored this subject matter. Rose Macaulay’s The Secret River (1909) also concerns a clerk, Michael Travis, drawn back to nature and an ultimately watery death, but Macaulay’s novel approaches the topic in a fragmentary, modernist style which appears more attuned to Forster’s complex scepticism. The Secret River’s distance from those other works discussed earlier is further notable in its initial evocation of the future clerk’s ‘intimate fellowship’ with nature: he is described here as ‘sentiently receptive of her secrets and responsive to her moods’.20 Travis, the aesthete, is therefore primarily cast from the Schlegel, rather than the Bast, mould. Indeed, Travis only becomes a clerk when his Philistine, materialist wife demands the income which his verse cannot provide. In accepting the two pounds per week clerkship offered by her tea merchant uncle, he fatalistically becomes part of what he describes as ‘an invention of the devils’ (116). This offers Macaulay the opportunity to send Travis on his journey into a latter-day Hades: So he entered into the grey and dusty labyrinth of the ways, uncomforted. It was a strange, dim half light that closed about him; a life of remote desk-work, in which his self had no part, but numbly and incuriously looked on. (139)


Here we encounter the familiar dichotomy of inner self and outer machine, but on this occasion the individual brings a distinctive selfawareness to the vision. This knowledge intensifies his despair at witnessing his fellow clerks divorced from the sanity of the world beyond the City; this is something Macaulay describes as ‘an almost total absence from themselves’ (141). Like Machen’s clerk, Travis recognises in his peers the perversion of values that prevents the appreciation of the honest and the real, leaving them instead ‘blind to the luminous spaces that girdled it about’ (142). But in contrast with Machen’s vision of the liberated Darnell, there seems no possibility of light entering this underworld: ‘oppressed by this great desolation of a city without hope [they] were bound hand and foot to an unremitting and spiritless labour’ (142). Travis’s privileged position as an outsider allows him to observe their incarceration with a clarity of vision which, Macaulay implies, those observed will never possess: Their unrealisation of the prison did not lift its obsession from them. That was obvious; for all the time they were seeking, consciously and unconsciously, ways of escape. (142) Following this nightmare interlude, Travis’s death in the secret river seems the necessary purification ritual to cleanse him of the contamination his soul has experienced. As a form of escape, however, it is evidently reserved for those whose souls possess the requisite delicacy. Bast, even after his glimpse of this other world, remains unaware of its existence, or its power of salvation. * * * Michael Travis’s right as an aesthete to be counted among the ‘elect’ is also bound up in the vexed question of the liberal intellectual’s attitude towards the wider assimilation of culture. Macaulay anticipates Forster in her expression of doubt about the ability of the groundling lower middle-class clerk to benefit seriously from what for him was an ‘unattainable culture’. Forster states his position plainly in Helen Schlegel’s following musings: Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. (122–3)


The attitude of both writers, encapsulated in these remarks, is close to Matthew Arnold’s anticipated provision of ‘sweetness and light’ to a wider public, but their reasoning seems to contradict Arnold’s in suggesting that culture, taken indiscriminately by the clerk, would only yield a growing restlessness and dissatisfaction. Indeed, Arnold’s optimistic ideas about the democratic spread of culture appear, for Macaulay and Forster, to some extent the cause of the now unbridgeable gulf between the clerk class and the ancient world. Forster imagined that this link remained fractured because individuals like Bast were locked in a state of limbo between the rejected ‘life of the body’ (the ‘natural man’) and the out-of-reach ‘life of the spirit’ (the ‘philosophic man’). In this void the clerk was left blindly pursuing a ‘culture’ that was ironically leading him away from the meaningful existence he desired. This anxiety is most clearly evoked in Forster’s suggestion that Bast, who, significantly describes his evening walk with reference to ‘a swamp of books’, is dazzled by the very beacons that he feels are illuminating his way. Forster says of the writers – including Jefferies, Borrow, Thoreau and Stevenson – who unwittingly accompany Bast on his expedition: The fault is ours, not theirs. They mean us to use them for signposts, and are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the signpost for the destination. And Leonard had reached the destination. (127) Forster argues that the invasion of Leonard’s ‘cramped little mind’ (127) by his cultural guides leaves him enslaved by words and therefore unable to appreciate the natural wonders he witnesses at his destination. Similarly, in The Secret River, Michael Travis encounters this fatal misappropriation of culture in Bankes, a fellow tea merchant’s clerk.21 Bankes, like Bast, is a victim of the modern city which overshadows the vestiges of his mental capabilities: ‘he had a mind, or had once had a mind, of calibre just fine enough to make him crave intermittently for more (not better) food than he could give it’ (143). Travis, who is initially drawn towards Bankes in a way that mirrors the Schlegels’ attraction to Bast, is, again like them, ultimately disaffected by the clerk’s insistent but untenable cultural ambitions. During a Sunday walk together, in which Bankes gauchely claims to have ‘worked through all the theologies’ (159),22 Travis becomes starkly aware of this gulf: Bankes embarked on the sea of speculative thought, and Michael silent at his side, wondered vaguely what Bankes was to him, that he


should listen; what hold Bankes and all his tribe had over him, that he could not do without them. (160) This sentence seems to throw into relief the problem that the liberal intelligentsia experienced when engaging with the clerk. Theoretically the liberal intellectuals were natural allies of Masterman in supporting the coming generation of literate, intelligent youth, and thus helping them to emerge from their ‘suspended’ state, but when approaching this Arnoldian perspective in a more practical manner they discovered that they had little stomach for what appeared an onerous and unrewarding task. Faced with the prospect of a vulgar Bankes or a Bast attempting to engage in a discussion of theology or Ruskin in pursuit of their desire to ‘come to culture suddenly’ (62), Forster and Macaulay ultimately could not transcend their instinctive reservations about this social group. Unable to countenance the growth of a cultured lower middle class, their inclination arguably directed them instead to prefer a continuation of what they perceived as the status quo. In this world, in which culture would be protected solely for its initiates, the formally aspiring clerks might (theoretically, if not practically) return to the ‘glory of the animal’ and give up their unequal quest for ‘a tailcoat and a couple of ideas’ (122). This form of cultural protectionism is realised in a passage in Howards End in which Bast is forced to renounce his meaningless pursuit of culture: I don’t trouble after books as I used … . Oh, I did talk a lot of nonsense once, but there’s nothing like a bailiff in the house to drive it out of you. When I saw him fingering my Ruskins and Stevensons, I seemed to see life straight real, and it isn’t a pretty sight. (235) Forster appears to be punishing Bast at this point for his temerity in attempting to obtain access to a club whose membership was reserved for more superior souls. In offering this fantasy of Bast’s admission of failure, Forster exposes more about his own prejudices than he does about his social conscience. For Forster this unremittingly negative view, even fear, of the clerk’s ardent though futile attempts to assimilate culture, was no doubt additionally complicated by his own efforts to educate members of this class. A twenty-year period of teaching at the London Working Men’s College had acquainted him with students who had real academic abilities, and this poses several questions concerning his avowed scepticism.23 Whichever way one approaches this conundrum, Forster’s attitude to


his students seems at best contradictory and at worst perfidious. The latter interpretation, which implies that Forster’s efforts to educate represented mere conscience-appeasement, is supported by a letter which Forster wrote a few months after the publication of Howards End. It was written to the novel’s publisher, Edward Arnold, and concerned a student in Forster’s Latin class, Alexander Hepburn, who had asked for his assistance in gaining a new position: I have in my possession a letter from him, detailing his qualifications, and if it was likely to be of the slightest interest to you, would send it. But I do not expect it would be, and please do not trouble to answer this unless it is. He is an intelligent attractive chap, and I promised to do anything I could for him, so I am soothing my conscience.24 Hepburn, who (Furbank notes), had forged a friendship with Forster, frequently taking walks and meals with the writer, might reasonably have expected more ardent support from his companion. But Forster demonstrates, in these private thoughts, both his liberal reflex to help an intelligent member of a lower class (coupled arguably with his homosexual appreciation of an ‘attractive chap’), and his conflicting desire to dismiss a potentially embarrassing social inferior. A clue to Forster’s apparent duplicity is perhaps offered in Furbank’s account of Hepburn’s debating skills, where he proved himself ‘a wag of remarkable skill and dexterity’. Furbank goes on to recall Hepburn defeating Forster by 18 votes to 12, in a college debate on the motion ‘That the sense of humour should be cultivated with caution.’25 If this small victory for pupil over master failed to crush Forster, it must at least have alerted him to the possible truth of Masterman’s ideas regarding the potential of this tribe. The often problematic relationship between Forster and the emerging generation of Suburbans goes some way towards accounting for the evident edge to his portrayal of Bast. In Howards End and elsewhere the complex nature of class relations arguably dictated that the clerk’s pursuit of culture be satirically represented in fiction, enabling it to provide – for the classes above – a form of confirmation and reassurance. Whilst this formulation might appear reductive, it is difficult to interpret the material discussed earlier in any other manner. It is warranted, if for no other reason than the unequivocal way in which the aspiring clerk is repeatedly dismissed by those whom he might legitimately consider, in Macaulay’s words, to be friends and patrons. The door, initially opened to the hopeful clerk (Bast, Bankes and others) is unceremoniously slammed shut with no possibility of it being reopened. Implicit in this


judgement is the assumption that the intellectual middle classes had examined the coming generation, and discovered in them no spark of higher life. This verdict naturally leads one to the conclusion that Forster and his ilk actually believed in the logic of a permanent intellectual caste system, a system which could conveniently dismiss from its circle those of more limited intellectual capacity. We witness this clearly in the Schlegel sisters’ dismissal of Leonard, whom they had once attempted to champion. Whilst Leonard is the father of her child, Helen Schlegel is able to blithely announce his impending disappearance from her consciousness: I would like to throw out all my heart to Leonard on such an afternoon as this. But I cannot. It is no good pretending. I am forgetting him. (327) This blanking out of the clerk here seems to suggest a strategy for disarming a potential threat. The void into which Leonard disappears neatly confirms the continuing irrelevance of the clerk and his tribe to his social superiors. To paraphrase Macaulay’s Travis, what hold had Leonard and all his tribe over the Schlegels that they could not do without him? * * * To successfully consign the modern clerk either to an eternal suspension in limbo, or to an evaporation into the void, it was necessary for writers such as Forster and Macaulay to confirm the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Had Bast’s character offered more reason to protect, nurture and in this way to redeem him, his erasure from a novel with humanitarian values would have proved difficult to justify. The key to disarming the clerk’s potential for redemption was to prove his lack of worth and thus alienate him from the putative readership. This was achievable by establishing that a ‘true’ understanding of culture (and therefore a capability of ascending with the elite to a higher plane) was beyond the clerk’s intellect. Immediate prosecution evidence to support this case might be offered in the satirising of his pathetic efforts to ‘come to culture suddenly’, Bast with his ‘swamp of books’, and Bankes through his dubious familiarity with ‘all the theologies’. But one could argue that a more fundamental proof of mental unsuitability was additionally required; without this proof the clerk might become a martyr figure, like Hardy’s Jude, his intellectual capabilities merely unrecognised rather than discounted.


The need to establish this congenital weakness of the clerk’s mind is exemplified in May Sinclair’s novella, ‘The Judgement of Eve’ (1907).26 Sinclair’s story demonstrates how a London solicitor’s clerk, Arthur Gatty, is easily able to convince a naive country girl, Aggie Purcell, of his cultured ways. She, passing up the suit of a more ‘natural’ man (local sheep farmer, John Hurst), instead chooses marriage with a man whose head is apparently ‘full of beautiful thoughts’ (7). But Gatty, the ‘philosophical man’, is quickly proved to be a charlatan: lying to Aggie about his knowledge of Latin, he salves his conscience by telling himself ‘that he would soon know heaps’ (14). Having moved from the Cotswolds to Camden Town, Aggie finds that her illusions of the clerk and his promise that they will ‘lead the intellectual life together’ (18) are swiftly challenged. Here in a creaking little villa, built of ‘sulphurous yellow brick’ (20), Gatty’s true worth becomes evident. Pressured by a dispiriting domestic environment, Gatty’s intellectual pretensions prove insubstantial. When Aggie suggests he visit the Debating Society, after a long lapse, he replies: ‘When you’ve been as hard at it as I’ve been all day, you don’t feel so very like turning out again – not for that sort of intellectual game’ (34). Later, Gatty’s charlatanism is further exposed when Aggie tries to read Browning to him. While Browning was apparently a poet that they used to read together ‘for pure love of it, for its own sake’ (25), Arthur now reveals that he thinks the poet’s verse is ‘rot’: ‘You – you used to like it.’ ‘Oh, I dare say – years ago. I can’t stand it now.’ Again he was softened. ‘Can’t understand it, perhaps my dear. But it comes to the same thing.’ ‘Yes,’ said Aggie, ‘it comes to the same thing.’ And she read no more. For the first time, for many years, she understood him. (42–3) Released from the need to maintain a cultured persona, Arthur can simply degenerate into numbness: ‘his soul fretted him no longer; it had passed beyond strenuousness to the peace of dulness’ (31). But Aggie is unable to enjoy this simple release. Her multiple pregnancies bring her to the verge of collapse, and in this weakened state she re-encounters John Hurst, the sheep farmer, who has subsequently become her brother-in-law. Now robbed of her illusions about Gatty’s intellectual qualities she is better able to compare the farmer and the clerk. In Hurst she now recognises ‘a sublime and patient face … . He had not a great intellect; but he had a great heart and a great


will’; as for Gatty, she realises: he hadn’t one strong passion in him; he had only a few weak impulses, incessantly frustrating a will weaker than them all. She remembered how her little undeveloped soul, with its flutterings and strugglings after the immaterial, had been repelled by the large presence of the natural man. It had been afraid to trust itself to his strength, lest its wings should suffer for it. It had not been afraid to trust itself to Arthur; and his weakness had made it a wingless thing, dragged down by the suffering of her body. (56) We return here to the same patterns of degeneration and self-indulgence that formed a large element of the clerk depictions as discussed in Chapter 5. In ‘The Judgement of Eve’ Aggie’s death, following a final fatal pregnancy, pressed on her by Arthur, forms a continuum with those other pessimistic depictions of clerks in Edwardian fiction. Arthur’s physical weakness, it is implied, complements his mental impotence, which in turn fosters his feeble sense of morality. The identification of the clerk’s impaired moral sense serves to confirm the alienation of his tribe, while establishing the key grounds for its dismissal. To a society preoccupied by correct forms of social behaviour, the illustration of those incapable of preserving these standards was evidently charged with meaning. In the texts discussed in this chapter, the moral laxity of the clerk is typically established at a point when the character is placed under pressure. At this moment, when a more robust body and mind might prove its worth, the clerk instead exposes his worrying lack of steadfastness. Examples of the clerk’s moral collapse would include Arthur Gatty’s refusal to abandon his conjugal rights in spite of his knowledge that a further pregnancy for his wife would be fatal; Bankes’ use of alcohol to seek ‘a way out’ from his miserable domestic life in Clerkenwell; William Henry Hudson’s John Smith (a clerk ‘not, except in his dreams, cast in the heroic mould’) and his naive involvement with a gang of nihilists in The Strange Adventures of John Smith (1902);27 and William Falder’s decision in John Galsworthy’s Justice (1910) to steal from his employers and blame this on a colleague. The lack of nobility implied by all these acts is particularly intriguing in the final example. Galsworthy’s play, arguably representing the acme of liberal social concern in the literature of this period, ensures that any sympathy felt for the clerk is tempered by a recognition of his frailty. Having committed his crime – admittedly motivated by humanitarian considerations – and having


received a jail sentence, Falder’s weakness is confirmed by his pathetic inability to stand his punishment. His lack of stamina (a degenerate condition inherited from a consumptive father), and fatalistic acceptance of his position, are witnessed in the following exchange with the prison Governor:28 Falder: I was always nervous … . Everything seems to get such a size then. I feel I’ll never get out as long as I live. The Governor: That’s morbid, my lad. Pull yourself together. (Act III, Scene 2)29 Sympathetic though Justice is to Falder’s plight, Galsworthy leaves us with no illusions about the difference between the feeble clerk and those of more stalwart qualities. Rather than crumbling under pressure, individuals possessing more heroic properties in the Galsworthy scheme would engage their intellect to overcome either the initial temptation or the resulting test of character. The tone of pathetic resignation demonstrated by Falder provides the standard reaction of the weakling clerk. It is, for example, repeated by Leonard Bast when he feels overwhelmed by ‘superior’ company at the Wilcox wedding, where Helen Schlegel has taken him to demand his job back: ‘I seem no good at all … . We’re more bother than we’re worth … . There’s nothing we’re good enough to do’ (225). He later confirms that he is indeed ‘no good’ by using moral blackmail to obtain money from his family in preference to finding work: as Forster’s omniscient narrator remarks ‘the clever wastrel can exploit this [connection] indefinitely’ (309). Like Falder, Bast’s evident lack of inner resources allows him to commit acts unthinkable to those beholden to a more enduring code of honour, the sort of code which, we imagine, a Public school, rather than a Board school, would instil. A shift in generic focus from the serious and socially concerned writers of fiction to an avowedly comic author is instructive here. P.G. Wodehouse might appear an unlikely novelist to discuss in the context of this chapter, but his Psmith in the City (1910) provides an intriguing, if somewhat oblique, commentary upon those texts examined earlier. Using the cloak of humour, Wodehouse appears able to speak directly about the relationship of the liberal-minded upper middle classes to the new clerk classes. Freed from the need to locate and account for the blighted clerk, adrift in the modern hell of London, Wodehouse was able, without liberal guilt, to map out the grounds of his alienation from the clerk class. While Wodehouse’s intuitive response understandably lacks a sense of the intellectual threat of the emerging class, it does delineate the anxiety of social


relationships between adjacent classes. Wodehouse’s hero Mike Jackson, forced from his public school into the New Asiatic Bank after his father’s financial reversals, is well placed to observe the vast gulf between the classes. An encounter with the vulgar Bristow, ‘one of Nature’s blighters’,30 provides some proof of this: Bristow is damned by a series of physical and verbal signifiers which furnish the narrative with a series of running gags: ‘detachable cuffs’ (118), ‘a small black moustache and a ring’ (118), ‘a fancy waistcoat’ (120), ‘a satin tie’ (170), ‘patent leather boots with white kid uppers’ (175), and inevitably clerkly slang (‘he habitually addressed Psmith as Smithy’ and ‘he called Mike “Mister Cricketer” ’ (119)). The real sense of a separation between classes is, however, only firmly established in an episode in which Mike accepts a Sunday supper invitation to the home of Waller, a fellow Cash Department clerk. Wodehouse’s description of the Sunday supper (‘[which] unless done on a large and informal scale, is probably the most depressing meal in existence’ (149)) gives his comedic talents full scope: he identifies ‘a chill discomfort in the round of beef’; a ‘blanc-mange’ which ‘shivers miserably’; and notes that ‘spirituous liquor helps to counteract the influence of these things, and so does exhilarating conversation. Unfortunately, at Mr. Waller’s table there was neither’ (149). But set apart from these typical Wodehousian remarks is a reflective paragraph to which the comedy offers a foil. Here the humour makes way for a serious assessment of ‘them’ and ‘us’: Mike, like most boys of his age, was never really happy and at ease except in the presence of those of his own years and class … . Mike was not a snob. He simply had not the ability to be at his ease with people in another class from his own. He did not know what to talk to them about, unless they were cricket professionals … . As regarded Mr. Waller, Mike liked him personally, and was prepared … to undertake considerable risks in his defence; but he loathed with all his heart and soul the idea of supper at his house. He knew that he would have nothing to say. (146–7) This serious admission reflects and refracts the tension evident in the work of the liberal-minded writers examined earlier. The lack of a more than superficial empathy for members of an adjacent class arguably led directly towards the confusion of values that bred Leonard Bast. Mike’s refusal to countenance his own snobbery is matched by those serious writers who similarly seemed bound to reveal this position in their texts. A later incident in Wodehouse’s novel involving Waller goes some way


towards confirming this commonality of attitude towards the Edwardian office worker. It occurs when Waller, like Galsworthy’s Falder, despairingly cashes a stolen cheque (again for humanitarian reasons) and subsequently allows Mike to take the blame. Again the clerk’s pathetic lack of inner resources (‘What can I do? I’m an old man. I can’t make another start. I am good for nothing’ (179)) is contrasted with Mike’s noble willingness to take the blame for somebody else’s crime. Taken together, these various examples of unmanly and degenerate clerks appear to provide a warning to those who might complacently accept Masterman’s optimistic assessment of the Suburbans. This climate of liberal anxiety about the changing social demographic of Britain is ironically critiqued by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Lost World (1912). Doyle, a writer who, as noted earlier, was receptive to the clerk’s cause, would presumably have warmed to Masterman’s advocacy, and recoiled, like Swinnerton, from the elitism evident in much contemporary ‘serious’ fiction.31 It is this elitism he gently pricks in the framing device he uses for his fantastic novel. Here Malone, a newspaper reporter, is inspired to join a potentially hazardous expedition when Gladys (the woman he loves) tells him that she could only love a man who would ‘look Death in the face and have no fear of him’.32 When he triumphantly returns to London to claim his prize, however, he is astonished to find himself supplanted by a ‘little ginger-haired man who was coiled up in the deep armchair which had once been sacred to my own use’ (187). Malone’s ire is fuelled by his successor Mr Potts’s over-familiar manner: ‘Have some refreshment,’ said the little man, and he added, in a confidential way, ‘It’s always like this, ain’t it? And must be unless you had polygamy, only the other way round; you understand.’ He laughed like an idiot, while I made for the door. (187) Impulsively, Malone returns to ask Potts a final question: ‘How did you do it? Have you searched for hidden treasure, or discovered a pole, or done time on a pirate, or flown the channel, or what? Where is the glamour of romance? How did you get it?’ He stared at me with a hopeless expression upon his vacuous, good-natured, scrubby little face … ‘Just one question,’ I cried. ‘What are you? What is your profession?’ ‘I am a solicitor’s clerk,’ said he. ‘Second man at Johnson and Merivale’s, 41, Chancery Lane.’ (188) Doyle’s conclusion, leaving Malone vanishing into the darkness with ‘grief and rage and laughter all simmering within [him] like a boiling


pot’, wryly and effectively captures the era’s tensions. The image of Potts, coiled up in the deep armchair supposedly intended for a more heroic being, seems to challenge the security of those who had attempted to reassure and convince themselves that society would and could not change. Realised here is the unpalatable truth that Bast might have married Helen Schlegel and in this way established himself at Howards End.

7 ‘A Merciful, Heaven-sent Release’?: The Clerk and the First World War

Without the advent of world war in August 1914, it is reasonable to assume that the figure of the clerk in English literature would have remained securely settled for the time being. Even with the spirited challenge of Frank Swinnerton’s modern office employees, the dominant image of the degenerate clerk appears unlikely to have undergone any short-term reassessment. A series of young Swinnertons chipping away at the stereotype might gradually have modernised the clerk’s place in the literary landscape, but this process was surely destined to be achieved over decades rather than years. After the outbreak of war, however, when the apparently meek, hollow-chested and morally fallible clerks formed the vanguard of Kitchener’s New Armies, pre-war certainties were swiftly destabilised. Those clerks who enlisted in the first weeks of the war were doing so, in part, to effect this destabilising process.1 Conscious of and sensitive to the injustice of the literary image of them that had developed since the 1890s, clerks relished the chance to convince detractors of their worth. J.B. Priestley, a clerk in a Bradford wool exporter’s firm, acknowledged this objective when he evaluated his motivation for enlisting in early September 1914: There came, out of the unclouded blue of that summer, a challenge that was almost like a conscription of the spirit, little to do really with King and Country and flag-waving and hip-hip-hurrah, a challenge to what we felt was our untested manhood. Other men, who had not lived as easily as we had, had drilled and marched and borne arms – couldn’t we? Yes, we too could leave home and soft beds and the girls to soldier for a spell, if there was some excuse for it, something at least to be defended. And here it was.2 Priestley’s perception of an individual response taking on the characteristics of a collective enterprise seems to explain the astonishing 123


success of the recruitment drive made by Kitchener at the onset of war. Rather than a moral desire to defend ‘gallant little Belgium’, which might have solicited a respectable though modest response (Priestley felt sorry for Belgium, but did not feel that ‘she was waiting for me to rescue her’),3 the more personal implications of the call accounted for its extraordinary effectiveness amongst the maligned clerks. The extent of this effectiveness can be assessed from the recruitment statistics. During the period from August 1914 to February 1916, when conscription was introduced, over half a million men, or 40.1 per cent of the total pre-war labour force, had enlisted from the finance and commerce section alone; this represented the biggest percentage of employees drawn from any of the major employment groups.4 We can confidently assume from these figures that by the time of conscription, the vast majority of able-bodied clerical workers under forty years of age had already volunteered their services. The patterns of recruitment evident in the South African War (as discussed in Chapter 5) were, therefore, repeated here but on an altogether larger scale. The preponderance of straw-boatered clerks seen in the photographs of enlistees assembling at recruiting stations in the first month of war offers a visual endorsement of the statistics. Arnold Bennett acknowledged the scale of the contribution in a review of Henry Williamson’s novel, The Patriot’s Progress (1930), in which he went as far as to argue that Williamson’s suburban clerk soldier might stand as a generic type: ‘The author has not drawn John Bullock as an individual. John Bullock is Everysoldier, and Everysoldier would have been an excellent title for the book.’5 It was a claim for a city clerk that, prior to August 1914 (and even allowing for the part they had played in the South African War), could only have been considered a tragicomic one. That Bennett might suggest it now, without irony, is indicative of the epoch-making changes that had occurred during the Great War. * * * In the first days of the war the clerk’s place in society had remained, from a literary perspective at least, where E.M. Forster had located it in his portrayal of Leonard Bast. The Prime Minister’s son, Herbert Asquith, illustrates the persistence of this image in ‘The Dead Volunteer’, which appeared in the Spectator on 8 August 1914: Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,

The Clerk and the First World War 125

Thinking that so his days would drift away With no lance broken in life’s tournament: But ever ‘twixt the books and his bright eyes The gleaming eagles of the legions came, And horsemen charging under phantom skies Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme. And now those waiting dreams are satisfied, For in the end he heard the bugle call, And to his country then he gave his all When in that first high hour of life he died. And falling thus, he wants no recompense Who found his battle in the last resort; Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.6 The image of the work-slave possessed of a degree of latent nobility (‘his bright eyes’) that can only be realised in death is, of course, a familiar one. Those Edwardian and early Georgian accounts of clerkly liberation from toil in the ‘city grey’ identified similar routes of emancipation. But rather than positing a watery grave, or the passive death in ‘adventure’ visited upon Bast, this glorious ending alongside the yeoman stock of Agincourt appears, from a patrician perspective, close to perfection. Asquith’s rallying cry to the clerks was, however, unlikely to inspire many undecided clerks to volunteer. The work of convincing clerks of their institutionalised inferiority, and thus their need to accept the chance for liberation, had already been achieved at length in the years prior to 1914. As I argued in Chapter 5, the debate regarding the health of volunteers for the South African War had intensified rather than diminished more general questions of clerkly fitness. R.C. Sherriff, like Priestley a pre-war junior clerk, confirms in his recollections of ‘joining up’ the redundancy of Asquith’s poem as a tool of persuasion. Coming to his London office directly from school at which he had been ‘captain of rowing and cricket, and record holder of the long jump in the sports’, Sherriff found his workplace ‘a demoralising come-down’. Like P.G.Wodehouse’s Mike Jackson, Sherriff recalls looking out of his office windows ‘at the smoke-grimed, suffocating buildings opposite’ while lamenting the loss of ‘the river and playing fields’. For Sherriff then, the war arrived not as an ominous black cloud, but instead as ‘a merciful, heaven-sent release’.7 Rather than offering the chance to prove something to others (as described by Priestley), the war for Sherriff was a golden opportunity to return to


the romantic idyll that his schooldays had come to represent during his time in the office. To these personal motivating factors was added the considerable piquancy offered by widespread predictions of the potential brevity of the conflict. The fear that the war might end before, in the thoughts of Williamson’s fictional John Bullock, ‘he saw some of the fun’ (7), propelled the frantic rush to enlist. This stampede was similarly fuelled by the impression that the chance was to be taken now or never; another post-war novel sums up the prevailing mood, proclaiming that the conflict provided an ‘opportunity, single and unrepeated, for distinction and fame!’8 For Kitchener, in his drive to build the New Army from scratch, these factors conjoined to provide the perfect conditions for the rapid accomplishment of his objective. Apart from these imperatives, several other reasons more specific to the office environment ensured that clerks were at the forefront of the successful recruitment drive. Of central importance here was the composition and structure of personnel in large urban offices. These working environments provided the perfect stock and breeding farms for the production of young soldiers. The relative youth and unmarried status of much of the workforce, and the ease with which these employees could be replaced by substitute female labour, were undoubtedly key factors here. For the army, however, a more important consideration was the ease with which business offices were able to supply the ideal physical specimens for soldiering. Ironically, in view of the pre-war literary obsession with their hollow chests, curved spines and weak hearts, supposedly ‘degenerate’ clerks proved at medical assessments to be of generally superior health to their working class urban counterparts: Jay Winter comments that ‘bank clerks or estate agents’, for example, were ‘better-fed, healthier, and by and large more able to stand the rigours of army life’.9 This fitness, honed at city sports clubs and gymnasia, could be maintained during the working day in the relatively healthy environment of the business office.10 To these fit and healthy clerks, unencumbered by the demands of a reserved occupation, the opportunity to become one of the 100,000 soldiers of Kitchener’s New Army was understandably the primary topic of conversation during the war’s first days. The departmental structure of the modern office facilitated this intense discussion of current events and proved a crucial element in propelling the clerk from speculation into definite action. The qualities of team spirit which the commercial departments had been keen to inspire (in, for example, their support for team sports and social groups) helped to foster the form of group mentality that would result in clerks joining-up en masse. Clerks witnessing their ‘heroic’ colleagues enlisting


would understandably feel considerable pressure to follow their lead. The novelist R.H. Mottram remembered that during the first week of war, at least eight of the clerks in his branch of Barclays Bank in Norwich wore red armbands to show that they had enlisted.11 This unprecedented phenomenon in the business community appears to have caused much anxiety amongst office managers who could foresee, in the words of one City clerk who walked out to enlist with a dozen of his colleagues, that ‘nothing but chaos would follow such a depletion of his staff’.12 Elsewhere, these concerns were further exacerbated by the formation of Pals’ battalions, which were recruited specifically from amongst office workers. The logic behind recruitment of this kind is illustrated in the following passage taken from the Hull Daily Mail dated 1 September 1914: Today has seen the commencement of recruiting for the middle-class, clerks, and professional men, or the ‘black-coated battalion’. It must not be thought there is a desire for class distinction, but just as the docker will feel more at home amongst his every day mates, so the wielders of the pen and drawing pencil will be better as friends together.13 The success of this marketing, which capitalised on pre-war class factionalism, is witnessed in the raising of the first battalion of Hull Commercials in four days, followed by a further two battalions within a month. In addition to those staff who impulsively enlisted in groups, urban offices also lost those clerks who, as members of the territorial forces, were immediately mobilised at the outbreak of war. Phillip Maddison, the central character in Henry Williamson’s autobiographical roman-fleuve, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951–69), finds himself in this position in August 1914.14 The immense detail and extraordinary recall that Williamson employs in How Dear is Life (1954) (HDIL), the volume dealing with Maddison’s transition from clerk to soldier, sheds light on this experience. It illustrates the ways in which Maddison, a meek and unheroic young clerk in the Moon Fire Office (a fictionalised version of Williamson’s own clerkship in the Sun Fire Insurance Company) had joined the territorials, in common with thousands of other clerks, purely to take advantage of its significant perquisites. Maddison, once a member, is able to enjoy the facilities of ‘a top-hole club, with no subscription’,15 and in addition, the prospect of a fortnight’s army camp each year, taken as paid leave, with an extra shilling a day as soldier’s


pay. As a youth with little interest in world affairs, Maddison remains, until the outbreak of war, relatively unconcerned about the commitment which his territorial membership brings. Williamson’s evocation of Maddison’s experience conveys a sense of the insularity of the City clerk’s world, an impression shared by both fictional and non-fictional accounts of the life of the pre-war clerk: ‘What happened in the big world outside his private world, Phillip little knew nor cared. He never read the main items of news in the ha’penny paper’ (HDIL 78). This lack of comprehension regarding the implications of his position is further exposed in Maddison’s response to his aunt who enquires about his potential mobilisation: ‘The Terriers are home defence, you know. We’re really more a sort of club than anything else’ (HDIL 113). When war is declared and the order for General Mobilisation of the territorial soldiers is made, Maddison’s feelings are curiously mixed: he expresses on the one hand a desire, like Sheriff, for the romance and escape offered by war; and on the other hand, a fear of the ‘vast, fathomless darkness’ which, for him, is condensed into images of ragged armless soldiers walking ‘listlessly, from nowhere to nowhere’ (HDIL 116–17). For Maddison, in spite of his reservations, there is no choice about his entry into the conflict. Indeed on the day war breaks out, he and his fellow territorial clerks have already submitted to the inevitability of martial life: ‘Almost every one of a hundred thousand faces under straw-hats undulating on the pavements of London Bridge bore a look of new resolution … . Feeling themselves to be marching, they crossed London Bridge’ (HDIL 131). But even for those clerks uncommitted by either a pre-war obligation, or a more immediate desire to enlist, it was evidently difficult to resist the call to arms. The pressures placed on clerks to enlist prior to the introduction of conscription in 1916 are illustrated in Herbert Tremaine’s (Maude Deuchar’s) overlooked pacifist novel The Feet of the Young Men (1917). This work focuses on the experiences of a young and ambitious estate agent’s clerk, Harry Manwell, for whom the war provides no inspiration and little incentive to trade his comfortable, relaxed office for ‘a wild whirling struggle’.16 Whilst the army barracks, close to his office, offer him a constant reminder of the country’s state of war, the marching soldiers exist only in the background of his life: ‘they were subdued in his consciousness to frame the vividness of daily life in the Manwells’ cottage and in Bliss’s office’ (21). This isolation is, however, challenged by his employer (Mr Bliss), who after attending a recruiting speech in the Town Hall, returns to inform Manwell that he ‘oughtn’t to be here’ (13). The argument that convinced Mr Bliss to give Manwell notice to quit is repeated by Bliss to


justify his actions to his clerk: Well, as [the recruiting speaker] said, what’s to prevent the women doing their bit, too – taking the places for the men? And the employers ought to be willing, as their bit, to train those women and to have patience if things don’t go exactly – well, not exactly on oiled wheels … he put it to the employers they oughtn’t – just for the sake of the smooth running of their business, and the profits and so on – they oughtn’t to keep back any men who might be in training for the front. (18) Later, Eva (the office typist) reveals to Manwell her suspicions that Bliss’s real reasons for taking a female clerk in his place are economic rather than patriotic: ‘ “Cheaper!” Eva said bitterly’ (40). Manwell, seeing through Bliss’s disingenuous argument, remains determined not to enlist, even after his dismissal from the office. His genuine indifference, tempered with a ‘deliberate intellectual detachment’ is hardened by a growing sense of externally imposed compulsion to conform. This feeling of detachment allows Manwell to observe objectively his fellow clerks, whom he believes to be mesmerised by the myth growing around the noble ‘Tommy’: ‘what a dare-devil he was, what a brick he was, how the girls all went mad about him’ (31). Too wise to believe this propaganda, for him the army is instead ‘a great cephalopod’ whose ‘long sucker-provided arms’ are attempting ‘to make a clammy clutch at [his] life’ (24). This stand is, however, seen to become progressively more difficult to maintain. Manwell’s initial optimism that ‘he would be sure to fall into one of those decent ordinary posts left vacant by those normal clerks who had exchanged their respectable shabby greys and brown and blacks for khaki’ (27), proves unfounded. His later decision to reduce his sights to enable him to apply for porters’ and shopmens’ jobs is equally fruitless: at an unsuccessful interview for the post of tramway manager, Manwell is asked the ubiquitous question ‘Have you offered your services to your country?’ (63). After a year of miserable unemployment, with his savings gone and additional public pressure placed on him following a Zeppelin raid on his town, Manwell finally succumbs to enlistment. With his ‘pride in his intelligence’ (160) dulled by his recent experience, there is a sense of relief in submission: There was a luxurious sort of pleasure in surrender to the browngreen monster which had got a hold of him at last. To struggle any longer would have been too much for the strength of an ordinary


man, a clerk who indeed had the Dumb Literary Temperament, but who had no heavy clogging principles nor theories of life … . To sell himself body and soul … seemed to him the only way to get sound boots and warm clothes and to secure a little weekly sum for his mother. (163) Manwell’s acquaintance with the theories that might have prolonged his resolve arrive too late to be of any practical effect. His encounter with the anti-conscriptionist Red Flag Socialist Party, though greatly impressing him, takes place only after his enlistment. Membership of this group, initially rejected by the clerk for fear of having to pay a subscription, would, anyway, merely have delayed a post-conscription (February 1916) army career. Although Tremaine’s novel is a polemical work, the rare glimpse it affords us of eroded resistance on the home front is of considerable interest. Its existence (taken together with Williamson’s delineation of Phillip Maddison’s emotional turmoil at the onset of war) offers a necessary counterweight to the more familiar clerkly tale of enthusiastic escape from dull routine. These fictional accounts offer us a glimpse of the sorts of pressures that were placed on office workers to enlist prior to enforced conscription. While we clearly need to remain sceptical about treating these sources as reliable evidence for social history, they do provide clues as to the reasons why almost the entire population of young and healthy British clerks were transformed – at their own behest – into soldiers in the first half of the war. Tremaine’s admittedly emotive image of Manwell (who will soon be killed in the trenches) in uniform encapsulates the pathetic shift from business suit into khaki uniform: ‘his walk was no longer the quick, light tread of the young business clerk. His feet fell regularly and heavily now – left – right – left – right … .’ (198). * * * The literature – both fictional and non-fictional – that attempts to convey the clerk’s initial experience of army life understandably concentrates on the extent to which the war forced together individuals from diverse backgrounds. That this phenomenon should provide such a source of fascination both for those involved in the process, and for those observing from outside, was conditioned by the seemingly strict lines of division that separated pre-war urban social groups. When C.F.G. Masterman offered his system of classification for the different strata of society in The Condition of England in 1909, he acknowledged


the extent to which the tribal nature of the modern city had separated the suburb-dwelling clerks from their inner-city neighbours: Every day, swung high upon embankments or buried deep in tubes underground, he [‘The Suburban’] hurries through the region where the creature [‘The Multitude’] lives. He gazes darkly from his pleasant hill villa upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled tenements which stretches at his feet. He is dimly distrustful of the forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every hour he anticipates the boiling over of the cauldron. He would never be surprised to find the crowd behind the red flag, surging up his little pleasant pathways, tearing down the railings, trampling the little garden.17 While we need to treat Masterman’s rhetoric with caution (particularly when we remember that many Suburbans had only recently emerged from among the ranks of the Multitude), the general atmosphere of disharmony and distrust that he describes between these classes did exist in some degree. Some five years after Masterman’s account was published, however, the suburban clerk was marching alongside the abyss-dwelling ‘creature’, united in a common cause. R.H. Mottram offers a typical recollection of these unprecedented events through the recollections of his bank clerk-turned-soldier Stephen Dormer, in the final volume of The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924–26). Drawing on his own experience of volunteering, Mottram, through his fictional clerk, recalls the diverse social mixture represented in the occupations of his training troop; these encompass labourers, clerks (in ascending order of rank from warehouses, railways, insurance offices, banks, and ‘one gorgeous individual who signed himself a Civil Servant’), and persons of private means. Mottram imagines this group overlooking pre-war enmities, and instead marching forward together, ‘the immense disparity of taste and outlook cloaked by shoddy blue uniforms and dummy rifles, equal rations and common fatigues’.18 Similarly, C.E. Montague’s non-fiction work Disenchantment (1922), an early text charting the increasingly negative reactions of the troops to the war, begins with the optimism engendered by the egalitarianism of a recruitment inspired by ‘one clear aim’: Here were hundreds of thousands of quite commonplace persons rendered, by comradeship in an enthusiasm, self denying, cheerful, unexacting, sanely exalted, substantially good … . Little white, prim clerks from Putney – men whose souls were saturated with the


consciousness of class – would abdicate freely and wholeheartedly their sense of the wide, unplumbed, estranging seas that ought to roar between themselves and Covent Garden market porters.19 Although Montague invokes here the pre-war stereotype of the prim Putney clerk, the impression he offers of prejudice eroded under extraordinary circumstances appears authentic. While it would be folly to assume that old partiality was entirely erased by the emergency, we can similarly appreciate that, under these circumstances, opinions long conditioned by reflex were undermined.20 It is, however, also apparent that the more lasting repercussions of this softening of class prejudice took time to take effect. Indeed, following the near euphoria of the first days, the effect of intimate association with those whose standards of social behaviour were perceived as debased appears, to some extent, to have confirmed previously imagined prejudices. Williamson’s fictional alter ego Phillip Maddison, for example, retains the class snobbery learned at his grammar school throughout his basic training. Convinced of his innate superiority over recruits from the working class, he describes fellow territorials with slight cockney accents, who occupy an adjacent tent, as ‘Leytonstone Louts’, Leytonstone being ‘a district he knew only from the many renewal notices he had made out’ and from a fellow clerk’s ‘remark about it being a ghastly place to live in’ (HDIL 181). But once in the trenches, during the Battle of Ypres, his fear of imminent death consigns these enduring prejudices to an unenlightened past. Maddison’s new perspective is conditioned by the kindness of the working class soldiers and their willingness to ‘help the newcomers’ (HDIL 296). His initial reservations about fighting alongside professional soldiers (who in peacetime he had considered on a par with ‘street-walkers’) is overcome to a point where he can later reflect that ‘the warm and comradely strength, and the security it gave to be among the regulars, was what kept him going’ (HDIL 309). Maddison’s appreciation of the irrelevance of pre-war social boundaries when tested under these extreme conditions also appears to have been a two-way process. Frank Richards, a pre-war regular soldier and sometime coal miner, illustrates, in Old Soldiers Never Die (1933), how the music-hall image of the clerk was, for the working classes, capable of disruption in battle. He describes how, in March 1917, his battalion had received amongst a new intake a bank clerk, schoolteachers and an architect. Presumably, at first dubious about their potential, Richards was later moved to remark that ‘during the time the bank clerk had been


with the Battalion he had seen much and endured much and become a pukka old soldier in action’.21 This testimonial constitutes a high accolade from an old campaigner whose pre-war impression of a clerk’s fighting ability is easy to envisage. Richards’ memoirs, compiled a dozen years after the war’s end, further suggest the enduring quality of impressions of worth formulated under extreme conditions. Alongside the wartime demystification of the working class, the clerks were also able to gain a similar window into the world of the professional and upper classes. Individuals viewed indistinctly before the war as names in society columns, characters in novels, or more closely as respected clients were, for the duration of the war, locked together with their former servants in the democracy of the battlefield. This process had begun at the recruiting grounds, with clerks like Williamson’s John Bullock in The Patriot’s Progress (1930) impressed at the close proximity into which the war had brought these formerly distant beings:22 In front of John Bullock marched a real gentleman – John knew he was that, because he wore a top-hat, like some of the rich directors of the other companies in the building, in whose presence he had always felt subdued and inferior. Now he spoke to the top-hatted gentleman with friendly ease, and even offered him a cigarette. (12) But after this initial glimpse of the democratic possibilities of war, the public-school-educated recruits were largely separated from the ranks to enable them to take up commissions. Thus, in the war’s early phase, the class lines dividing the lower middle classes from those above were re-established in the new division between officers and men. This, we assume, would replicate the peacetime norm, with the clerk, trained to offer due deference to an affluent or aristocratic customer, seamlessly transferring that respect to a university-educated officer. Williamson’s Phillip Maddison illustrates this resumption of roles in his relationship to the company’s superiors: The company officers … were from that other world, high above him. Their faces were different from those of ordinary people. They looked cleaner, somehow, although not all of them were good-looking. Many of them, he imagined, lived in Park Lane, and, until the war, their hats were faultless Lincoln Bennetts. No doubt they drank champagne with their evening dinners in expensive hotels of the West End. (HDIL 155)


The illusion of the officers as demi-gods was, however, unsustainable in warfare. Following catastrophic casualties amongst Infantry Officers during the first months of the war, the authorities reluctantly acknowledged that replacements, who lacked the social pedigrees traditionally associated with military commissions, would be urgently required. At this stage many clerks applied for and received the promotions that offered them parity of rank with the sons of the aristocracy. That the black-coated workers were to form so significant a proportion of the temporary commissions awarded after the Spring of 1915 is, with hindsight, unsurprising. Their standards of education, typically far beyond those of their working-class counterparts, married to the ambition for social mobility traditionally bred in business offices, made the clerks ideal and willing substitutes.23 Martin Petter indeed argues with ‘some certainty’ that the largest single element of wartime officers ‘came from what Masterman called “the suburbans” ’.24 But those numerous clerks who took up commissions did so in the express knowledge that their new status was good for the duration of the war only. This sense of the impermanence of their elevation is reflected in the term ‘temporary gentlemen’ with which they became indelibly branded.25 It was a formulation that encapsulated economically the sense of reluctant compromise forced on the establishment by the emergency. A mean-spirited term, it carried with it the hope that rigid class boundaries would again be established after the war, at which time the gentlemanly licences would be revoked. But both the temporary officers and their detractors must have realised, as the war dragged on, that there would be considerable difficulties in effecting this later reversal, at least to the extent that the reversal would mean a return to the sort of pre-war subservience towards a social ‘superior’ that Williamson had illustrated in his characterisation of Phillip Maddison. The liberating effect of living (and dying) with those of a higher peacetime social rank, whilst subject to the relative equality provided by combat, was inevitably calculated to be an irreversible process. Ernest Raymond’s novel The Old Tree Blossomed (1928) offers a useful account of the effect of a swift elevation in social status on a pre-war clerical worker. Raymond, himself a pre-war clerk, depicts the career of Stephen Gallimore, who until 1914 had, like his father, worked in the office of a London department store. Gallimore, at 30, after 13 years’ clerical experience, has resigned himself to his existence as a three-poundsa-week clerk living (with his waitress wife) in two rooms in the suburbs. But with the coming of war Stephen sees the chance to transform his prospects. In an echo of Priestley’s non-fictional account of his


motivation for volunteering, Stephen is described as unconscious ‘of any nobility or self-sacrifice in thus going to the wars; such things seemed the opposite of war’s gift to him; for he saw only the opportunity’ (184). Swiftly taking this opportunity in the form of an early commission, Stephen is able to enjoy the various perquisites of his new status, experiencing, for example, the privileges of an Officers’ Mess where deferential orderlies sped to his summons; of an officer’s first class travelling; of an officer’s personal servant; of all the London clubs of which an officer was an honorary member; and of the ladies an officer might be expected to meet. (199) The attraction of these entitlements is placed in particular relief when Gallimore returns home on his first post-commission leave. Here he receives ‘dull blows of shame’ at his house’s ‘narrow dingy hall’, at his ‘lodgers coming in and going out’, and at his wife’s need to work hard ‘in her scullery’ (200). The increasing estrangement from his wife is further symbolised in their diverging reading matter; whilst his wife enjoys ‘Polly’s Paper, Price 1d’ and ‘Fanny’s Threepenny Fiction’, Stephen ‘had been reading the highest literature under an inspiration from one of the Birminghams’ officers’ (204). Raymond juxtaposes Stephen’s two worlds to suggest the growing sense of distance from his former existence which the peacetime clerk encounters. Unable to relax at home, it is with feelings of immense relief that Gallimore returns to his officer training camp, and significantly, he makes a subsequent decision to spend a future period of leave at the Sussex country home of a fellow officer.26 Whilst the account of Gallimore’s experience is understandably coloured by Raymond’s evidently negative feelings towards the suburban clerk’s life, his account of Stephen’s displacement does offer a reasoned imaginative engagement with the officer’s dilemma. The vast gap between life on a clerk’s limited salary, and that lived with access to the trappings of affluence that accompanied the officer’s uniform, was undoubtedly destined to provide a sense of considerable social disorientation. A similar sense of the problems created by a potentially rapid social advancement during wartime is captured in Williamson’s account of Phillip Maddison’s experiences of promotion. Maddison, having survived the battle of Ypres, in common with most of the remnants of his battalion, applies for and receives a temporary commission. To complete his officer training he is sent to a territorial county regiment, where pre-war ideas of soldiering are, as yet, unaffected by wartime conditions. This atmosphere, carefully maintained by a battalion commander used to approving his


junior officers for their connections with the county, is an uncomfortable one for Maddison. Lacking the established middle-class connections of his fellow junior officers and marked out as a representative of one of the ‘ “band-box” establishments of the New Armies’,27 the former clerk is keenly aware of his outsider status. Reactions toward Maddison range from the puzzlement of the colonel who, unfamiliar with his new officer’s grammar school, attempts to place him socially through other means: ‘was there a hint of Kent, or was it Cockney, in some of his vowels?’ (AFUMC 165); to the overt hostility of his fellow trainees who, having variously described him as a ‘young tick’, a ‘damned outsider’, and a ‘blasted little Cockney’ with ‘abominable manners’ (AFUMC 171, 174, 187), attempt to force him to resign his commission. These reactions to his presence encourage Maddison to reflect, like Raymond’s Gallimore, that his new status has left him in an uncomfortable space between old and new lives: ‘he was a sort of mongrel, a half-and-half person’ (AFUMC 77).28 Maddison’s unhappy isolation, exacerbated by his ignorance of public school codes of behaviour, contrasts revealingly with his experience amongst the infantry in France. It is only when Maddison is again in combat, during the Battle of Loos, that he is able to witness the relaxing of the snobbish attitudes which had proved such an integral part of his training. In a direct parallel with his experience amongst working-class regulars, Maddison senses an evaporation of class consciousness whilst in extreme danger. This is evident in the novel when, as a combat-hardened veteran, Maddison again encounters the snobbish officers of the county regiment who have recently arrived from England. In combat, those pre-existing attitudes towards Maddison’s inferiority are instantly cast aside in the knowledge that the veteran’s familiarity with the battlefield offers a potential lifeline to them as newcomers. Maddison’s assistance is indirectly acknowledged by the regiment’s commander, who later conceeds that it was a pity that Maddison had ‘never been to school’ (AFUMC 386). If we can consider this shaking-up of old social boundaries a potential dividend of the war, we can equally recognise positive benefits in Williamson’s evocation of Maddison’s rapidly growing confidence and maturity. Later, as his relative longevity (coupled with a high casualty rate amongst fellow officers) ensures that Maddison wins further rapid promotion, his transformation from an awkward and timid youth into an authoritative leader is complete. This induces recognition of Maddison’s changing perception of himself: Strange thoughts of his new self passed in his mind; he was commanding men; he was one of those superior beings to whom men


looked, as having power over their lives. It was a surprising thought that he, Phillip Maddison, could stand up to real officers like Captain West, M.C.; could speak to staff officers as an equal. How remote seemed his old self, that used to feel small in the presence of such people as Captain Whale, Major Fridkin, and Lieutenant Brendon, who had remarked, with slight contempt, ‘As a soldier, Maddison is in that state known as non est.’ (AFUMC 302) In his early twenties, Maddison had therefore undergone an education, contingent on his rapid assumption of authority, unavailable to him in peacetime. An army rank may for these volunteers have been, according to a familiar army expression, ‘for the duration only’, but this sense of impermanence could not extend to personal development. This is particularly evident in Maddison’s feelings of equality with those ‘superiors’ of whom he had once been in awe. Later volumes of the Chronicle witness his ease of familiarity with those once-distant individuals who, only months earlier, would undoubtedly have overawed him: by late 1915, for example, Maddison reflects, whilst staying with a fellow officer at his country house, ‘what wonderful people he had met, owing to the war!’29 That a more widespread feeling of permanent change was developing amongst the surviving temporary officer clerks is also suggested by R.H. Mottram’s Stephen Dormer in The Spanish Farm Trilogy. In this novel sequence, the former bank clerk’s impressions of the army as a form of alternative university anticipate those of Maddison: ‘He had become during the three years that had contained for him an education that he could not otherwise have got in thirty, a more instructed person’ (735–6). But in contrast to Maddison, whose experiences effect a radical alteration in his character and outlook, Mottram’s clerk’s new confidence primarily offers instead an affirmation of, and a fresh perspective on, his pre-existing worth. This manifests itself in the sense that, from Mottram’s perspective, Dormer does not substantially develop from his connection with the army, as much as the army is immeasurably strengthened from the contribution of Dormer and those like him. The novels of the Trilogy in this way offer an unashamed celebration of those undemonstrative qualities possessed by the clerk, qualities which had, prior to 1914, regularly proved a source of mockery in literature. An impression of a changing perception of these qualities is conveyed in Mottram’s constant references to Dormer’s conservatism and resoluteness: he is described variously as possessing a ‘tidy mind’ (616), a ‘precise and town-bred spirit’ (620), ‘no superfluous imagination’ (729), a


‘detached, civilian mind’ (607); and of being ‘mild and quiet-mannered’ (740), and capable of distinguishing ‘himself at [routine] by his thoroughness and care’ (658). Rather than indicating here that Dormer is a dull and plodding soul, these characteristics, in the context of war, proffer a much-needed solidity and reliability. Both in battle, and behind the lines as a temporary captain attached to Divisional Headquarters dealing with civilian liaison and troop morale, Dormer’s quiet steadfastness is highly prized. Mottram’s portrayal of Dormer suggests that he and his ilk represent the epitome of a modern yeoman breed. His character is, therefore, calculated to represent the antithesis of those degenerate and morally fallible Edwardian clerks discussed in Chapter 6. Dormer is, Mottram’s omniscient narrator suggests, typical of an undervalued stock that had emerged from the period of the ‘history of the world that mattered’; it was an epoch that had begun only ‘after the battle of Waterloo, with Commerce and Banking, Railway and Telegraph, the Education and Ballot Acts’ (719). The war, much as it had created carnage on an unparalleled scale, Mottram implies, might also offer the country an opportunity to reassess the generation that Dormer represented. Mottram implies that this reassessment should take into account not only that steadiness of temperament which kept afloat the British army in France, but also the new yeoman stock’s refusal to countenance those mutinous thoughts that had surfaced during the conflict. These feelings are concentrated in the following reflections on Dormer, which typify the novel’s prevailing philosophy: He was no revolutionary. No one was further than he from being one. He only hated Waste. He had been brought up and trained to business, in an atmosphere of methodical neatness, of carefully foreseen and forestalled risks. Rather than have recourse to revolution he would go on fighting the Boche. It was so much more real. (716–17) Dormer’s conservative thoughts, evoked here after he is a witness to the Etaples mutiny, suggest the reasons why the potential for an escalation of unrest among the British Army failed to materialise. Rather than anticipating the rejection of his former life on return from the war (as Williamson’s Maddison did), Mottram’s Dormer instead looks forward to its resumption with increased relish. Pre-war England, represented for him by ‘real proper tea’ and ‘tea-cakes’, ‘the Choral Society’, ‘the local theatre’, and ‘Vestry or Trust meetings’, offered pleasures that the war had thrown into relief. These suburban treats and employments, so often the targets of satirists, made for Dormer ‘a fitting


termination to a day which he had always felt to be well filled at a good, safe, and continuous job, that would go on until he reached a certain age, when it culminated in a pension, a job that was worth doing, that he could do, and that the public appreciated’ (664). Dormer’s honourable participation in the war seemed to offer Mottram a licence now to record these pleasures without qualification. Prior to 1914, characters who stood up for, or merely represented suburban life, appeared to require an apology for their existence: examples might include Robert Thorne’s wish that ‘someone more capable’ had taken his story in hand;30 or Keble Howard’s ‘Note of Warning’, prefacing The Smiths of Surbiton, that ‘if you happen to be a Superior Person, you will not like this story’.31 Mottram’s post-war confidence in presenting his clerk without comic or tragic adornment represents a breakthrough in the literary representation of members of his class. Quite apart from Swinnerton’s youthful ambitious clerks, Dormer represented a sort of Everyman figure whose conservative inclinations and reliability had (until now) rarely found a literary stage uncoloured by comedy. * * * Even for Mottram himself, however, the peace finally achieved in November 1918 brought with it a sense of anti-climax. The newfound feelings of worth discovered in uniform (and later imaginatively reworked in his characterisation of Dormer) were not immediately transferable into civilian life. Indeed, when Mottram himself returned to his branch of Barclays Bank his impression was of being welcomed back from a brief holiday rather than five years of sacrifice: Everyone was very nice, but I had just sense enough not to talk about my experiences, or expect any exceptional treatment and to behave as if August 1914 had been the month before, for I did dimly grasp that those of us who had been out in Flanders or farther were not nearly so sick and tired of it all as those who had been kept at home.32 Whilst Mottram’s temperament allowed him resignedly to resume his old occupation, other clerks, such as Williamson, found that the civilian blindness to their wartime transformation made thoughts of a return to the office stool impossible. The need to submit to demobbing might have been prepared for by temporary officers who had looked forward to the resumption of their civilian lives, but the process of being ‘de-officered’, as Mottram termed it, was another matter. This implicit procedure


appeared to demand that the wartime commission holder should hand in his experience, education and hard won self-esteem, along with his pistol. Although the desire to efface a healthy resource of confidence and leadership skills appears a baffling instinct, there can be little doubt that more traditional employers and a significant section of the public wished to ensure that the ‘de-officering’ process was respected and adhered to by the former ‘temporary gentlemen’. Martin Petter’s excellent article, ‘ “Temporary Gentlemen” in the Aftermath of the Great War: Rank, Status and the Ex-Officer Problem’, identifies various individuals who attempted to police the process. Amongst the most insistent of these controlling voices was that of H.F. Maltby, whose successful play A Temporary Gentleman, staged in 1919, was written in response to what he perceived as the problem of post-war resettlement. He outlined this motivation in his autobiography: I had often wondered where some of our officers and V.A.D. girls came from; they were so obviously lower-middle class and suburban and gave themselves such airs and graces. I wondered what would happen to them when the war was over, I could see a terrible de-bunking before them.33 Maltby’s play, which was (according to him) the product of altruism, depicted Walter Hope, a former junior warehouse clerk who had gained a wartime commission in the Royal Army Service Corps. On his return to civilian life he had, in Maltby’s formulation, ‘ideas above his station’ which ‘unfitted him for any useful livelihood’. This led to Hope becoming ‘out of work because he [was] too swollen-headed to go back to his old job’.34 Maltby’s conclusion sees the clerk’s untenable position eventually revealed to him, and witnesses his subsequent return to a more ‘realistic’ outlook which allows him to become a commercial traveller. The play also concurrently records his move from courting his former employer’s daughter to a more ‘reasonable’ engagement to a housemaid. The plot’s parabola and evident success (it became a film in 1920) indicates the resumption of a significant strain of pre-war thinking that looked forward to a return to the status quo; Petter’s research uncovered the breadth of this thinking, revealing for example the reaction to the play of the Manchester Guardian’s critic, who had considered its conclusion, an ‘admirably worked-out solution to [Hope’s] difficulties … . [That] he shall in a word “buckle to” … and do his best in some employment open to him in his pre-war status as clerk.’35


Elsewhere, those who had participated in the war tended to be more sympathetic to their fellow veterans, appreciating the considerable problems of resettlement which war service had brought about. Such individuals tellingly included temporary officers such as Richard Aldington, a pre-war University student and poet who considered that Maltby’s play dangerously oversimplified the problems of the clerk returning to a defamiliarised environment. Aldington here discusses his feelings after attending A Temporary Gentleman: I beheld a demobilised officer so conceited about having held His Majesty’s Commission that he refused to know his old friends and considered ordinary jobs beneath him … . The travesty was bitterly unjust. Already, ex-officers were tramping the streets looking for any job, and within months thousands of them were sleeping in Hyde Park, absolutely destitute.36 The support of Aldington – who later wrote a short story ‘The Case of Lieutenant Hall’, centring on the suicide of a demobbed officer who had seen Maltby’s play – and others in exposing the injustice of the ‘deofficering’ process gained ground in the years following the war.37 As more of those who had survived began to write of their experiences, the full naivété and injustice of Maltby’s play became exposed. It is perhaps reductive to argue that the generation that had fought together as temporary officers during the war formed a loose brotherhood united by survival rather than class. But even the most sceptical of critics must recognise some degree of truth in this admittedly grand assumption. Alan Thomas’s novel The Lonely Years (1930) certainly suggests the sense of a new egalitarianism which looked to counter the patronising depiction of the returning officer in Maltby’s A Temporary Gentleman. Thomas’s central character John Penrose differs from Walter Hope in that his pre-war background is more typical of the traditional officer class, but following his demobilisation as a temporary Captain, Penrose’s financial circumstances leave him with little choice but to rearrange his peacetime life. Unlike Hope, however, who is too selfimportant to accept lesser work, Penrose pragmatically accepts a post at the Bell Insurance Company in Bishopsgate. Penrose’s stoicism in accepting a ‘fifty bob a week’ clerk’s post after having served as a wartime Company Commander is sensitively handled by Thomas. One senses, in the ex-officer’s reflection ‘I’m not complaining … . I’m lucky to have a job at all these days’, a closer understanding of the post-war


scene than that suggested by Maltby’s bumptious Hope.38 Thomas counterbalances Penrose’s acceptance of his lot with the delineation of events within the office that illustrate the arguably inequitable nature of the character’s situation. Penrose is, for example, at 26, and after developing leadership skills, expected to remain patiently in line for promotion behind those too young to fight. Told by his patronising boss not to run before he can walk (226) and that he should be patiently ‘absorbing the routine of the office’ (228), Penrose is moved to silently recall: ‘I was running – running over the top – while you were sitting in that chair!’ (226). When Penrose does eventually speak to his manager about his frustrations, his impatience is criticised and his war experience dismissed as an irrelevance: ‘The work’s the same, it’s you fellers that are different. You don’t seem to be able to settle down. You’ve got no patience … . You’ve got to remember that you’re not the only one. There are hundreds – thousands, in fact – like you. And what you’ve got to do now, is to try and forget the war – ’ What we’ve got to do! [thought John] We! Forget! ‘Forget the war, and settle down to the routine of daily life.’ (226) Thomas suggests that Penrose’s inability to achieve this sort of tactical amnesia is not indicative of the innate superiority of an individual forced down the social scale by family reversals, it is more because his war experiences have left him, and others, a ‘fragment of the old order, incapable of fitting into the new!’ (243). It is ultimately and ironically the ‘positive handicap’ (229) of his army service that ensures he leaves the office for an uncertain future. The pessimism evident in this fictional account of civilian indifference to hard-won potential was, to some extent, tempered by its very articulation. Aldington, Thomas and others, in issuing their support to those returning to office work, ensured that the process of mental ‘deofficering’ might be exposed and checked. And in addition to those new voices emerging from the war, and thus keenly aware of injustice to their fellows, there were other less likely advocates. Amongst these was John Galsworthy, whose patrician characterisation of the clerk Falder in his play Justice (1910) had epitomised the pre-war liberal humanist perspective on this group.39 Now, in his Forsyte Saga novel The White Monkey (1924), Galsworthy was prepared, in the character of Butterfield, to suggest a small but significant change in attitude towards those of the clerk class. Initially Butterfield does appear to duplicate the ineffectuality of


Falder, being described as ‘commonplace’, ‘modest looking’, and as one ‘who made [his] living out of self-suppression and respectability’.40 But later Michael Mont, the publisher and poet, is moved to see in Butterfield something more than what Jolyon Forsyte had described as ‘a pale martyr with his shirt on fire’ (192). Revealingly, this occurs after Mont has established his feelings of fraternity with Butterfield following a commonplace observation: ‘From your moustache, you were in the war, I suppose, like me?’ After this establishment of connection, Mont can, ‘as between fellow-sufferers’ (201), accept that a sense of perfect trust will exist between him and his future employee. This trust encourages Mont both to employ Butterfield, and to offer his example to his father-in-law, Soames Forsyte, as proof that the war has permanently changed society. Butterfield, who in modern terms would be considered a ‘whistle-blower’ for his decision to inform against Elderson (a corrupt former employer), has in Mont’s view, acquired the steeliness required for this act through the experience he had gained during the war. While Mont admits to Soames Forsyte that the war ‘took the lynch-pins out of the cart’, he also enthusiastically reflects that ‘it did give you an idea of the grit there is about, when it comes to being up against it … . Look at young Butterfield, the other day … going over the top, to Elderson!’ (276–7). A further indication of Galsworthy’s belief in this shifting assessment is observed in Reveille, a magazine for disabled soldiers and sailors, which he edited from August 1918. Here, in an article entitled ‘The Ex-Officer Problem’, published in February 1919 (and therefore prior to the staging of Maltby’s play), H.B.C. Pollard had argued: Everyone recognizes that the warehouse clerk who has shown himself fit to be a colonel should not have to go back to his old job, because it is such obvious waste of a man of higher capacity … . The nation must realise what magnificent material it has available in the non-regular officers of the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy, and it must wake up to the absolute necessity of making the best possible use of them when they revert to civil employment … .The officer of to-day and the ex-officer of tomorrow are one and the same thing … .41 Whilst the full implementation of Pollard’s (and presumably his editor’s) wishes were, due to the post-war economy, never likely to be fully realised, a reward of a less tangible kind was, in due course, paid. It was paid in the sense that attitudes clearly changed towards the clerk class over the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in some part from the recognition of this group’s contribution to the war effort. That this was indeed the case


is witnessed in the extent to which the sort of stereotype represented by Walter Hope – and by extension Leonard Bast – had largely disappeared by the time that Alan Thomas’s John Penrose had arrived in 1930. * * * The gap between the appearance of Hope in 1919 and Penrose in 1930 is not marked by the emergence of any single clerk character in English literature who might be considered to herald the change in attitudes. Literary recognition of this change was a gradual process marked more by the absence of the old than by the coming of the new. Whilst established writers such as Frank Swinnerton and W. Pett Ridge continued to publish novels which were wholly sympathetic to the clerk’s cause, there was little sense of domestic literature producing anything as fresh as, say, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) or Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923) in America. This absence appears to be due, in part, to the extent to which the wartime substitution of female clerks and their continued post-war presence had ensured that the literary focus was elsewhere during this period. The change of focus was perfectly understandable when we take into account the statistics which expose these extraordinary adjustments: women who had in 1911 accounted for just 18 per cent of the clerk workforce in England and Wales, and who had numbered just 124,843, had by 1921 increased to 46 per cent, or 591,741.42 Mottram illustrates the effect of these statistics when he remarks upon the changes he discovered on returning to his Norwich bank branch after the war: ‘The “girls”, as we called the female members of staff, had come to stay. They were, taking an average, as efficient, and more devoted to the job, and (how conceal it?) cheaper than men.’43 This new and permanent element of the workforce was, therefore, almost bound to impact upon the literature of the immediate post-war period. Novels now appeared in greater number which exploited this expanding market by utilising the new plots that female clerks might inspire. The following titles offer clues to the nature of this emerging fiction: The Judgement of Charis, Fanny the Fibber, Latchkey Ladies, The Sinister Man, The Tight-rope.44 But while fiction examining the colonisation of the offices by female staff held centre stage, certain small but significant signs emerged to suggest the male clerk’s new standing in print culture. Of these, the following two diverging examples offer a glimpse of changes evident in the new era. First, one might cite as an index the post-war willingness of the satirical magazine Punch to include cartoons which focused on office life. Prior to 1914, clerks other than Mr Pooter


had been a rare sight in the magazine’s pages, but following the war, as if in response to a more general recognition of their new status, office workers were ever-present: in the edition for 14 November 1923, for example, there are three separate cartoons featuring clerks.45 Furthermore, these cartoon clerks are not mere Pooters, designed to amuse a ‘superior’ reader; they instead tend to suggest a parity of social position with the readership. As a second example we might look towards the clerk’s changing literary profile in the work of new modernist writers emerging after the war. An inclusive vision of modern society is, for example, offered in Richard Aldington’s modernist poem A Fool i’ the Forest (1924). The poem offers a spiritual autobiography of three symbolic characters who are also a single individual. Of these, according to Aldington’s prefatory note, ‘ “I” is intended to be typical of a man of our own time’: Every morning now at half-past seven Ethel thumps me in the back; Up I leap, a loyal English husband, Whistle in the bath-room, gulp my bacon … Buy the morning papers as I hasten to the Tube And read of all the wonders of the age. At the office I am diligent and punctual, Courteous, well-bred, and much respected;46 As in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (to which Aldington’s poem was indebted), suburban man is imagined as the figure who epitomised the norm of British society in the post-war era. The contrasting literary signs of democracy evident in Punch and Aldington’s poem say very little on their own, but taken together with further evidence offered in Chapter 8, they indicate the compounding nature of social change following the war. The literature that emerges from the war and into the 1920s reflects the changing conception of the clerk both during and after the conflict. It primarily demonstrates the ways in which the rigid pre-war social boundaries that had helped to mould the enduring image of the clerk were shaken by the imperatives of extended conflict. Whilst no one would argue that the war brought an end to the divisions of society identified by Masterman, most would agree that the war had disrupted the strict nature of the dividing lines. If the relative egalitarianism of the trenches failed to be immediately transported back into civilian life after November 1918, more lasting impressions did remain. Clerk soldiers returning from the war did so with a greater confidence of their worth as


individuals, and of the value of their ideas. This new assurance was translated into the literature of the 1930s, in which a generation of prewar clerks emerged as playwrights and novelists: amongst these were J.B. Priestley, R.H. Mottram, Gerald Bullett, Henry Williamson and R.C. Sherriff. Whilst it would be misleading to rope these individuals together into a literary movement, they do collectively lend the post-war era a distinctive quality largely lacking before 1914.

8 The Black-coated Worker and the Great Depression in 1930s Literature

Written accounts of the Great Depression in Britain are customarily accompanied by familiar visual imagery. The picture library required to illustrate such surveys will typically select from the following stock images: the Jarrow march, a queue at a soup kitchen, men standing idle at a street corner, or, more emotively, ragged and barefoot children. These images visually reinforce stereotypical reactions to accounts of ‘the hungry Thirties’, economically confirming the harsh quality of life during this decade for members of the working classes. While few would deny the validity of using these pictures to convey such information, this orthodox iconography of the Depression overlooks the effects of the failing economy on other ‘working’ classes. The Slump was no respecter of social rank, profoundly affecting those areas of the employment market that were formerly considered ‘safe’. One contemporary report suggests that security of employment was, by 1935, ‘for the great majority of clerks … a thing of the past, and they have therefore acquired the last decisive characteristic of the wage worker, that of uncertainty with regard to the future’.1 Although white-collar unemployment during the 1930s is little recognised today, this phenomenon was much debated in the fiction and non-fiction of the period. In these texts, the putative complacency of secure and comfortable suburban life was challenged by a wide variety of writers seeking to investigate the Depression’s hidden victims.2 This largely sympathetic engagement with the social conditions of office workers during the 1920s and 1930s was a positive legacy of the First World War. As I argued in Chapter 7, the widespread disturbance to previously rigid notions of class during the conflict encouraged the 147


subsequent emergence of new literary perspectives on post-war British society. Among the writers who emerged during this transitional literary period was George Orwell who, although lacking a direct connection with the clerk’s milieu, proved to be a sensitive observer of this section of society. As Gissing had also done some fifty years earlier, Orwell argued that the menace of unemployment and its effects were potentially more damaging to the clerk class than to the working class. In Orwell’s novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Bowling reflects on the likely psychological effects of life as a ‘five-to-ten-pound-a-weeker’ during a period of economic uncertainty: There’s a lot of rot talked about the sufferings of the working class. I’m not sorry for the proles myself. Did you ever know a navvy who lay awake thinking about the sack? The prole suffers physically, but he’s a free man when he isn’t working. But in every one of those little stucco boxes there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he’s fast asleep … .3 Orwell had argued earlier inThe Road to Wigan Pier (1937) that the working classes grew resilient during the Depression because they suffered together: ‘it makes a great deal of difference when things are the same for everybody’.4 There was, Orwell conversely argues, little of this strength in fellowship to be found among the denizens of the ‘little stucco boxes’. In Orwell’s judgement, the resolute independence of the suburbans exacerbated what he described as ‘that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is almost the worst evil of unemployment – far worse than any hardship’.5 These feelings, Orwell argued, brought about a ‘corroding sense of shame’6 which would spread like disease among the post-war suburban housing developments so readily associated with the clerk class.7 Orwell’s conviction regarding the scale of this problem is, however, only partially endorsed by contemporary statistics. These figures infer that a relatively small percentage of clerical workers became out of work at this time: in 1931 the proportion of unemployed male clerks was less that half that of those out of work in the total labour force – 5.3 per cent as opposed to 12.7 per cent.8 But F.D. Klingender, in his study The Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain (1935), urged caution when examining these official figures: At best these statistics can be taken as an index of the general trend, but they afford no basis for estimating the total number affected. The

The Black-coated Worker and the Depression 149

most important reason for this is that the incidence of clerical unemployment is heaviest in the group previously in receipt of salaries above the insurance limit [those who earned over £250.00 p.a. were excluded from making a claim at this time]. Most of these men are not recorded in the unemployment statistics when they lose their jobs, because they apply to employment exchanges only in exceptional cases. They are not entitled to unemployment relief, and in this section of workers the middle-class outlook had become most deeply rooted, because they believed that their positions were secure, and they would often do anything rather than attach to themselves the stigma of the ‘dole’.9 Taking into account these petit bourgeois sensibilities (also cited by Orwell), the grounds for Klingender’s scepticism regarding the reliability of the government statistics appear persuasive.10 The likelihood of large numbers of ‘missing persons’ absent from the published unemployment figures (David Lockwood quotes a source estimating the number of ‘invisible’ jobless clerks in 1934 at 300,000)11 persuaded Klingender to look instead at figures taken from smaller samples to indicate the general trend. These statistics showed that the numbers of unemployed male clerks registered at London Employment Exchanges, increased from 3365 in May 1928, to 7115 in October 1930, and then reached a high of 12,408 in April 1932.12 Even allowing for partiality in Klingender’s Marxist analysis of the situation, the fourfold growth in numbers recorded in London points towards the substantial scale of increase in unemployment among clerks elsewhere in Britain.13 Klingender’s evidence for the increasing severity of clerkly unemployment is reinforced by accounts of the effects of the Depression found in the contemporary press. Typical amongst these were a series of recollections published in The Listener in the summer of 1933 and later collected together by H.L. Beales and R.S. Lambert as Memoirs of the Unemployed (1934). These testimonies offer a refreshingly egalitarian picture of the job market: sandwiched between ‘An Unskilled Labourer’, and ‘A Rhondda Miner’, for example, we find ‘An Ex-Army Officer’, who had, after resigning his commission, attempted to find an office job: I wrote hundreds of letters and had introductions to quite a number of employers, but without success. At the end of nine months a reply came that was different, with the result that I took a job as a shorthandtypist with an oil company at a salary of 25s per week; but at the end of the six months the oil company had ‘gone broke’ and I was again


out of work … . I now put a considerable amount of energy into finding another job before I should become too discouraged. But after the first few hundred negative replies I began to get thoroughly disheartened. At present, after a year’s unemployment, I am still trying to find a job by all means that I or my friends can think of, but without success.14 This individual sums up his situation as leading to a feeling of ‘utter hopelessness, helplessness and dejection’, words which anticipate Orwell’s later response. The Ex-Officer’s abject tone is echoed throughout this collection of accounts and serves to evoke a general atmosphere of pessimism among employees – salaried and waged – at this time. Collectively the accounts suggest a social climate in which the majority of workers would have had first-hand knowledge of firms that were folding and neighbours who were facing redundancy. We should not, of course, be surprised about this level of pessimism given the overall scale of unemployment at the height of the Depression: between 1931 and 1935 the numbers of those officially classed as unemployed never fell below two million, while during 1932–33 these figures reached a high of nearly three million, or one-quarter of the total insured working population.15 It is also important to record that notwithstanding this unprecedented level of unemployment, the number of clerical workers employed in Britain nearly trebled during the first half of the twentieth century, increasing from 887,000 (or 4.8 per cent of the total working population) clerical workers in 1911 to 2,404,000 (10.7 per cent) in 1951.16 Given this combination of mass unemployment during the Depression and the more general migration of workers towards the clerical sector over an extended period, there can be little surprise that these two sets of figures overlap. While we can only speculate about actual numbers of jobless clerks and the levels of anxiety suffered by them, we can at least recognise the pressing case for a literary response to these problems. * * * As I argued in Chapter 7, the literature emerging during the period after 1918 was much better placed than its earlier counterpart to provide an even-handed discussion of current social conditions. Alison Light refines this more general diagnosis of inter-war literary democracy in terms of a movement towards introspection: What had formerly been held as the virtues of the private sphere of middle-class life take on a new public and national significance.


I maintain that the 1920s and ‘30s saw a move away from formerly heroic and officially masculine public rhetorics of a national destiny … to an Englishness at once less imperial and more inwardlooking, more domestic and more private … . In the ubiquitous appeal of civilian virtues and pleasures, [for example] the picture of ‘the little man’, the suburban husband pottering in his herbaceous borders … we can discover a considerable sea-change in ideas of the national temperament.17 Light summarises this shift in literary perspective as resulting in ‘the privatisation of national life’.18 The nuanced interpretation of cultural change that Light offers here usefully intersects with my own reading of the movement towards social inclusion in British literature at this time. This change of emphasis from imperial rhetoric to recognition of more domestic virtues appears entirely consistent with the sort of post-war revaluation of society that I identified in Chapter 7. The appeal, for example, of R.H. Mottram’s Spanish Farm Trilogy (1927), with its privileging of the ‘little man’, seems a direct response to a perceived loss of faith with the grand and heroic. Mottram here, indeed, appears to fill the space previously occupied by these now bankrupt certainties with his steadfast suburban yeoman. This manoeuvre takes on special significance during the Depression years because of the sense that civilian virtues bound up in the image of the pottering suburban husband were coming under increasing pressure. The literary response to this crisis therefore appears as a record of survival (or lack thereof) of an arguably vulnerable value system. In order to substantiate my argument it is necessary first of all to provide a brief survey of the growth of the clerk as a figure in 1930s fiction. Although this outline provides little more than a list of writers and book titles, it is essential here to provide material evidence of the changing nature of British print culture during this era. We might begin the survey with those clerks-turned-soldiers-turned-writers discussed in Chapter 7. These included J.B. Priestley, whose epic novel of office life, Angel Pavement (1930), was amongst the most commercially successful and influential literary works of the decade. Similarly prominent at this time was R.H. Mottram who published a number of novels during the 1930s promoting the theme of the modern clerk as yeoman stock: these included Castle Island (1931) and The Banquet (1935). R.C. Sherriff’s novels similarly specialised in depicting sympathetically the lives of unremarkable office workers: in The Fortnight in September (1931) and Greengates (1936) clerks take their annual holiday in Bognor and face up to retirement. Ernest Raymond, whose novel The Old Tree Blossomed


(1928) was discussed in Chapter 7, continued for the rest of this period to publish novels (notably We, the Accused (1935)) which concentrated on the suburban scene. And lastly, Frank Swinnerton, who (while not a wartime combatant) anticipated this generation of post-war ‘suburban’ novelists. Swinnerton published a variety of fiction during the 1930s, and his high literary profile at this time (including his role as book critic on the Evening News) ensured that he remained a key influence on the taste of the new reading public. The home and working life of the office clerk also became a familiar feature of genre fiction during the 1930s, in particular in novels of crime and detection. These texts often used the current economic crisis to provide motivation for crime in their plots. In C.S. Forester’s Plain Murder (1930), for example, a group of advertising agency clerks commit a murder to retain their threatened jobs.19 Similarly, the dénouement of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey story Murder Must Advertise (1933) features a clerk who murders a colleague to protect his fragile financial position. The Great Depression also inspired a number of plots in which clerks were freed from financial uncertainty through inheriting sudden and unexpected wealth: amongst these works were E. Aceituna Griffin’s Genesta (1930), Martin Armstrong’s The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah his Wife (1931), and Martin Hare’s Butler’s Gift (1932); in the last of these a bank clerk inherits a large property in Ireland from a distant cousin. Novels such as these were arguably intended to tap into notions of wish fulfilment prevalent during a time of widespread financial uncertainty. But perhaps the most important and revealing development evident in this field was the emergence of a number of young and often previously unpublished novelists whose early works depicted the experience of modern lower middle-class life. A selection of texts capable of sketching out the wider picture might include the following: Malcolm Muggeridge’s Autumnal Face (1931), a sympathetic account of the effects of unemployment on a middle aged clerk; V.S. Pritchett’s Nothing Like Leather (1936), an autobiographical novel of a young clerk’s experiences in the leather industry; and Hugh Preston’s Head Office (1936), which describes a single day in the life of a large London firm. Among the more experimental texts to emerge on this topic were Arthur Wellings’ Each Stands Alone (1930), a Joycean study of frustrated love in a bank; E.A. Hibbitt’s The Brittlesnaps (1937), a left-leaning and technically bold account of the effects of unemployment on a white-collar worker’s family; and Frank Tilsley’s novels The Plebeian’s Progress (1933) and I’d Do it Again (1936) which offer radical socialist readings of the suburban clerk’s economic position during the Slump.


An extended discussion of the novels mentioned here is beyond the scope of this chapter, but two writers in particular – J.B. Priestley and Frank Tilsley – are worthy of attention as exemplars of the diversity of literary representations during this period. Priestley’s popular best-sellers, on the one hand, characterise the movement of suburban life from the margins of British literature to the mainstream. On the other hand, Tilsley’s novels signify the emergence of distinctive and strident voices from the political left during this era. In their essential differences, Priestley and Tilsley underscore the new breadth of approach among British writers of the 1930s to issues of work, social class and politics. More specifically, these two writers, in contrasting fashion, suggest the ways in which the private and domestic, as emblematised by office workers, might survive the often acute pressures brought about by the Slump. * * * More than any other writer of the inter-war era, it was J.B. Priestley whose work symbolised the rise of the clerk class in 1930s literature. Whereas established writers such as W. Pett Ridge and Frank Swinnerton continued during this period to discuss the lives of white-collar workers in their novels, Priestley offered new impetus to the delineation of this character type when his epic story of office life, Angel Pavement (1930) was published in the wake of the extraordinary success of his previous novel The Good Companions (1929). As Priestley himself noted, the ‘astonishing popularity’ of The Good Companions, gave his subsequent novel a ‘flying start’.20 Under these circumstances Angel Pavement was almost bound to receive a considerable sale and significant critical attention. This duly occurred, as we can infer from The Bookman’s decision to dedicate a special illustrated supplement to the novel in its Christmas edition. The impact made by Angel Pavement upon the reading public can perhaps be gauged from the playwright John Osborne’s recollection of the novel’s place in his family home in 1930s Fulham. Osborne remembered that Priestley’s text was sufficiently well regarded by his father to allow it to become the only novel in a small ‘permanent’ collection of books that were intended for reading and rereading.21 Whether this level of interest in Angel Pavement would have occurred without the success of The Good Companions is difficult to ascertain. What we can say, however, with reasonable confidence, is that a substantial reading public was ready in 1930 for a serious novel which examined everyday life, and recorded those ‘civilian virtues and pleasures’ identified by Alison Light. Priestley, in writing Angel Pavement, was


additionally responding to the public desire for a literary culture of substance and integrity, as expressed in the demand for ‘good’ books. Recognition of these demands of ‘ordinary’ though self-consciously discerning readers (often those with limited disposable income), were a particular feature of British print culture in the inter-war era. This evolution in the tastes of the British reader, and moreover a realisation by the publishing industry of this change in demand, triggered a number of innovations which collectively revolutionised the book market: we might note, for example, the emergence of the quality paperback (Penguin Books, Hutchinson’s Pocket Library); the growth in popularity of the private lending library (Boots Booklovers’ Library claimed that by 1938, books were being exchanged at the rate of 35 million each year);22 the rise of the book club (the Book Society and Book Guild); the increasing relevance to sales of the best-seller list; and the appearance of a new generation of popular literary magazines such as John O’London’s Weekly and The London Mercury. The vibrant cultural climate that the emergence of these phenomena points towards is further reinforced by statistics which show that the number of new editions of adult fiction doubled from 1051 in 1920 to 2081 in 1930.23 As Joseph McAleer claims, ‘the maintenance of these levels during the depression proves that the consumption-based industries in Britain were comparatively unaffected by the slump’.24 This burgeoning literary marketplace was evidently quite different in character from its predecessor before the war. Priestley’s understanding of the composition of the book-buying and borrowing element of this market is reflected in the structure and literary style that he used in writing Angel Pavement. Although Priestley’s primary influence appears to be the epic Victorian novel of Dickens and Thackeray (certainly in terms of the size of the novel which numbers over 600 pages, and its structure, which brings together several separate but inter-locking stories), other more recent models also appear to have left their mark. The companionable and sympathetic tone of Priestley’s narrator, for example, seems to echo that used by W. Pett Ridge in his novels similarly set in the business world. The tone of the opening section of Priestley’s novel (‘It is for the sake of No. 8 that we have come to Angel Pavement at all, but not for the whole of No. 8, but only for the first floor’),25 with its use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’, appears especially reminiscent of Pett Ridge’s work.26 Another suggestion that Priestley drew inspiration from modern (as well as more traditional) literary sources is his tendency in Angel Pavement to render substantial slices of unexceptional daily life. As Frank Swinnerton and Arnold Bennett had already done at length in their


work, Priestley painstakingly records the quotidian detail of City and suburban existence. Priestley, however, tempers this mundane realism with a more dramatic element introduced by the arrival in the workplace of Mr Golspie. This character, a mysterious and somewhat sinister stranger who disturbs the settled routine of the office, appears to be borrowed from nineteenth-century models of fiction. The coexistence here of contrasting stylistic elements – inter-war realism and Victorian melodrama – allows Priestley to spice his account of the seemingly dull day-to-day routine of the staff of Twigg and Dersingham, timber importers, in an innovative way. Angel Pavement, therefore, represents the packaging together of a range of new and old literary material customised to appeal to what we might now recognise as a ‘middlebrow’ reader in 1930.27 This blend of literary elements intended for a specific if increasingly large market is evident in Priestley’s characterisation of Mr Smeeth, the firm’s middle-aged cashier. Although Smeeth is depicted as a faithful and slightly pompous clerk in the Dickensian mode, he appears equally designed to convey the perceived solidity and decency of latter-day yeoman stock. Following R.H. Mottram’s celebration of clerkly solidity and forbearance in The Spanish Farm Trilogy, Priestley was able to update and reassess this character type in his own distinctive way. Priestley’s approach to the depiction of the reliable career scribe initially follows the example of Edwardian writers like J.P. Blake, who had explicitly criticised conventional literary representations of the City worker. Priestley’s early descriptions of Smeeth make this position clear: ‘he looked what he ought to have been, in the opinion of a few thousand hasty and foolish observers of this life, and what he was not – a grey drudge’ (36); ‘Nature, [cared] nothing for literary formulas’ (69). Having led readers away from misguided impressions of Smeeth, Priestley then proceeds to redefine Smeeth as a craftsman whose raw materials are the numbers that appear in his ledgers: He had spent years making neat little columns of figures, entering up the ledgers and then balancing them, but this was not drudgery to him. He was a man of figures. He could handle them with astonishing dexterity and certainty. In their small but perfected world, he moved with complete confidence and enjoyed himself. If you only took time and trouble enough, the figures would always work out and balance up, unlike life … . (37)28 Priestley’s method here, effectively likening Smeeth to a monk absorbed in an illuminated manuscript, is calculated to provoke a sympathetic


re-evaluation of clerkly contentment and efficiency. Like Mottram, Priestley implies here that individuals who possess this combination of undervalued qualities represent the lynchpins of a country reliant upon business and trade. Significantly, it is left to Mr Golspie, the mysterious outsider, to recognise and record the vital importance to the City of its Non-Commissioned Officer class: ‘you know, Smeeth, if I’d been as tidy as you, as good at putting down little figures every day … I’d have been a rich man now’ (392). In addition to reassuring ‘middlebrow’ readers about the value and importance of working lives dedicated to unfashionable commerce, Priestley’s depiction of Smeeth also looks to allay his audience’s anxiety regarding cultural matters. As Jonathan Rose has recently demonstrated, the interwar period was a time of considerable autodidactic activity in cultural matters among the British working and lower middle classes.29 With university education still largely out of reach for members of these groups, those seeking advice about culture might look for guidance towards notable literary figures of the day such as Priestley. Priestley’s knowledge of his pedagogical role in this respect is recognisable in Angel Pavement in the description of Smeeth’s visit to a classical music concert. This episode is used by Priestley to encode the likely apprehension of his readers towards particular aspects of the arts and then to work through these concerns in a positive and affirmative way. Smeeth anticipates the reaction of the stereotypical middlebrow to ‘high’ culture with his thoughts that the programme might be ‘rather heavy’ and ‘a bit above his head’ (239). Armed, however, with the traditional layperson’s caveat, ‘though he didn’t pretend to know much about it … [he] liked nothing better than music’ (240), Smeeth proceeds to take his seat safe in the knowledge that ‘there would be sure to be something he could enjoy, and the Queens Hall, expensive and highbrow as it sounded, couldn’t kill him’ (240). Priestley significantly moves away here from Arnoldian models of culture as a means to the end of human perfection (in Arnold’s terms, to ‘ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail’).30 Instead, Priestley promotes ‘good’ culture as a pleasurable end in itself. We can see this in the evocation of Smeeth’s enjoyment of Brahms’s First Symphony: He could have shouted at the splendour of it. The strings in a rich deep unison sweeping on, and you were ten feet high and had a thousand glorious years to live. But in a minute or two it had gone, this glory of sound, and there was muddle and gloom, a sudden sweetness of violins, then harsh voices from the brass. Mr Smeeth had given it


up, when back it came again, swelling his heart until it nearly choked him … . He felt more excited and happy than he had done when he had heard about the rise that morning. (246–7) In setting this episode in the Queens Hall, Priestley additionally appears to critique Forster’s earlier decision to place Leonard Bast in the same venue while he vainly attempted to ‘acquire culture’.31 Whereas Forster had questioned Arnoldian ideas of cultural enrichment by depicting Bast’s engagement with the arts as pathetic and ultimately ill-fated, Priestley implicitly criticises the effects of Arnold’s ideas in a contrasting manner. For Priestley it was the legacy of inferiority and tentativeness involved in the pursuit of ‘weighty’ and ‘difficult’ culture among Leonard Bast’s generation that needed to be addressed. Priestley’s aim, therefore, appears to be one of liberation for the intellectually curious of the clerk class. This was a liberation not only from the Academy’s putative judgement that culture was beyond them, but also from the attitudes of those members of the clerk’s own class who saw classical art forms as pretentious. Mrs Smeeth and her daughter Edna’s reactions to Mr Smeeth’s visit to the Queen’s Hall convey this sense of reverse cultural snobbery: ‘Oo, classy, aren’t we?’ cried Mrs Smeeth. ‘Did you like it?’ ‘I’ll bet he didn’t,’ said Edna, an aggressive low-brow. (248) Although one might now be inclined to interpret Smeeth’s enjoyment of Brahms (and his family’s reaction to this) as a patronising evocation of the little man’s ability to survive ‘high’ culture, this episode needs to be understood in its contemporary cultural context. A more generous evaluation of the scene is available if we recognise the liminal position of Smeeth and his ilk at this time, in relation to supposedly élite culture. It is also necessary to appreciate the historical context in which Angel Pavement appeared when interpreting the elements of the novel which examine directly the effects of the Slump. Priestley’s establishment of Smeeth as a sort of Everyman character, embodying the conservative, solid and reliable yeoman stock of British urban society, is built up at length in order that this steadfastness might also be tested in the novel. The testing of Smeeth’s character is shadowed in several early scenes in which his contentment is juxtaposed with fears about the gathering economic gloom: Once he stopped being Twigg and Dersingham’s cashier, what was he? He avoided the question by day, but sometimes at night, when he could not sleep, it came to him with all its force and dreadfully


illuminated the darkness with little pictures of shabby broken men, trudging from office to office, haunting the Labour Exchanges and the newspaper rooms of the Free Libraries, and gradually sinking into the workhouse and the gutter. (37) Priestley, recognising (along with Orwell) the potential gravity of these concerns, seeks to articulate them by imagining their effect on an individual like Smeeth. The use of a middle-aged and male suburban clerk character to conduct this test is crucial for Priestley because he sees this class and gender, again in common with Orwell, as being subject during the Slump to an intensive form of mental pressure. These pressures, Priestley suggests, are exacerbated by the failure of the media to recognise and record them: on his return home from work, Smeeth is irked by the irrelevance of the material appearing in his penny newspaper: ‘[the] editor seemed to know all about everybody and everything, except Mr Smeeth and all the other staring men on the tram’ (67–8). The sense of Smeeth’s isolation in his anxiety (he is described by the narrator as ‘lonely with his fear’ (74)), anticipates Orwell’s remarks about the corroding effects of unemployment uncertainty among the lower middle class. While Priestley later argued that Angel Pavement was not written as either a piece of social criticism or ‘with a definite political bias’, this claim fails to stand up to scrutiny.32 The sense of Priestley’s engagement with Smeeth’s fears, and his indignation at the effects of the boom/bust economy on decent British yeomanry, is palpable even when filtered through the detached voice of the narrator. The way in which Priestley handles the climax to the novel is also instructive in offering both a realisation of corrosive fears – the firm of Twigg and Dersingham duly collapses – and also a timely reassurance to anxious readers about this dreaded scenario. The initial impact of this catastrophe is conceived in the depiction of Smeeth’s indignation at his impending unemployment: ‘what was the good of paying rates and taxes … and reading the newspapers and voting, if this is what could happen at any minute?’ (486). Subsequently, this righteous anger subsides at a point when Smeeth is able to draw upon the sort of reserves that typify the modern British yeoman: [He seemed] for one brief interval, to be staring at another smaller world, and it was a world that could play all manner of tricks with Herbert Norman Smeeth, but could never capture, swallow, and digest the whole of him. The newly born ironist then returned downstairs, to eat his supper. (494)


Irony, in this context a decidedly British reaction to impending financial disaster, is invoked to confirm the indefatigable spirit of Smeeth and his ilk. The generation that survived the war, it appears, will survive another debacle caused by factors beyond their control. Priestley’s plucky ironist rhetoric is indeed reminiscent of wartime propaganda and this is perhaps understandable given the scale and consequences of the Depression. We need to consider Priestley’s treatment of the Slump in Angel Pavement in these warlike terms to make better sense of the novel’s dominant tone of indignation and defiant resolution. In particular, by recognising the function of Priestley’s popular Second World War broadcasts on the BBC, we can arguably gain an insight into what he attempts to achieve in the novel. As Vincent Brome notes, in these wartime readings, known as ‘postscripts’, Priestley developed ‘into an oracular figure whose gifts for stirring people’s emotions in language intelligible to everybody was reinforced by his rugged personality and rich baritone voice’.33 The stoicism and reassurance promoted by Priestley during the war was seemingly rehearsed on a similarly beleaguered audience during the earlier emergency. Given Priestley’s role in seeking to assuage anxiety triggered by the seemingly perpetual economic downturn, it is possible to reassess the contemporary critical description of him as the ‘Gracie Fields of literature’.34 Although hardly intended as a complementary comparison, this connection with the popular working class film star is an instructive one. Fields’ role in lifting the morale of her mill and factory working fans during the Slump resembles the sort of reassurance Priestley himself attempted to offer his readership in suburbia. Indeed, the link becomes even more apposite when we note that Fields’ supreme statement of optimism during the crisis ‘Sing As We Go’ is included in the 1934 film of that name co-written by Priestley. While this connection helped to establish Priestley in literary circles of his day as epitomising popular rather than ‘serious’ artistic endeavour, the manipulation of his evident popularity in Angel Pavement to raise morale appears, in its historical context, a credible strategy. The link between the First World War and the Great Depression that I have pursued here is instructively reinforced by Orwell in his review of Priestley’s play Cornelius (1935). This work returns to the central themes of Angel Pavement in dealing with the effects of the Slump on a variety of workers in a small office. Orwell saw the play on its revival in 1940 during the height of the Blitz, and recognised in it a kind of consolation: Although it is perfectly possible that we shall all be blown to pieces within the next few weeks, it is actually a relief to get a glimpse of the


vanished ‘thirties and reflect that, whatever comes out of the present war, the horrors that Mr Priestley is describing can never happen again in just that way.35 While Orwell makes this point apropos his assumption that private capitalism would disappear ‘in the near future’, we might now read this reflection as a telling reminder of just how bad things had been during the 1930s. We need perhaps to recover something of the ‘horrors’ Orwell recalls here to allow us to understand why Angel Pavement held such a privileged position in John Osborne’s suburban home in 1930. * * * If J.B. Priestley’s work was conditioned by his experiences as a survivor of the Great War, then Frank Tilsley’s fiction might equally be considered a product of his experiences during the Depression. Whereas Priestley’s humanist impulse inspired a conclusion to Angel Pavement marked by reassurance and stoicism, the end of Tilsley’s 1930s novels suggest little room for optimism and hope in the short term. The sorts of clerks who appear in Tilsley’s texts indeed represent the antithesis of Priestley’s conservative and contented ‘man of figures’. In novels such as The Plebeian’s Progress (1933) and I’d Do It Again (1936), Tilsley evokes the sort of disaffection and disenchantment that he himself had experienced while employed in seventeen different jobs in as many years. Rather than submitting quietly to what they recognise as an iniquitous system, Tilsley’s clerks tend to follow his own example by rebelling against that milieu. This type of protest, Tilsley implies, often begins when intelligent people realise that the economic system of which they are a part is unfairly weighted against them. The sense of alienation brought about by this loss of faith in (and rebellion against) modern capitalism, is exemplified in the cynical clerk-narrator of I’d Do It Again: I’d sooner be honest than dishonest. But I’d sooner be dishonest and have five pounds a week and live in this bungalow and have this garden … than be honest on three pounds a week and live how we were living in Camberwell, and that’s a fact. I’ll risk being found out. It’s worth it. It’s worth going to the office in a morning with your stomach swaying about inside you and being petrified with fright at your desk when you’re occasionally asked an awkward question … . It’s worth it.36 While this clerk’s impulse for retaliation is exercised in a series of small thefts from his firm, Tilsley argues elsewhere that the consequences of


clerkly disaffection might have more lasting repercussions for 1930s Britain. As his volumes of political memoirs (First Things First (1938) and We Live and Learn (1939)) reveal, Tilsley’s distrust of modern capitalism was based upon empirical evidence. This knowledge left Tilsley with a lasting sense of injustice at what he felt was capitalism’s anti-democratic structure. Born in 1904, the son of a Manchester tailor, Tilsley had initially felt privileged to be offered, at sixteen, a job in a Chartered Accountant’s office. He described this position as ‘a very posh job indeed. It was a cut above the errand boys, apprentice engineers, railway clerks, window cleaners’ assistants and shop lads who were my friends’.37 Tilsley also relished the jealousy that his new job appeared to provoke amongst his peers, particularly delighting in the perks that he could claim as a trainee audit clerk: the chance to start at ten o’clock instead of half-past seven; the chance to mix with former public school boys; opportunities to take tea with the bosses; and the fact that he could visit a variety of offices in the course of his duties. But as these novelties wore off, he began to discover that the prospect of any genuine advancement from his lowly position was largely illusory. The only way in which he could become a Chartered Accountant, he realised, was by being articled to another Chartered Accountant. To become articled he would need to pay a premium and work without wages for five years, an option unthinkable for an individual with his social background. Tilsley was therefore destined instead to attempt to pursue the lesser rank of an Incorporated Accountant, but as he soon understood, ‘from an economic point of view the Incorporated qualification didn’t hold a candle to the Chartered … . I was working simply to become a nothing’.38 This realisation provoked a change in Tilsley’s attitude to his employment. A new rebelliousness replaced the pride in his ‘posh job’, and he now became adept at encroaching on his employer’s time. Later he recalled how he would write letters, read the sporting news, wash, do physical exercises and even regulate his bowels ‘so that they should function only during my employer’s time’.39 For Tilsley this process of disillusionment led him inexorably towards socialist ideals, which he felt offered the best opportunity to create more egalitarian working conditions in Britain at this time. A change in social attitudes brought about by the effects of the Slump would, Tilsley hoped, provide the opportunity to restructure the country’s economy in a fundamental manner. This, in turn, would allow a more even-handed distribution of work and its rewards: The problem before us which is of major importance is how we should do the work of the world and what is the proper way to


distribute the products of the work when it is done, so that the sort of people who can find gratification in work shall still have the sort of work that will gratify them, the sort of people who hate work shall not be so overwhelmed with it that they have no opportunity of obtaining gratification in something else, and the whole lot of them shall feel that they are not being exploited for the benefit of a socially, economically, or politically privileged minority, either in their own country or elsewhere.40 Tilsley’s novels, though by no means merely socialist tracts, suggest the reasons why the political models that he proposed here was necessary. By offering case studies in fiction of the lives of modern suburb-dwelling clerks, Tilsley looked to demonstrate that socialism represented the best opportunity for change for the disillusioned amongst this group. The sort of education represented by these texts was urgently needed, he felt, because petit bourgeois prejudice had historically militated against the political left. As Tilsley argued in First Things First, ‘people who would benefit so immediately and enormously by socialism – the poor, and the lower middle-classes – do not know … what Socialism is, being consistently lied to about it and misled about its consequences’.41 That Tilsley was able to make the case for socialism in his texts is indicative of the new opportunities that opened up for left-wing writers during the 1930s. New publishing houses like Victor Gollancz, Secker and Warburg, and Michael Joseph (all of whom published Tilsley’s work during this period) provided considerable scope at this time for the socialist case to be expressed in print. Without this platform for publication, it is most unlikely that Tilsley’s politicised texts would have reached the clerkly readers that his texts both depicted and addressed. One suspects that it was Tilsley’s lower middle-class perspective on socialism that originally encouraged Victor Gollancz to publish The Plebeian’s Progress in 1933. Whereas Gollancz’s reputation as a left leaning firm would have invited numerous requests to publish novels dealing with working-class socialism, far fewer manuscripts were likely to deal with the politics of suburbia: we should remember that Orwell’s own Gollancz-published novel dealing with these issues, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, emerged only in 1936. While The Plebeian’s Progress contains the faults of many other first novels (Tilsley later dismissed the work as ‘very amateurish and unsatisfactory and unimportant’),42 it is a key work in the context of this chapter. This is evident both in terms of its discussion of white-collar unemployment in Manchester during the Slump, and also because of the dialectic it establishes with Priestley’s


Angel Pavement. Tilsley’s novel concerns Allen Barclay, a young audit clerk (like Tilsley) who initially prospers at work, and in the hope of further advancement, buys a new property in a suburban village. With the economic downturn, however, he loses his job and later his house following a period of extended unemployment. The severity of the clerk’s situation is emphasised by Tilsley in a melodramatic ending to the novel in which Barclay is executed following his conviction for killing his wife in a failed suicide pact. This desperate measure, taken to escape from the hopelessness of their situation, implicitly questions the stoicism endorsed in Priestley’s novel. While Allen Barclay instinctively takes the same attitude as Priestley’s clerk towards unemployment (‘it can’t be as bad as we think … . After all, simply millions of people are sticking it’),43 his acceptance of this conventional response to adversity is rejected by his wife, who replies Faith gives us strength to endure more and more – and by the time we lose our faith we are too feeble, too contemptible, to do anything about it … . Wouldn’t you rather die a thousand times than go through all that again? … and, if they’d known, sooner would those who’ve stuck it. But by the time people find that faith has cheated them it’s too late. They’re reduced to cringing, spineless gutter-rats; whining and whining – but doing nothing about it; just carrying on. (268) This apparent response to Priestley’s plucky ironist Smeeth concludes with a sardonic combination of words and images designed to underscore the perils of political complacency. While Barclay is being dragged to the gallows, the words of a glib statesman are quoted from a newspaper interview: ‘The unprecedented sacrifices we had all so nobly borne … had placed us on the high road to prosperity … . [We could now] look forward to the future with the uttermost confidence’ (288). The lessons learned during the Depression, Tilsley considered, would be lost if people stoically endured their conditions rather than seeking to change them. Although Peter Quennell, writing in New Statesman and Nation, commended The Plebeian’s Progress as ‘an effective pamphlet, directed against the present state of society’,44 Tilsley had difficulty in finding a publisher for a further ‘worthy’ novel.45 Over the following three years he found only intermittent work as, variously, a shopkeeper, a teacher, a ledger clerk, and finally in 1936 as an audit clerk with a firm of chartered accountants.46 During a five-week period of unemployment before securing the last of these jobs, Tilsley wrote I’d Do It Again. Abandoning


the overwrought indignation that characterised his first novel, Tilsley now adopted an indirect approach to depicting a similar topic. Far from engaging in the earnest political pleading of the clerkly victim in The Plebeian’s Progress, the solipsistic and self-absorbed narrator of I’d Do It Again apparently rejects any idea of seeking external solutions to his predicament: There was yards in the paper about the problem of unemployment but – hell! – what about the problem of employment? Two million men without jobs might be a tragedy, but give them two million jobs like mine and it’s what I call misery. Perhaps if I’d ever been unemployed I’d have felt different but personally I could never feel a damn for the unemployed. (14) By using a first person narrator in this novel, Tilsley was able to examine the life of an individual who espouses socialist ideas without connecting these thoughts to their political source. At one stage in the narrative, for example, the narrator bemoans the class-bound nature of office hierarchy: The only difference between me and him [his employer] was that I was educated at a Council School and he was educated at a Public School, and had lots of money and influence and credit. I’d just as much brains as he had, and I’d take all the risks he takes, and more. (34) Tilsley sensed that the sort of intelligent and articulate character imagined in the novel represented a virtually untapped source of energy that might in future be used to promote socialism. As long as socialism was unable to connect with this element of the lower middle classes, Tilsley considered that the reservoir of energy they symbolised was wasted, often merely expended on small acts of revenge. The revenge taken by the clerk in this novel, and described in minute detail by Tilsley, takes the form of a series of petty thefts engineered to augment a meagre salary. Tilsley’s own experience as an audit clerk during the Depression had presumably alerted him to the methods and motivation of fraudulent clerks: his knowledge of the technical side of these crimes certainly lends verisimilitude to this element of the novel. This sense of authenticity is employed by Tilsley to persuade the reader that the clerk’s crimes have their root in an unjust economic system. Tilsley, in making this case, sees the causes of white-collar fraud as resulting from a commercial culture which, even after economic recovery, manages to keep salary payments artificially low. The narrator


explains the background to this practice: I can’t get five pounds a week … because this is a time when there are a lot of five pound a week men out of work and they’re ready enough to take my job and do it for what I’m getting – three pounds a week But I need five pounds a week. I can’t manage on three pounds a week. (131) An obsessive reiteration of the clerk’s need to earn, or acquire, a larger sum is rendered in the novel alongside extensive empirical evidence of the reasonableness of this argument. For Tilsley, the corner-stone of this case is provided by an account of the financial liability placed on a clerk by his new suburban home: this topic also forms a prominent matter for discussion in The Plebeian’s Progress. In I’d Do It Again, the costs of the clerk’s bungalow in Edgware (twenty-two shillings and sixpence per week) are characterised as a parasitic and permanent drain on a limited income. Once these housing costs are removed from his three pounds per week income, the clerk working in London in 1936 is seen to have little money left on which to exist. Although Tilsley evokes little sense of triumph in the narrator’s freedom from detection at the end of the novel (‘I’d do it again’ (241) are the clerk’s final defiant words), the reader is at least in a position to apprehend the logic underpinning the petty fraud. The evidence presented in the novel looks to sympathetically revaluate the narrator’s apparently specious justification ‘I’m only taking what I reckon is mine anyway’ (131). The impact of the narrator in making what we might describe as the default case for socialism is enhanced by Tilsley’s employment of a distinctive voice for his character. This tone, memorably described by Walter Allen as a ‘vernacular rasp’, sets I’d Do It Again apart from other British novels up to this time.47 Cyril Connolly in his review of the novel was surely right to recognise the influence on Tilsley of American ‘hardboiled’ fiction writers such as James M. Cain.48 More, however, than simply recycling the American form, Tilsley’s novel appears to use this style in a fresh and distinctive manner. Whereas the narrative ‘rasp’ associated with ‘hard-boiled’ American fiction was predominantly associated with grand larceny and murder, Tilsley applied this style to more mundane scenes of crime: the total stolen by the narrator is just one hundred and four pounds. Although the scale of the narrator’s crime is relatively small, however, this does not, in the novel’s context, leave the impression of the traditional pettifogging clerk too timid to let rip with more muscular theft. The intertextual stylistic references here


evident in the distinctive ‘voice’ of Tilsley’s narrator impart a sense of gravity and immediacy to the clerk’s actions. Connolly was well placed in 1936 to recognise the effect of Tilsley’s innovative use of the first person narrator: Galsworthy and Bennett have created our office life for us, there must be benevolent and knighted bosses, faithful old clerks, sentimental office boys, traditions of long service, probity, antique methods, snuff boxes and quill pens – the only way to dodge them is to take a new and shady concern, whose personnel inspires no loyalty, lacks the English touch … . Think of the ordinary novel about a three-pound a week clerk and his wife and you realise what a tour-de-force this book is.49 Connolly’s high praise for I’d Do It Again, together with that of Walter Allen who called the text ‘a landmark in … the English novel of revolt during the thirties’,50 arguably indexes the effectiveness of Tilsley’s method and message in this novel. Although Tilsley’s Little Tin God (1939) lacked the ‘narrative rasp’ of I’d Do It Again, this later novel addresses the theme of disaffected whitecollar clerk in an equally distinctive and challenging manner. In Little Tin God, Tilsley imagined what might occur if the bitterness and alienation experienced by those clerks featured in his earlier novels became channelled into right-wing fascism. The danger of clerkly energy being exploited by the ‘wrong’ sort of political cause was a genuine fear in Europe during this period. Arno J. Mayer argues that a failure of intellectuals (both liberal and Marxist) to comprehend the unstable condition of the lower middle classes in the twentieth century ensured that this section of society responded ‘very readily to millenarian appeals of a reactionary sort’.51 Tilsley, in dramatising this argument, describes how a bank clerk, Carl Cramm, becomes gradually seduced by fascism, in the same way that the narrator of I’d Do It Again becomes seduced by crime. Cramm, who sees little chance of promotion in his office, is incensed when a Jewish clerk is promoted over his head. This robs him of his earlier scepticism of Nazism and replaces it instead with an acknowledgement that this ideology alone will ensure his deserved advancement. While this summary reduces the plot to a crude outline, the novel is, like its predecessor, a work of subtlety and persuasion. The suggestion in this work is that the clerk who had lived through the Depression and its repercussions might take revenge on the commercial world in ways that went far beyond the pilfering of petty cash. In this way, Little Tin God seems to serve both as a warning and, given the date


of its appearance, a more disturbing forecast that this advice was perhaps already too late. Writing Little Tin God on the eve of war in 1939, Tilsley could have had little anticipation of the election of a socialist party to power in Britain just six years later. The Attlee government elected in 1945, with its commitment to full employment and social democracy, promised to address many of the concerns that Tilsley raised in his texts. But neither this administration, with its plans for a socialist utopia, or Tilsley, with his promise as a writer, were destined to fully achieve their potential. In 1957, over-wrought about his financial future and convinced that his literary talents were drying up, Tilsley committed suicide by cutting his own throat. At the inquest into his death the coroner remarked that his suicide ‘was the tragedy of a man who entirely depended on his own brain work’.52 While it is perhaps reductive to trace Tilsley’s anxiety back to the ‘corrosive’ unease instilled by unemployment during the Depression, some element of those earlier worries must surely have resurfaced in Tilsley’s case. Thoughts of a return to the sort of peripatetic life he had experienced during the 1930s would presumably have increased his apprehension regarding a future without literary income. Whether or not the link between Tilsley’s suicide and the Great Depression is a legitimate one, it at least reminds us of the connection between regular work and mental wellbeing. There could be no more telling endorsement of Orwell’s convictions regarding the intensive anxiety suffered by the suburban classes during the Slump.

Afterword

In his pioneering study of American clerical workers and their class, C. Wright Mills noted that ‘the white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society. Whatever history they have had is a history without events’.1 My findings, as they relate to British office workers, have tended to destabilise this conventional perspective, recognising instead a complex and eventful history for this group. The cumulative arguments of the chapters have suggested that far from representing an historical absence, the clerk has proved to be a figure at the centre of social and cultural change in the twentieth century. Moreover, while my introduction to this book noted the death of the ‘clerk’, his and her successors (now perhaps ‘datainput processors’ or ‘call-centre operatives’) still represent a significant element of the urban landscape. With white-collar workers set to become the biggest occupational category in Britain in the next few years, critical studies of this section of society appear more relevant now than ever.2 This afterlife of the ‘clerk’ continues to form an important element of British culture. In recent years novels by John McCabe (Stickleback, 1998), Matt Thorne (Eight Minutes Idle, 1999), John Lanchester (Mr. Phillips, 2000) and Michael Bracewell (Perfect Tense, 2001) have further investigated the place of the office worker in modern British society. In addition, the much deserved success of the Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant BBC TV series The Office (2001–03) has focused renewed critical and creative attention on clerical workers and their environment. In the same way in which the popularity of Priestley’s Angel Pavement inspired much office fiction in the 1930s, The Office appears likely to offer fresh impetus to the dramatic use of this location. While I would not anticipate future generations of white-collar employees citing The Office as a motivation for military service, there is little doubt that this programme has had (and will to have) a significant impact on the relationship of white-collar workers with their 168

Afterword 169

colleagues and their workplace. The textual (or televisual) clerk is far from a neutral agent, and the typing of individuals as Mr Pooters, Leonard Basts or David Brents, is a socially significant process. As my book has demonstrated, cultural representations are quite capable of creating a kind of group consciousness among individuals who share common experiences. And, as my findings have also established, the consequences of this form of collective identification, when compounded over an extended period of time, can have far reaching consequences. The impact of these consequences in relation to my topic (as I have implied throughout this book) have become obscured because of the critical neglect of realist literature in the twentieth century. Those texts written by clerkly writers in direct response to negative print cultural images of their class have tended to be classified by critics as mere middlebrow entertainment and therefore summarily excised from the canon. This form of taxonomy has resulted in works by Swinnerton, Priestley Wells and Bennett, amongst others, becoming regarded as ‘guilty pleasures’ for critical readers rather than as texts worthy of academic scrutiny. Chris Baldick has recently argued for a re-evaluation of British literary history that would address this imbalance: The reputations of the major modernist writers are secure enough to permit a non-partisan re-examination of the larger Modern Movement within which they worked, of their affiliations to realism and other non-modernist currents … . The age of tense highbrow vigilance against ‘Edwardian’ tastes and middlebrow entertainment has also passed, so we can afford a relaxed appreciation of significant merit in the work of Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Kipling Chesterton, Maugham, Buchan, Coppard, Priestley … and several others without having to fear that we may be betraying the cause of Art … . A formidable range of literary stimulation awaits us in this period’s writings, if only we suspend the suspicions and proscriptions of a century-old culture war.3 The ‘great age of literary realism’ that Baldick identifies in his revisionary study of the period 1910–40 was, to a large extent, brought about by the tensions and transformations that I have identified in this book. While I would not claim that office clerks single-handedly changed the face of British literature, the class which they symbolise certainly did. Without the sort of literary archaeology of texts and attitudes that I have undertaken in this book our knowledge of this cultural and social epoch will only ever be a partial one.

Notes Introduction: Leonard Bast’s Revenge 1. ‘What is the History of Books?’ in Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History, Faber and Faber, 1990, p. 135. 2. Geoffrey Crossick, ‘The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: A Discussion’ in Geoffrey Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914, Croom Helm, 1977, pp.11–60. Arno J. Mayer, ‘The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem’, The Journal of Modern History, 47 (3), 1975, pp. 409–36. 3. Mayer, op cit, p. 409. 4. Crossick, op cit, pp. 11–12. 5. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, Faber and Faber, 1992; Arlene Young, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999. 6. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, pp. 393–438. 7. Ibid, p. 404. 8. Ibid, p. 404. 9. E. M. Forster, Howards End, Penguin, 1989 (1910), p. 122. 10. Crossick, op cit, p. 19. 11. David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness, Unwin University Books, 1969 (1958), p. 36. 12. Ibid, p. 37. 13. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the Novel 1875–1914, Fontana Press, 1991 (1989), pp. 32, 34. 14. Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2001, p. 56. 15. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900, University of Chicago Press, 1967 (1957), pp. 306–7. 16. Gregory Anderson (ed.), The White-Blouse Revolution, Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 2. 17. These include work on Henry James’s ‘In the Cage’: see Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Richard Menke, ‘Telegraphic Realism: Henry James’s In the Cage’, PMLA 115, 2000, pp. 975–90. More general studies of technology and the female office worker include Christopher Keep’s ‘The Cultural Work of the Type-writer Girl’, Victorian Studies, 40 (3), 1997, pp. 401–26, and Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), Literary Secretaries, Secretarial Culture, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004. 18. Gregory Anderson (ed.), op cit, p. 7. 19. See Andrew Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2001; Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800, Routledge, 1991; Herbert 170

Notes 171 Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art, Cambridge University Press, 1995; John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999. 20. Song of Myself, Verse 42, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, Rinehart Press, San Francisco, CA, 1949 (1855, 1860, 1881), p. 66. 21. Christopher P. Wilson, White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885–1925, University of Georgia Press, 1992, p. 2. Graham Thompson’s recent book Male Sexuality Under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature, University of Iowa Press, 2003, offers another illuminating analysis of this topic. 22. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000 (1993), p. 32. Bourdieu defines the ‘literary field’ as ‘a space of objective relationships among positions – that of the consecrated artist and that of the artiste maudit, for example – and one can only understand what happens there if one locates each agent or each institution in its relationship with all the others. It is this peculiar universe, this “Republic of Letters”, with its relations of power and its struggles for the preservation or the transformation of the established order, that is the basis for the strategies of producers, for the form of art they defend, for the alliances they form, for the schools they found, in short, for their specific interests.’ Ibid, p. 181.

2 ‘Getting on’?: The Clerk’s Emergence in Literature 1880–1900 1. H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1860), Volume II, Victor Gollancz, 1934, p. 506. 2. Ibid, p. 507. 3. Arnold Bennett, A Man from the North, Methuen, 1920 (1898), p. 44. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 4. Charles Lamb, The Last Essays of Elia, J.M. Dent, 1906 (1833), p. 88. 5. Arlene Young, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999, p. 62. Fraser’s Magazine first published William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841). This story featuring the young clerk Samuel Titmarsh, offers a notable glimpse of a City of London fire and life insurance office of the period. 6. Ibid, p. 61. 7. Ibid, p. 72. 8. George Newlyn’s research shows that among Dickens’ novels only Oliver Twist (1838) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) lack the presence of named clerk characters. George Newlyn (ed.), Everyone in Dickens, Volume III, Characteristics and Commentaries, Tables and Tabulations: A Taxonomy, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1995, pp. 176, 184, 185, 363, 384. 9. Young, op cit, p. 73. 10. See, for example, the depiction of Charley Tudor in Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1858). 11. Gregory Anderson’s seminal historical study Victorian Clerks looks to Dickens’ work while evoking the conditions of the counting-house: ‘For

172 Notes

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

many clerks the workplace must have corresponded all too closely to the depressing conditions created by Dickens for Bob Cratchit and Newman Noggs.’ Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks, Manchester University Press, 1976, p. 9. The richness of Dickens’ depictions of clerks and offices as cultural landscape is clearly evident in Jeremy Lewis’ anthology of office life in literature. Lewis includes here twenty passages from ten of Dickens’ novels, making him by some distance the foremost British contributor to this volume. Jeremy Lewis (ed.), The Chatto Book of Office Life or Love Among the Filing Cabinets, Chatto & Windus, 1992. George Henry Lewes, Ranthorpe, Ohio University Press, 1974 (1847), p. 24. Ibid, pp. 24, 26. See Barbara Smalley’s introduction to ibid, pp. xi–xxiv. Walter Besant, All in a Garden Fair: The Simple Story of Three Boys and a Girl, Chatto & Windus, 1895 (1883), p. 106. All subsequent page references are to this edition. From ‘The Quill and the Counter’, Martin F. Tupper, Select Miscellaneous Poems of Martin F. Tupper, Gall & Inglis, Edinburgh and London, 1874, pp. 283–5. See also Frederick Locker’s poem ‘The Old Government Clerk’, which displays its qualities in the following lines: ‘Though silent and lean, Darby was not malign, / What hair he had left was more silver than sable;/ He had also contracted a curve in the spine, / From bending too constantly over a table’. Frederick Locker, London Lyrics, Kegan, Paul, 1891 (1856), pp. 125–8. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the Novel 1875–1914, Fontana Press, 1991, p. 27. The British Library catalogue includes seven non-fiction studies of London by Walter Besant. Anderson, op cit, p. 52. Anderson records a growth in commercial occupations from 91,000 in 1851 to 449,000 in 1891, and within this broad category, notes an increase in commercial clerks from 48,689 in 1841 to 181,457 in 1881 and on to 477,535 in 1911. Ibid, p. 52. Besant’s fears are again supported by empirical evidence provided by Anderson, who notes that by 1901, ‘75 per cent of male clerks aged between fifteen and sixty-five were under the age of thirty-five, as compared with an average of 57 per cent for all other occupations’. Ibid, p. 52. These Board schools, instituted under the Education Act of 1870 (Forster Act), were intended to make provision of primary education free and compulsory for all children. They replaced a somewhat haphazard network of voluntary schools – mostly run by religious groups – that had provided basic education until that time. David Lockwood argues that the institution of the Board schools had a significant effect on the social dynamic of British offices: ‘it was increasingly the case … that by the turn of the century working-class boys were entering [white-collar] occupation. They were largely the sons of skilled manual workers, notably the brightest pupils from the elementary schools’. Lockwood, op cit, p. 106. The dangers of the unthinking use of the general term ‘clerk’ were already understood, prior to the employment boom, by Benjamin Orchard, who in the 1870s had written of two tiers of clerks, ‘distinct in their education,

Notes 173

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

business prospects, and various other things, but chiefly in the social usages which custom has made a framework of their daily life’. Orchard identifies this dichotomy as comprising an upper tier which embraced ‘those in banks, insurance offices and other public companies’; and the lower group, forming ‘a much more numerous body’, whose salaries were ‘unlikely to exceed £150’. B.G. Orchard, The Clerks of Liverpool, J. Collinson: Liverpool, 1871, p. 64. By the 1880s and 1890s this assessment still remained substantially accurate, but the expansion of the market rendered it somewhat inadequate. In this later period the elite clerical worker was still the bank clerk, followed closely by those employed in insurance; the civil service clerk would equally be considered a member of, and arguably at the top of, this upper stratum. But below this elite, we might identify a middle band consisting of the general commercial and legal clerks, who were themselves considered superior to the bottom tier of lowly railway and warehouse clerks. Of these, the clerks employed in the upper band would experience the advantages of both a higher salary and improved chances of promotion over their less fortunate counterparts; for these reasons this top grade of clerk has variously been described as ‘quasi professionals’, and the ‘blackcoated aristocracy’. G.L. Anderson ‘The Social Economy of Late Victorian Clerks’ in Geoffrey Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914, Croom Helm, 1977, p. 114; see also Lockwood, op cit,. p. 43. Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT and London, 1984, p. 145. Walter Besant, ‘Candour in English Fiction’, New Review, II, January 1890, pp. 6–9. This ennobling quality is also a feature of Lewes’s clerk Ranthorpe: ‘the youth [superficially] looked like a clerk … . Those who looked a little closer, however, might have seen that there was something in this youth’s face which belied his dress – an air of refinement and command – a look of the English gentleman, which is peculiar to our nation, and to one class in that nation.’ G.H. Lewes, op cit, p. 4. See, for example, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Finest Story in the World’, first published in The Contemporary Review in July 1891. This tale of metempsychosis features the bank clerk Charlie Mears, described as ‘full of aspirations … which were all literary’. Far, however, from applauding Mears’ ambition as Besant would have done, Kipling’s design ensures that the clerk’s aspiration is shown – through the eyes of a designedly snobbish narrator – to be an unobtainable, even a laughable one. Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions, Macmillan, 1899, p. 95. Letter to Algernon Gissing, 6 March 1884. Algernon and Ellen Gissing (eds), Letters of George Gissing: To Members of his Family, Constable, London, 1927, p. 136. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Doubleday, Doran, New York, 1937, p. 71. Besant described the novel as ‘an account, somewhat embroidered, of my literary beginnings’. Walter Besant, Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant, Hutchinson, 1902, p. 210. Walter Besant, The Pen and the Book, Thomas Burleigh, 1899, pp. 54–5. E.A. Bennett, Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities, Grant Richards, 1901, p. 124.

174 Notes 34. See Kate Jackson, op cit, p. 55, and John Goodbody, ‘The Star: Its role in the Rise of the New Journalism’ in Joel Wiener (ed.), Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s–1914, Greenwood Press, New York, 1988, p. 145. 35. See Chapter 4 for further discussion of the ways in which 3/6 editions of novels were designed to confer status upon their readers. 36. This was the position after the firm was incorporated in 1891, at which time, as Patricia J. Anderson has remarked, Leadenhall Press ‘significantly decreased the quantity of its publications – in 1893 it published only fourteen books, a number which declined further to a decade low of three titles in 1897’. Patricia J. Anderson, ‘Leadenhall Press’ in Patricia J. Anderson and Jonathan Rose (eds), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880, Gale Research Inc, Detroit and London, 1991, p. 172. 37. Lynne Warren, ‘ “Women in Conference”: Reading the Correspondence Columns in Woman’ in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2000, p. 122. 38. Anonymous, The Story of a London Clerk: A Faithful Narrative Faithfully Told, Leadenhall Press, 1896, p. 66. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 39. C. Booth (ed.), Life and Labour of the People in London, Volume VII, Macmillan, 1896, p. 278. 40. Frederick Wicks, The Stories of the Broadmoor Patient; and the Poor Clerk, Remington, 1893. 41. Bennett considered that this attention to form was conspicuously lacking in English fiction to date. He noted, in a Journal entry for 11 January 1898, that ‘none of the (so called) great masters of English nineteenth-century fiction had (if I am right) a deep artistic interest in form and treatment’. Arnold Bennett, The Journals of Arnold Bennett 1896–1910, Books for Libraries Press, Plainview, New York, 1975 (1932), p. 71. 42. Arnold Bennett, The Truth About an Author, Methuen, 1928 (1903), pp. 62, 64. 43. Margaret Drabble, Arnold Bennett: A Biography, Futura Publications, 1975 (1974), p. 65. 44. Bennett wrote to his friend George Sturt while completing A Man From the North: ‘I feel more sure than ever I did in my life before, that I can write in time, & “make people care”, too, as Hy. James says – though praps [sic] only a few people. Still, to have made fellow artists care – that is the thing! That is what will give ultimate peace of mind.’ Letter dated 11 November 1895, James Hepburn (ed.), Letters of Arnold Bennett, Volume II, 1889–1915, Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 27. 45. Letter dated 10 March 1902. Quoted in Reginald Pound, Arnold Bennett, William Heinemann, 1952, p. 105. 46. Bennett, The Truth About an Author, op cit, p. 74. 47. Ibid, p. 62. 48. From Emile Zola, ‘The Experimental Novel’ in George J. Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1967 (1963), p. 176. 49. David Trotter, The English Novel in History, 1895–1920, Routledge, 1993, p. 116.

Notes 175 50. From Guy de Maupassant ‘The Lower Elements’ in George J. Becker (ed.), op cit, p. 249. 51. Ibid, p. 250. 52. Bennett, The Truth About an Author, op cit, p. 64. 53. ‘The Story of Harry Cummers’, Edwin Pugh, A Street in Suburbia, William Heinemann, 1895, p. 72. 54. Ibid, p. 74. 55. Ibid, p. 78. 56. W. Somerset Maugham’s clerk James Clinton in his story ‘A Bad Example’ provides another example of the influence of Naturalism on the depiction of characters of this class. See William Somerset Maugham, Orientations, T. Fisher Unwin, 1899, pp. 37–94. 57. E.A. Bennett, Fame and Fiction, Grant Richards, 1901, pp. 258–9. 58. Bennett uses this phrase to describe George Moore’s use of characterisation in his novel A Mummer’s Wife: ‘His persons are in all respects everyday folk, lacking any sort of special individual charm, and at best full of paltry human faults.’ Ibid, p. 257. 59. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, Faber and Faber, 1992, p. 162. 60. See ibid, pp. 152–81, for Carey’s argument regarding the reasons for recent critical neglect of Bennett’s work. 61. Bennett, The Truth About an Author, op cit, p. 63. 62. Ibid, p. 64. 63. Ibid, p. 65. 64. Lane’s recent publication of the Yellow Book had understandably helped to secure this reputation for his house. Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 72, 73. 65. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000 (1993). 66. Unsigned review, Manchester Guardian, dated 15 March 1898. James Hepburn (ed.), Arnold Bennett: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 145. 67. ‘Mr Gissing and the Minor Clerks’, Speaker, 8 October 1898, p. 429. From Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge (eds), Gissing: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p. 349. 68. Conan Doyle review in Literature, IV, 1899, p. 343. H. G. Wells wrote to Doyle in support of A Duet: ‘They’re a middle-class couple and simple at that; but the ass of a critic seemed to think that this somehow condemned the book.’ Quoted in John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Murray, 1949, p. 140. 69. For other fictional studies of clerks in the 1890s see the following: Walter Besant, The Ivory Gate (1892); William Westall Trust Money (1892); Henry Cresswell, A Precious Scamp (1894); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Ebb Tide (1894); St. John Adcock, Beyond Atonement (1896); C.R. Coleridge and H. Shipton, Ravenstone (1896); W.J. Dawson, London Idylls (1895); B.L. Farjeon Samuel Boyd of Catchpole Square (1899); Richard Whiteing, No 5 John Street (1899); Amelia M. Barker, Tom-All-Alone (1899); and Shan F. Bullock’s The Barrys (1899). See also John Davidson’s remarkable poem ‘Thirty Bob a Week’.

176 Notes

3 ‘The Decently Ignoble – or, the Ignobly Decent?’: George Gissing’s Fictional Clerks 1. Unsigned review, Spectator, 9 February 1895, pp. 205–6. Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge (eds), Gissing: The Critical Heritage, op cit, p. 238. 2. Gillian Tindall, introduction to George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee, The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1976 (1894), p. xi. 3. Frank Swinnerton, George Gissing: A Critical Study, Martin Secker, 1924 (1912), p. 49. 4. Letter from ‘A Minor Clerk’ dated 29 September 1889. The Daily Chronicle, 29 September 1898, p. 6. 5. Walter Allen, The English Novel, Pelican Books, 1974 (1954), pp. 287–8. 6. John Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books, Oxford University Press, 1987 (1982), p. 3. 7. Unsigned review, Manchester Guardian, 30 April 1895, p. 10. Coustillas and Partridge (eds), op cit, p. 249. 8. George Gissing, New Grub Street, Penguin, 1983 (1891), pp. 173, 244. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 9. Halperin, op cit, p. 62. 10. Letter dated 7 February 1880, Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, Pierre Coustillas (eds), The Collected letters of George Gissing, Volume I, 1863–1880, Ohio University Press, 1990, p. 238. 11. Ibid, letter dated 3 November 1880, p. 307. 12. George Gissing, A Life’s Morning, Harvester, Brighton, 1984 (1988), p. 135. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 13. Hood is also distinctive in the context of late Victorian clerk depictions in that he belongs to Yorkshire rather than the City of London. Depictions of clerks from outside London remain rare throughout this period. 14. The New Statesman, 8 November 1947, p. 372. 15. That this social convention was widely enforced, and was continued into the twentieth century, is indicated by the experience of Leonard Bast in E.M. Forster’s Howards End: He discovered that he was going bareheaded down Regent Street. London came back with a rush. Few were about at this hour, but all whom he passed looked at him with a hostility that was the more impressive because it was unconscious. He put his hat on. E.M. Forster, Howards End, Penguin Books, 1989 (1910), p. 131 16. Article entitled ‘George Gissing’, written May–June 1948. Peter Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George Orwell: Volume Nineteen: It is What I Think 1947–1948, Secker & Warburg, 1998, p. 348. 17. Orwell argues that this motif stands as the dominant theme in Gissing’s work: ‘Gissing’s novels are a protest against the form of self-torture that goes by the name of respectability’. Ibid, p. 347. 18. George Gissing, The Nether World, Oxford University Press, 1992 (1889), p. 194. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 19. Gissing diary entry for 17 June 1888 notes, ‘I have lived in London ten years, and now, on a day like this when I am very lonely and depressed, there is not one single house in which I should be welcome if I presented myself, not one

Notes 177

20. 21.

22. 23.

family – nay, not one person – who would certainly receive me with good will’. Pierre Coustillas (ed.), London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist, The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1978, p. 32. Halperin, op cit, p. 111. Reardon’s entry into clerkdom is described in terms of a deterministic formula that Gissing uses to describe Scawthorne’s choice of employment: ‘the clerkship was the best opening that could be procured for him’ (Gissing, The Nether World, 194); similarly, Humplebee, in the eponymous short story, finds that ‘a place in a manufacturer’s office seemed the best thing that could be aimed at’. ‘Humplebee’ in George Gissing, The Day of Silence and Other Stories, Everyman, 1993, p. 143. Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography, Hutchinson, 1937, p. 241. In an aside that contrasts with that made earlier by Hood’s daughter, Reardon suggests the comparatively positive aspects of the clerk’s existence: How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There’s the day’s work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they just have to work at something, and when evening comes, they have earned their wages, they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one’s only means of support! (p. 81)

24. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell, The Hogarth Press, 1987 (1958), pp. 175–6. 25. Gissing’s understanding of his own ‘negative identification’ in the mid-1880s might appear to invalidate the argument that his early clerk characters – all written after The Unclassed – are products of this relationship. I would respond by arguing that, although Gissing recognised this phenomenon early in his career, it continued to affect his work. Throughout his novels and stories there are examples of Gissing continuing to demonstrate traits that he had earlier presciently identified and implicitly criticised. This is evident, for example, in the forceful argument he offers in various novels against exogamous marriage prior to his own wedding to a working-class woman, Edith Underwood, in 1891. 26. George Gissing, The Odd Women, Virago, 1980 (1893), p. 43. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 27. See Diary entry 30 March 1893. Coustillas (ed.), op cit. p. 300. 28. George Gissing, The House of Cobwebs, Constable, 1926 (1906), p. 266. 29. George Gissing, Human Odds and Ends, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911 (1898), p. 212. 30. Ibid, p. 219. 31. The Idler, May 1896, IX, p. 509. 32. George Gissing, Stories and Sketches, Michael Joseph, 1938, pp. 115, 117. 33. Ibid, p. 123. 34. Ibid, p. 125. 35. Sloan cites Nellie Power’s ‘taunting’ song ‘The City Toff’ as a prime example of this form. John Sloan, John Davidson, First of the Moderns, Clarendon Press. Oxford, 1995, p. 112. Sloan includes these reflections in his discussion of John Davidson’s autobiographical poem ‘In a Music-Hall’, which recalls a clerk’s experiences of visiting such a venue: ‘In Glasgow, in ‘Eighty-four, / I worked

178 Notes

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

as a junior clerk;/ My masters I never could please, / But they tried me a while at the desk … . I did as my desk-fellows did; With a pipe and a tankard of beer, / In a music-hall, rancid and hot, / I lost my soul night after night.’ Andrew Turnbull (ed.), The Poems of John Davidson: Volume One, Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh and London, 1973, pp. 21–2. Gissing, The House of Cobwebs, op cit, p. 37. Ibid, p. 95. George Gissing, The Days of Silence and Other Stories, op cit, p. 123. George Gissing, A Victim of Circumstances, Constable, 1927, p. 171. Ibid, p. 176. Ibid, pp. 179–80. Ibid, p. 183. That Gissing’s ire rather than his desire for self-parody is the determining motivation behind the tale is emphasised in Dolamore’s laughable attempts to affect knowledge of philosophy. Dolamore’s citing of Schopenhauer (pronounced ‘Shoppenhaw’ by the charlatan clerk), to whose ideas Gissing himself was particularly attracted, appears significant in this respect. A measure of Gissing’s contempt is evident in the narrator’s response to Dolamore’s disingenuous claim that he has had to read the philosopher’s work in English, because the original was too expensive: ‘Of course he knew no language; what it is to be intellectual and at the same time poor!’ (170). Diary entry for 10 May 1898. Coustillas (ed.), op cit. p. 492. George Gissing, The Town Traveller, Thomas Nelson, 1919 (1898), p. 34. All subsequent page references are to this edition. E.M. Forster, Howards End, op cit, p. 53. The Daily Chronicle, op cit, p. 6. See Diary entries from 29 September 1898 until 6 October 1898. Coustillas (ed.), op cit, pp. 502–3. Speaker, 8 October 1898, p. 429. Coustillas and Partridge (eds), op cit, pp. 349–51. Ibid, p. 351. The columnist notes of Sir Pitt Crawley: ‘To say that Thackeray intended [him] to represent the whole baronetage of England would be nonsense’. Quoted from Robert L. Selig’s article ‘Gissing and Shan F. Bullock: The First Reference in the Chicago Press to Gissing’s Chicago Fiction and Adventures.’ The Gissing Journal, 28 (4), October 1992, p. 4. Spectator, 9 February 1895. Coustillas and Partridge (eds), op cit, p. 239. Letter written by George Gissing to Morley Roberts, 10 February 1895, quoted in Coustillas and Partridge (eds), p. 242.

4 The Day of Inconceivably Small Things: The Clerk in Comic Literature 1888–1900 1. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To say Nothing of the Dog), J.W. Arrowsmith, 1909 (1889). 2. M.H. Spielmann’s 1895 study The History of Punch, indicates the lack of regard given to the Diary on its debut: ‘It was a domestic record of considerable length, which dealt in an extremely earnest way with Mr. Samuel Porter [sic], who lived in a small villa in Holloway, and had trouble with his drains,

Notes 179

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

and was sometimes late at the office, with similar circumstances of striking interest and concern, which seemed to him to call for public notice.’ M.H. Spielmann, The History of Punch, Cassell, 1895, p. 392. William Sime’s story The Rajah and the Rosebud was the featured serial in Home Chimes between January and June 1889, and H.E. Clarke’s By Hook or By Crook was the featured serial in the same periodical between July and December 1889. ‘Recent Novels’, The Times, 17 October 1895, p. 3. Punch, 26 May 1888, p. 241. Peter Keating notes the expansion of the late Victorian magazine market as follows: ‘In 1875 the number of weekly, monthly and quarterly magazines was given [in the Newspaper Press Directory] as 643. Here again there was a steady, though more spectacular increase to 1298 in 1885, 2081 in 1895, and to 2531 in 1903’. Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914, Fontana Press, 1991, p. 34. Introduction by Kate Flint to George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995 (1892), p. ix. George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody, Pan Books, 1946 (1892), p. 15. All subsequent page references are (unless otherwise specified) to this edition. Punch, 11 May 1889, p. 229. Barry Pain, The Eliza Stories, Pavilion Books, 1992 (1984), p. 2. These ‘stories’ were originally published in Jerome K. Jerome’s periodical To-Day. Ibid, p. 79. Ibid, p. 52. Arlene Young, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999, p. 89. Taken from the Geffrye Museum catalogue to the exhibition ‘Mr Pooter’s London’, 1 November 1988–26 February 1989. A further endorsement of the precision of the Grossmith’s perspective is provided by the 1995 edition of the Diary published by Oxford University Press. This edition offers one hundred and thirty three explanatory notes to the text, none of which dispute the accuracy of the textual detail. Geffrye Museum catalogue to the exhibition ‘Mr Pooter’s London’. Introduction by Michael Irwin, George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody, Wordsworth Classics, 2006, p. iv. V.S. Pritchett, The Working Novelist, Chatto & Windus, 1965, p. 86. The Independent, Review Supplement, 3 May 2001, p. 7. George Cotterell, ‘New Novels’, The Academy, 21 July 1894, p. 46. Cotterell notes, ‘Mr. Weedon Grossmith is to be particularly congratulated on the way in which he has caught the spirit of the narrative, and made it fixed and visible in his drawings’. The Saturday Review, 5 October 1889, p. 388. Quoted in Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dog), Pavilion Books, 1982, p. 184. Spectator, 16 November 1889, p. 700. Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times, Hodder and Stoughton, 1926, p. 72. Joseph Connolly, Jerome K Jerome: A Critical Biography, Orbis Publishing, 1982, p. 38.

180 Notes 25. Home Chimes’ popularity is confirmed by its relatively long life (it lasted until 1894) in an increasingly competitive market. Prior to placing Three Men with the magazine, Jerome had already published his ‘Idle Thoughts’ (later collected as Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow) in this periodical in 1885. 26. While the Connolly biography suggests that Jerome had already embarked on his career as a full time writer while penning Three Men in a Boat, Jerome’s autobiography appears to contradict this. Here Jerome writes that it was only after the death of his employer Anderson Rose that ‘I decided to burn my boats, and to devote all my time to writing’. Rose’s death in September 1890 would therefore appear to confirm that Jerome remained a solicitor’s clerk for some months after the book’s publication in September 1889. Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times, op cit, p. 82. 27. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994 (1889), p. 5. All subsequent page references are to this edition unless otherwise specified. 28. Letter to J.W. Arrowsmith dated 11 March 1889. Quoted in Pavilion edition of Three Men, op cit, p. 182. 29. See Chapter 3 for ways in which this ‘3/6 public’ was later targeted by Leadenhall Press in their marketing of The Story of a London Clerk. 30. Letter to J.W. Arrowsmith dated 19 March 1889, quoted in Pavilion edition of Three Men, op cit, p. 182. 31. Letter to J.W. Arrowsmith dated 15 March 1889. Ibid, p. 182. 32. Patricia J. Anderson and Jonathan Rose (eds), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880, Gale Research Inc, Detroit and London, 1991, p. 13. 33. See letter to Jerome from J.W. Arrowsmith dated 20 January 1890, quoted in Pavilion edition of Three Men, op cit, p. 185. 34. Gregory Anderson notes that bank clerks were, during the Victorian period, considered to be ‘the aristocracy of the clerical profession, [who] generally worked shorter hours than commercial clerks’. He adds that ‘preference would be given in recruitment to those who were respectably connected’. This in effect meant that prospective bank clerks were ‘known personally or were nominated by persons known to the employer’. Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks, op cit, pp. 12, 16. Jerome plays, to some extent, on the bank clerks’ ‘superior’ reputation among other clerical workers in the following passage, in which J and Harris discuss George’s work: ‘ “I never see him doing any work there,” continued Harris, “whenever I go in. He sits behind a bit of glass all day, trying to look as if he was doing something. What’s the good of a man behind a bit of glass? I have to work for my living. Why can’t he work?” ’ (66). 35. Jerome, My Life and Times, op cit, p. 104. 36. Home Chimes, VI, February 1889, p. 103. 37. A recent article in the The Pall Mall Gazette had served to confirm the effect of the growth of this tribe with specific reference to the Thames: For the last few years it has been gradually dawning upon us, however sad and unwilling we might be to believe it, that the Thames was not the place for a holiday. ‘Arry camping in rows of tents on the lock islands, house-boats anchored against every bank … – all these were bad enough; but the bitterest part of all was perhaps the knowledge that every respectable person on the banks of the river who did not want to make money out of you regarded

Notes 181 you as a pest and a nuisance. So we gave up the Thames once and for all , and, exiled by ’Arry, we tried the Seine instead.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

Unsigned article entitled ‘A Boating Expedition on the Seine’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 1 October 1886, p. 4. V.S. Pritchett, a knowledgeable observer of the lower middle classes, had no hesitation, some seventy years after the tale was published, in recognising Three Men as representing ‘the misadventures of three tin-opening suburban clerks’. V.S. Pritchett, The Working Novelist, op cit, p. 85. John Carey has more recently argued that, quite apart from Jerome’s employment of clerk’s slang in Three Men, his description of the men eating (or, more accurately, attempting to eat) tinned fruit would have served to define the ‘low’ nature of the material depicted. Carey, op cit, pp. 21–2. Jerome, My Life and Times, op cit, p. 72. Ibid, p. 72. The Saturday Review, op cit, pp. 387–8. Punch, 1 February 1890, p. 57. ‘Letters to Clorinda’, The Idler, 9, February 1897, p. 134. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To say Nothing of the Dog), Arrowsmith, 1909 edition, op cit. It is important to note that the consistently high sales figures for Three Men allowed it to remain on sale at its original price for many years rather than appearing (after its initial print run) in the shilling edition that Jerome had anticipated in his letter to Arrowsmith’s dated 11 March 1889. This lengthy success for the book at 3/6 certainly vindicates Jerome’s reading of the market. The Idler, op cit, pp. 133–4. Apart from Anthony Hope, the popular comic writer F. Anstey had also helped to popularise the dialogue sketch in the 1890s. In 1897, The Academy noted the relationship of Anstey’s work to that of Pett Ridge: ‘The author of Voces Populi [Anstey] prefers to find his subjects rather among the middle and upper classes than the masses … . This circumstance gave Mr. Ridge his opportunity: he has made waggish Whitechapel his own, wherever it is found, and it remains his own to this day.’ Article entitled ‘Some Younger Reputations: Mr. Pett Ridge’, The Academy, 52, 11 December 1897, p. 527. Pett Ridge described his first published work thus: Because a fellow-student at the Birkbeck had succeeded in placing a turn-over in the Globe – a turn-over was an article on the last column of page one, and a thousand words enabled it to go to page two; the fee was one guinea, and I believe the sum never varied – because of this I wrote a sketch called ‘A Dinner in Soho,’ and sent it to St. James’s Gazette. It was printed immediately, and I prepared others without delay; all concerning London incidents and London people.

W. Pett Ridge, A Story Teller: Forty Years in London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1923, pp. 8–9. 48. Ibid, p. 2. 49. Ibid, pp. 12–13. 50. An impression of the nature of the fiction produced by Pett Ridge during his long career can be indicated by his choice of titles: Up Side Streets (1903), Next Door Neighbours (1904), Sixty-Nine Birnam Road (1908), Nine to Six-Thirty

182 Notes

67. 68.

(1910), Light Refreshment (1910), Love at Paddington (1912), Mixed Grill (1913), The Remington Sentence (1913), and On Toast (1916). A review of Pett Ridge’s 1929 novel The Slippery Ladder argued that his stories fell into two distinct types: ‘one is “Dick Whittington” and the other “Cinderella” ‘. But the reviewer conceded that ‘his variants of these stories … are peculiarly his own, and by keeping them up to date, and, as a rule within the four-mile radius, which he knows as no other novelist knows it, they never fail him’. The New Statesman, 30 March 1929, p. 799. G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered, Methuen, 1908, p. 10. Letter to Percy Redfern, ‘end February 1898’. David C. Smith (ed.), The Correspondence of H.G. Wells: Volume 1, 1880–1903, Pickering and Chatto, 1998, p. 307. ‘Good Bad Books’, Tribune, 2 November 1945. Peter Davison (ed.), I Belong to the Left, 1945, Volume Seventeen, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Secker and Warburg, 1998, p. 348. From review of Outside the Radius (1899), ‘Recent Novels’, The Times, 14 April 1900, p. 9. These Dialogues had originally appeared in a number of popular magazines: St. James’s Gazette, New Budget, Pall Mall Budget, Sketch, Black and White, and To-Day, edited by Jerome. W. Pett Ridge, Minor Dialogues, J.W. Arrowsmith, 1894, p. 57. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Vincent Brome, Four Realist Novelists, Longmans Green, 1965, p. 32. For an account of Pett Ridge as a member of the ‘Cockney School’ see P.J. Keating, The Working Class in Victorian Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, pp. 206–19. ‘New Writers: Mr. W. Pett Ridge’, The Bookman, IX, February 1896, p. 148. The title Outside the Radius indicates the area beyond the four mile zone measured from Charing Cross in which the London cabbies were permitted to charge at a higher rate per mile. W. Pett Ridge, Outside the Radius: Stories of a London Suburb, Hodder and Stoughton, 1899, p. 3. All subsequent page references are to this edition. W. Pett Ridge, A Story Teller, op cit, pp. 23, 24. From ‘Repairing a Breach’, W. Pett Ridge, Up Side Streets, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1903, pp. 158, 160. From ‘Nesting’, ibid, pp. 149, 150. From ‘The Alteration in Mr. Kershaw’, The Idler, X, December 1896, p. 713. From ‘First Day and Last’, W. Pett Ridge, London Only, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1901, pp. 222–3. This review of Pett Ridge’s collection Light Refreshment, went on: ‘In your study you devour/ NIETZCHE, KANT and SCHOPENHAUER;/ Something in a lighter vein/ Suits your fancy in the train./ MR. RIDGE (PETT RIDGE) and I/ Recommend that you should buy/ Light Refreshment. Don’t abstain, / But consume it in the train … .’. ‘Our Booking-Office’, Punch, 23 November 1910, p. 378. V. S. Pritchett, In my Good Books, Chatto & Windus, 1942, p. 90. Ibid, p. 90.

5

Degeneration in the Edwardian Office

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

1. Arthur Machen, The House of Souls, E. Grant Richards, 1906, p. 23. 2. Keble Howard, The Smiths of Surbiton, T. Fisher Unwin, 1925 (1906), p. 78.

Notes 183 3. Shan F. Bullock, Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk, T.Werner Laurie, 1907, pp. 59–60. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 4. Bill Nasson, The South African War 1899–1902, Arnold, 1999, p. 279. 5. G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought 1899–1914, Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 61. 6. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c1848–c1918, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 222, 230. 7. C.F.G. Masterman (ed.), The Heart of Empire: Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1973 (1901), p. 8. 8. Price’s research confirms that greater numbers of clerks than labourers aged between 17 and 25 volunteered for the Imperial Yeomanry in 1900 and 1901. Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War 1899–1902, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 228, 241. See also, Richard Price, ‘Society, Status and Jingoism: The Social Roots of Lower Middle Class Patriotism, 1870–1900’ in Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, Croom Helm, 1997, pp. 89–112. 9. David Brooks, The Age of Upheaval: Edwardian Politics, 1899–1914, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 12. 10. Pick, op cit, p. 3. 11. Gregory Anderson, ‘The Social Economy of Late-Victorian Clerks’ in Geoffrey Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, op cit, p. 115. 12. Ibid, p. 115. 13. Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks, Manchester University Press, 1976, p. 27. 14. Ford Maddox Ford, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City, Everyman, 1995 (1905), p. 55. 15. ‘The Two Clerks’, from Rudolf Dircks, Verisimilitudes, The Unicorn Press, 1897. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Dircks’ text is of particular interest in its rare depiction of a large modern departmentalised office at this period. The majority of other relevant works of this era tend to be set either in small offices, such as Arnold Bennett’s legal office in A Man from the North (1899), or in larger and more traditional workplaces, as exemplified by Shan F. Bullock’s depiction of the Somerset House Tax Office in Robert Thorne (1907). 16. Pick, op cit, p. 25. 17. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 125. 18. In Dracula, Mina Harker tells Professor Van Helsing that the Count ‘is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him’. Bram Stoker, Dracula, Oxford University Press, 1998 (1897), p. 342. 19. Lamb, Trollope and Bullock had all worked as clerks in this location. 20. Note, for example, the following description of Thorne’s duties: Being junior in our room, which dealt largely with correspondence, I had a junior position there, and that meant inferior duties – copying letters, indexing papers, addressing envelopes, clearing trays, carrying and fetching messages, keeping the correspondence book, besides duties of a more servile nature, such as making up the fire, attending the telephone, working the revolving stamp. (p. 139) 21. Gissing, New Grub Street, Penguin Books, 1983 (1891), p. 173. 22. The apparently affectionate detail with which Thorne describes his working life has encouraged John Carey, among others, to erroneously suggest that

184 Notes

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

this novel presents ‘a wholly sympathetic treatment of clerkdom’. John Carey, The Intellectual and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, Faber and Faber, 1992, p. 60. Elsewhere, H.J. Dyos reads Bullock’s novel, alongside Keble Howard’s The Smiths of Surbiton, as one which champions suburbia. H.J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb, Leicester University Press, 1966, p. 26. Similarly, Kate Flint includes Bullock alongside Pett Ridge and Keble Howard as writers who ‘delineate the suburbs, and the lives of those who inhabit them, with understanding, even idealism’. Kate Flint, Introduction to George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. xvii. In depicting Thorne as a child of the Devon countryside, Bullock appears to suggest that his petit bourgeois upbringing (his father is a schoolteacher) rather than blighted city air, has robbed the future clerk of his vitality. Mark Allerton was the pseudonym of William Ernest Cameron, the father of the distinguished journalist and broadcaster James Cameron. In his autobiography Point of Departure, James Cameron remembered his father as a barrister who had ‘found his true metier as a novelist’. Cameron junior further acknowledged the ‘serious quality’ of several of his father’s works of fiction, and went on to lament the fact that these novels had become ‘long forgotten by everyone in the world except me’. James Cameron, Point of Departure, Panther, 1969 (1967), p. 16. ‘The Stock-Broker’s Clerk’, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Smith, Elder, 1903 (1894), p. 81. See William Greenslade, op cit, pp. 99–106. As Margaret Schlegel remarks: ‘If Wilcoxes hadn’t worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn’t sit here without having our throats cut … . More and more do I refuse to draw income and sneer at those who guarantee it.’ E.M. Forster, Howards End, op cit, pp. 177–8. The prejudicial attitude of the bourgeois intelligentsia towards the commercial world during this period is placed in a wider cultural context by Martin J. Wiener. Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Oliver Onions, In Accordance With the Evidence, Nisbet, 1915 (1912), p. 203. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Oliver Onions, Whom God has Sundered, Martin Secker, 1926, p. 115. Mark Allerton, Such and Such Things, Methuen, 1910, pp. 118–19. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Pick, op cit, pp. 173–4. Manchester Guardian, 23 February 1910, p. 7. Keble Howard’s original plans for The Smiths of Surbiton suggest that the text was initially intended to offer a perspective on suburban life complementary to Bullock’s Robert Thorne: ‘The kind of people he [Leicester Harmsworth] had in mind would live in a house rented at about £26 a year.’ Keble Howard op cit, pp. 8, 9. Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, Everyman’s Library, 1938, p. 294. Reviews of The Merry Heart, many of which were printed by way of advertisement in Swinnerton’s second novel, confirm the novelty of its approach to the office scene. Typical amongst these was that printed in the Athenaeum,

Notes 185

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

which commended the novel’s ‘wholly sympathetic study of the City office’, in particular noting its ‘background drawn with freshness and accuracy altogether unusual from lower middle-class English life’. Elsewhere, the Standard’s reviewer recognised Swinnerton’s achievement in capturing a mediated vision of clerkly life, arguing that he had ‘succeeded in rendering life truly without being either too drab or too fanciful’. Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography, Hutchinson, 1937, p. 131. Anderson (ed.), The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Workers since 1870, Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 34. Frank Swinnerton, The Young Idea, Chatto & Windus, 1910, p. 59. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Swinnerton, mindful of those earlier fictional clerks who aspired to and directed their energies towards an unsuccessful career in literature, expressly sets Galbraith apart: ‘Thank God I don’t imagine I can write! Most chaps chuck up jobs like this and hurl ’emselves on the writing trade … or the stage’ (233). Galbraith, however, equally sees the likelihood of promotion, (following the acceptance of his scheme), as opening up the prospect of his taking a wife: ‘It led the way to economic advancement: he would then have no need to examine pennies or to blink the idea of marriage’ (171). Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography, op cit, p. 169. Hubert Bland, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman, 4 April 1914, p. 823.

6 The Friends and Patrons of Leonard Bast: Liberal Anxiety and Edwardian Clerk 1. C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England, Methuen & Co, 1960 (1909), pp. 75–6. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 2. Forster notes ‘I belong to the fag-end of Victorian Liberalism’ in E.M. Forster, Two Cheers For Democracy, Edward Arnold, 1951, p. 67. 3. Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E.M. Forster, The Hogarth Press, 1970 (1938), pp. 120–1. Forster reciprocates these sentiments in an essay entitled ‘English Prose between 1918 and 1939’: ‘Rose Macaulay is a wise guide, tolerant, generous-minded, liberal, courageous, cheerful, and her judgements of society and social values are always sound’. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, op cit, p. 281. 4. Several critics have concurred with Swinnerton’s views on Forster’s weakness in his grasp of Leonard Bast: F.R. Leavis, for example, described the clerk as ‘clearly a mere external grasping at something that lies outside the author’s first-hand experience’. F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit, The Hogarth Press, 1984, (1952), p. 270. D.S. Savage similarly argued that Bast was a mere ‘effigy made to walk and talk in such a way as to bolster up the liberal philosophy which inspires the book’. D.S. Savage, The Withered Branch: Six Studies in the Modern Novel, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950, p. 66. 5. Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E.M. Forster, Stanford University Press, 1966, p. 247. 6. Nicola Beauman, Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster, Hodder & Stoughton, 1993, p. 219. 7. Masterman, op cit, p. 63.

186 Notes 8. Noted in P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 135. 9. Beauman, op cit, pp. 218–19. 10. Whilst Masterman included elementary teachers amongst his ‘Suburbans’, it is clear that he considered the office worker to be particularly representative of this group: ‘Its male population is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters. It is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness falls’ (Masterman, op cit, p. 57). 11. Gissing’s clerk Christopher Parish in The Town Traveller epitomises this type when taking part in (and winning) a newspaper ‘missing word’ competition (p. 305). 12. Whether Masterman here has in mind the garden city model is left open to question, but this design (and the timing of his remarks) would appear to suggest that this was indeed his intention. 13. Robert Baden-Powell’s foundation of the Boy Scout movement in 1908 should also be understood as a part of this process of reconnecting the urban with the countryside. See Elleke Boehmer’s introduction to Robert BadenPowell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, Oxford University Press, 2004. 14. Peter Widdowson, E.M. Forster’s Howards End: Fiction as History, Sussex University Press, 1977, p. 104. 15. Stone, op cit, p. 249. 16. ‘A Fragment of Life’ in Arthur Machen, The House of Souls, E. Grant Richards, 1906, p. 33. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 17. See also Forster’s characterisation of Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey (1907). 18. Quoted in Christopher Palmer’s introduction to Arthur Machen, The Collected Arthur Machen, Duckworth, 1988, p. 26. 19. M. Urquhart, The Fool of Faery, Mills and Boon, 1910, pp. 241–2. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 20. Rose Macaulay, The Secret River, John Murray, 1909, p. 62. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 21. Bankes is introduced into the novel with a reference to his former existence: ‘[he was] once pleasant to look at before the seal was set on him’ (143). 22. The clumsy expression ‘worked through’ is reminiscent of Bast’s own formulation ‘I attend the gallery’ (50), which he uses to describe his visit to the Opera House. This usage is noted by Helen Schlegel whose mental reaction is captured by Forster: ‘She had been to the gallery at Covent Garden but she did not “attend” it, preferring the more expensive seats’ (51). 23. Furbank notes that amongst Forster’s students in the period before Howards End was published was E.K. Bennett, a clerk at Crosse and Blackwell’s pickle factory. In later years Bennett, through Forster’s influence, received a scholarship to Cambridge, subsequently becoming a fellow of Caius and an expert on the German Novelle. Furbank, op cit, p. 176. 24. Letter to Edward Arnold, dated 3 June 1911, quoted in E.M. Forster, Howards End, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, London, 1998 (1910), p. 283. 25. Furbank, op cit, pp. 175–6.

Notes 187 26. May Sinclair, The Judgement of Eve and Other Stories, Hutchinson, 1914 (1907). All subsequent page references are to this edition. 27. William Henry Hudson, The Strange Adventures of John Smith, Sands, 1902, p. 22. 28. Falder’s pathetic inability to withstand a crisis, and his meek, fatalistic acceptance of his fate, is reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw’s comic treatment of the clerk’s collapse in Misalliance (1910). Julius Baker, a clerk who has arrived with a gun at a country house party, determined to make the host answer to him for the seduction of his mother, is instead easily disarmed by a female guest: Baker: All right: I’m done. Couldn’t even do that job decently. That’s a clerk all over. Very well; send for your damned police and make an end of it. I’m accustomed to prison from nine to six: I daresay I can stand it from six to nine as well.

29. 30. 31.

32.

George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Fanny’s First Play, Constable, 1914, p. 67. John Galsworthy, Justice, Duckworth, 1977 (1910), p. 56. P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith in the City, A & C Black, 1950 (1910), p. 118. All subsequent page references are to this edition. In addition to the Conan Doyle material discussed in Chapter 5 it is worth recalling that in ‘The Naval Treaty’, Sherlock Holmes singles out Board schools for special praise: ‘Light-houses … Beacons of the future! Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future’. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Smith Elder, 1903, p. 331. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, Oxford University Press, 1998 (1912), p. 6. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

7 ‘A Merciful Heaven-sent Release’?: The Clerk and the First World War 1. For more general studies of masculinity and the Great War, see the following: Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War, George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, and Lois Bibbings, ‘Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors in the Great War’, Social and Legal Studies, 12 (3), 2003, pp. 335–58. 2. J.B. Priestley, Margin Released, The Reprint Society, 1963 (1962), p. 79. 3. Ibid, p. 78. 4. These figures contrast with those from the industrial, agricultural and transport sectors, from which an average of just 26.35 per cent of the pre-war total workforce enlisted. Figures taken from J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People, Macmillan, 1985, p. 34. 5. Quoted in Henry Williamson’s Preface to The Patriot’s Progress, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1999, (1930), p. xx. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 6. ‘Xanthus’ (Herbert Asquith), ‘The Dead Volunteer’, Spectator, 8 August 1914, p. 202. We might usefully compare this with Rudyard Kipling’s poem

188 Notes ‘Ex-Clerk’, taken from the ‘Epitaphs of the War’ series published in 1919: Pity not! The Army gave Freedom to a timid slave: In which Freedom did he find Strength of body, will and mind: By which strength he came to prove Mirth, companionship, and love: For which Love to Death he went: In which Death he lies content.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition 1885–1918: Volume II, Hodder & Stoughton, 1919, p. 190. R.C. Sherriff, No Leading Lady: An Autobiography, Victor Gollancz, 1968, p. 317. Ernest Raymond, The Old Tree Blossomed: A Realistic Romance, Cassell, 1930, p. 184. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Winter, op cit, p. 49. The relatively healthy working conditions in British offices contrasted with those existing in industry which, according to Winter, had contributed to the ‘appallingly low standards of health in many urban working-class districts’. Ibid, p. 49. R.H. Mottram, Bowler Hat: A Last Glance at the Old Country Banking, Hutchinson, 1940, p. 200. Quoted in Peter Simkins’s Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–1916, Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 170. Quoted in Simkins, ibid, p. 88. In an introduction to the Alan Sutton reissue of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, Anne Williamson reflects upon the autobiographical nature of this novel sequence: ‘Most of the characters and incidents throughout the entire series are based on real scenes, characters and incidents from Henry Williamson’s own life, and that of his family and friends’. Anne Williamson goes on, however, to bring a necessary caveat to this claim: ‘the element of fiction and transposing of real events with imagined ones does, however, mean nothing can be taken for granted’. Henry Williamson, A Fox Under my Cloak, Alan Sutton, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1996 (1955), p. iii. Henry Williamson, How Dear is Life, Alan Sutton, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1995 (1954), p. 48. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Herbert Tremaine (Maude Deuchar), The Feet of the Young Men: A Domestic War Novel, C.W. Daniel, 1917, p. 25. All subsequent page references are to this edition. C.W. Daniel was a pacifist publisher who, as Imogen Gassert notes, ‘was very publicly prosecuted and almost closed down for publishing the novel Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini (as “A. T. Fitzroy”)’. Imogen Gassert, ‘In a Foreign Field: What Soldiers in the Trenches Liked to Read’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 May 2002, p. 17. C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England, Methuen, 1960, (1909) p. 59. R.H. Mottram, The Spanish Farm Trilogy 1914–1918, Chatto & Windus, 1929 (1927), p. 775. All subsequent page references are to this edition. The individual volumes of the trilogy were published as follows: The Spanish Farm in 1924, Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four! in 1925 and The Crime at Vanderlynden’s in 1926.

Notes 189 19. C.E. Montague, Disenchantment, Chatto & Windus, 1922, pp. 7–8. 20. Several autobiographical accounts point towards the initial embarrassment that might be caused by these new relationships. A.H. Davis, a clerk at Lloyds Bank, recalled marching through local streets following his enlistment, with ‘one particularly rough chap [who] picked me out as his pal on progress to R.E. Headquarters … . [On the way] I seemed to meet all my more exclusive friends, and consequently did not feel particularly proud of my position.’ A.H. Davis, Extracts from the Diaries of a Tommy, Cecil Palmer, 1932, pp. 12–13. Similarly Pooteresque was Private Charles Jones, a pre-war solicitor’s clerk, who wrote to his wife, describing his experiences three days after arriving at his depot: The language used by the majority of recruits, consisting mainly of London roughs and country yokels of the worst description, I cannot repeat here but Damns and Bloodys etc etc were introduced into every sentence … .We had to sleep packed like sardines and with one of the noisiest and obscene collections of human beings it has ever been my misfortune to meet, and the smell of them packed into a small building after a hot day was truly sickening. (Quoted in Simkins, op cit, p. 195). 21. Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die, Faber & Faber, 1964 (1933), p. 285. 22. R.H. Mottram remembered at his enlistment that next to him ‘stood one for whom a large car called to take him home from drill and who gave sumptuous dinners after which officers were invited to take wine with him’. R.H. Mottram, Three Personal Records of the War, The Scholartis Press, 1929, p. 22. 23. Donald Hankey commented in his popular war essays, collected together in A Student in Arms (1916), that ‘the youngster who wants promotion has probably been a clerk and lived in a suburb. He is better educated and has a smarter appearance than the general run of the men’. Donald Hankey, A Student in Arms, Andrew Melrose, 1917 (1916), pp. 46–7. 24. Martin Petter, ‘ “Temporary Gentlemen” in the Aftermath of the Great War: Rank, Status and the Ex-Officer Problem’. The Historical Journal, 37 (1), 1994, p. 139. 25. The indeterminate status of the temporary officers of the New Armies is identified in the following passage from Henry Williamson’s The Golden Virgin: What did Georgina Lady Dudley think of them? They were the half-and-half people, so very polite, poor dears, so formal, trying hard to appear above themselves; but all was forgiven them for being what they were. Had they not come out of their unknown places and answered the call, from their obscure streets and small houses, to replace, with their plain names in the casualty lists, those of the splendid young men who had fallen in 1914 and 1915. (p. 340) Henry Williamson, The Golden Virgin, Macdonald, 1966. 26. Gallimore’s re-invention of himself as a member of the leisured classes is achieved with an ease which perhaps points towards the potential of the London clerk to achieve a desired social mobility. Jim, the ‘son of a banking house’ with whom Gallimore spends his leave, appears unaffected by the exclerk’s lack of pre-war status: ‘Stephen, in speech and appearance, lacked

190 Notes

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

nothing that Jim possessed. They blent easily’ (Raymond, op cit, p. 201). Similarly, Phillip Maddison is called ‘posh’ and ‘Archibald’ by working class soldiers (the latter a name used in the music-hall to indicate a ‘toff’ character), epithets which he personally denies, but fails to refute publicly (Williamson, op cit, pp. 77, 257). Williamson, A Fox Under my Cloak, op cit, p. 164. All subsequent page references are to the edition. Alfred Burrage, writing under the pseudonym ‘Ex-Private X’, confirms the temporary gentleman’s indeterminate status as seen from the ranks. Whilst Burrage’s memoir commended the lower middle-class officer’s fighting ability, he was less accepting of them on the home front. Describing the scene at a West End restaurant he comments that: ‘The place was full of officers and their lady-loves, and judging by the manners and accents of the former they were nearly all “Smiffs”, late of Little Buggington Grammar School, who had been “clurks” in civilian life, and were now throwing their weight about on seven and sixpence a day and half salary’. Ex-Private X [A.M. Burrage], War is War, Victor Gollancz, 1930, p. 217. Williamson, The Golden Virgin, op cit, p. 73. Shan F. Bullock, Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk, T. Werner Laurie, 1907, p. 1. Keble Howard, The Smiths of Surbiton, T. Fisher Unwin, 1945 (1906), p. 7. R.H. Mottram, Bowler Hat, op cit, pp. 198–9. H.F. Maltby, Ring up the Curtain, Hutchinson, 1950, p. 146. Ibid, p. 149. Petter, ‘Temporary Gentleman’, op cit, p. 133. Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, Cassell, 1968 (1941), p. 188. ‘The Case of Lieutenant Hall’ in Richard Aldington’s Roads to Glory, Imperial War Museum, 1992 (1931). Alan Thomas, The Lonely Years, Ernest Benn, 1930, p. 220. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Galsworthy’s support for R.H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy, to which he contributed a foreword, also perhaps indicates his shift towards a more empathetic attitude to the clerk class. John Galsworthy, A Modern Comedy (including The White Monkey), Heinemann, 1948 (1929), pp. 122,192. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Reveille: Devoted to the Disabled Sailor and Soldier, 3, February 1919, p. 425. Anderson (ed.), The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers since 1870, Manchester University Press, p. 34. R.H. Mottram, Bowler Hat, op cit, p. 200. See the following: Mrs Baillie Reynolds, The Judgement of Charis (1921), Mrs Horace Tremlett, Fanny the Fibber (1921), Marjorie Grant, Latchkey Ladies (1921), Edgar Wallace, The Sinister Man (1924) and Sylvia Stevenson, The Tight-rope (1926). Punch, 14 November 1923. These included cartoons by H.M. Brock (p. 479), J.H. Thorpe (p. 475) and D.L. Ghilchik (p. 466). Richard Aldington, A Fool i’ the Forest: A Phantasmagoria, George Allen & Unwin, 1925, p. 60.

Notes 191

8 The Black-coated Worker and the Great Depression in 1930s Literature 1. F.D. Klingender, The Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain, Martin Lawrence, 1935, p. 98. 2. Walter Greenwood’s seminal novel of industrial unemployment, Love on the Dole (1933), illustrates this persistence in the following scene, in which Sally Hardcastle rues her brother’s decision to refuse an effeminising but secure job option: ‘She frowned petulantly; pouted, asking herself, plaintively, whether she could help it if her father and Harry were unemployed. Anyway, Harry should have taken the job in an office when he left school: he wouldn’t be advised.’ Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole, Penguin, 1969 (1933), p. 169. 3. George Orwell, Coming up for Air, Penguin, 1963 (1939), p. 14. 4. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin, 1966 (1937), p. 78. 5. Ibid, p. 77. 6. Ibid, p. 131. 7. John Burnett argues that ‘In the development of English housing types, middle-class housing of the inter-war period, most typically represented by the semi-detached villa situated in a newly-developed suburban area, seems to mark a disjunction with the past, and an entry into a new era of mass housing still today the most characteristic expression of English domestic architecture’. Burnett backs up this argument by noting that of the 3,998,000 new houses built in England and Wales between 1919 and 1939, 2,886,000 were constructed by private builders who were typically building for those with an income level of £200–£600 per year. John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1985, Methuen, 1986 (1978), pp. 250, 252. 8. Lockwood, op cit, p. 55. 9. Klingender, op cit, p. 91. 10. Frank Tilsley’s novel The Plebeian’s Progress, Gollancz, 1933 includes the following scene in which an out-of-work clerk decides to try his luck at selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door: ‘If it’s a wash-out I’ll start and sign on.’ ‘Oh, Allen.’ Anne [his wife] sat bolt up right and turned, startled. ‘The dole … you!’ ‘What the hell d’you mean? The dole, me,’ he mimicked. ‘There’re thousands better than me on the dole and thousands more peddling round places with all sorts of rubbish’. (p. 199) 11. Lockwood, op cit, p. 56. 12. Figures taken from Klingender, op cit, pp. 91–2. 13. Harold Elvin, the General Secretary of the National Union of Clerks, anticipated Klingender’s argument in a submission to the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance (1931): Prior to the war and immediate post-war period, it was generally assumed that office workers could rely on being permanently employed, providing they were efficient and their character good … they could feel assured of regular employment in contra-distinction to the manual worker, whose employment might often be intermittent … . [But since the depression] clerks with twenty,

192 Notes thirty and forty years’ service to their credit have been dismissed … . Owing to the continued depression, this has meant that some of them have never again been employed as clerks. (Quoted in Lockwood, op cit, pp. 55–6) 14. H.L. Beales and R.S. Lambert (eds), Memoirs of the Unemployed, Victor Gollancz, 1934, pp. 131–2. 15. Figures quoted in John Stevenson, British Society 1914–45, Penguin, 1990 (1984), p. 266. 16. G. Routh, Occupations of the People of Great Britain, 1801–1981, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1987, p. 28. 17. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Routledge, 1991, p. 8. 18. Ibid, p. 9. 19. The following extract from C.S. Forester’s Plain Murder, Penguin, 1954 (1930) offers an impression of the use of current economic events to provide a motive for murder: ‘And we’ll be looking for a job’, said Oldroyd. ‘I’ve been out before and I know what it’s like’. ‘Know what it’s like? D’you think I don’t know too?’ said Morris. ‘ “Dear Sir, in reply to your advertisement in to-day’s Daily Express” – bah, I’ve done hundreds of ’em. God, you’re lucky compared to me. I got a wife an’ two nippers, don’t you forget. An’ a fat chance we’ve got of finding another job … . We’ll be starving in the streets in a fortnight’s time. Jesus, it’ll be cold. I’ve had some’. Reddy [never having been unemployed] did not appreciate fully the gnawing fears which were assaulting the other two – hunger and cold were only words to him. (pp. 5–6) Later Morris, the married clerk, meditates privately on these gnawing fears: He realised in all its horror the imminence of dismissal, of tramping streets looking for work, of standing elbow to elbow with seedy out-of-works scanning the ‘Situations Vacant’ columns of the newspapers in the Free Library … . All men have their secret fear. (p. 13) 20. Quoted from Priestley’s introduction to Everyman’s Library edition of Angel Pavement. J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement, Everyman’s Library, 1968 (1930), p. xii. Vincent Brome notes that during Christmas 1929, when demand for the novel was at its height, 5000 copies of The Good Companions were leaving the publisher Heinemann’s warehouse every day. Vincent Brome, J.B. Priestley, Hamish Hamilton, 1988, p. 94. 21. John Osborne, A Better Class of Person, Faber & Faber, 1981, p. 65. 22. Figures taken from Boots PLC company website: www.Boots-plc.com. 23. Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, p. 46. 24. McAleer notes that over 2800 new editions of adult fiction appeared annually between 1935 and 1937. Ibid, p. 46. 25. J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement, Penguin, 1948 (1930), p. 25. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 26. Frank Swinnerton makes this comparison explicit in his study, The Georgian Literary Scene: It [Angel Pavement] is not greatly different in tone (although it is much longer than any of them) from the novels of Pett Ridge. That does not mean,

Notes 193 naturally, that it is a bad book, for Pett Ridge was an able writer; but it does mean that it is lacking in just that distinction which would make it important. (p. 351)

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, Everyman’s Library, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938. For discussions of who might constitute a ‘middlebrow’ reader during the 1930s, see the following: Alison Light’s Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (1991), Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), Rosa Maria Bracco’s Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (1993), and Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (2001). In a later passage, Priestley seems to raise Smeeth’s skill to a Zen-like plane: He was not Herbert Norman Smeeth, but simply the master of the neat little figures, and he added and subtracted and multiplied them without letting his mind wander away from their austere but calculable world, in which he had spent so many pleasant hours (459). See chapter entitled ‘What was Leonard Bast Really Like?’ in Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, pp. 393–438. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge University Press, 1963 (1868), p. 47. See also Swinnerton’s depiction of clerk characters at ease with ‘high’ culture in the Queen’s Hall in his novel On the Staircase. Frank Swinnerton, On the Staircase, Methuen, 1914, pp. 160–9. Quoted from Priestley’s introduction to Everyman’s Library edition of Angel Pavement, op cit, p. xii. Brome, op cit, p. 242. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939, Cardinal, 1991 (1940), p. 298. ‘Drama Review’, Cornelius, Time and Tide, 7 September 1940. Peter Davison (ed.), A Patriot After All: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume Twelve, 1940–1941, Secker and Warburg, 1998, p. 251. Frank Tilsley, I’d Do It Again, Morley-Baker, 1969 (1936), pp. 131–2. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Frank Tilsley, We Live and Learn, Labour Book Service, 1939, p. 9. Ibid, p. 61. Ibid, p. 19. Frank Tilsley, First Things First, Michael Joseph, 1938, p. 99. Ibid, pp. 300–1. Ibid, p. 315. Frank Tilsley, The Plebeian’s Progress, op cit, p. 268. All subsequent page references are to this edition. New Statesman and Nation, 3 June 1933, p. 736. Tilsley, We Live and Learn, op cit, p. 152. As Tilsley notes in We Live and Learn: With astonishment and dismay I found that I was not a success as a writer, that we had hardly any money left, and that I had better do something about it before we were penniless – for finding a job in Manchester in 1933 was simply unthinkable. (Ibid, p. 153)

194 Notes 47. Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time, Readers Union, 1965 (1964), p. 228. 48. New Statesman and Nation, 30 May 1936, p. 864. 49. Ibid, p. 854. 50. Allen, op cit, p. 228. 51. Arno J. Mayer notes that the failure of intellectuals in recognising the rise of the lower middle class resulted in far-reaching results: The consequences of glossing over both the nature and the role of the petit bourgeoisie in the history of Europe have been significant. By failing to explicate the unstable condition of the lower middle class in the twentieth century, liberal intellectuals contributed quite as much as their Marxist counterparts to leaving that class disorientated in the face of crisis, with the result that it responded so very readily to millenarian appeals of a reactionary sort. The fascist furor [sic] alone should serve as a terrifying reminder of the pivotal role of the lower middle class in contemporary history. (Mayer, op cit, pp. 409–10) 52. The following inquest submission made by Frank Tilsley’s son Vincent offers an insight into the writer’s suicide: He [Frank Tilsley] was worried about his financial future. I think he had got into a state of dreadful anxiety … . He thought he was drying up entirely … . He was working on his latest novel, which he was completely dissatisfied with, and would not let his publishers see it. (The Times, 20 March 1957, p. 3)

Afterword 1. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, Oxford University Press, New York, 1967 (1951), p. ix. 2. A recent report predicts that white-collar workers, particularly in the category of managers and administrators, will significantly increase in number in the period until 2010, ‘with a related decline in those engaged in skilled and semi-skilled manual tasks’. Richard Scase, Britain in 2010: The New Business Landscape, Capstone, Oxford, 2000, p. 38. 3. Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 10, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 400.

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195

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198 Bibliography Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations, Oxford University Press, 1991. Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Oxford University Press, 1991. Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit, Oxford University Press, 1991. Dickens, Charles. The Personal History of David Copperfield, Oxford University Press, 1991. Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz, Oxford University Press, 1991. Dickson Carr, John. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Murray, 1949. Dircks, Rudolf. Verisimilitude, The Unicorn Press, 1897. Dowling, Andrew. Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2001. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Great Shadow and Beyond the City, J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1893. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Lost World, Oxford University Press, 1998. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Smith Elder, 1903. Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett: A Biography, Futura Publications, 1975. Drinkwater, John. Discovery, Ernest Benn, 1932. Drinkwater, John. Inheritance, Ernest Benn, 1931. Dyos, H.J. Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell, Leicester University Press, 1961. Eagleton, Mary and Pierce, David. Attitudes to Class in the English Novel, Thames and Hudson, 1979. Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Émigrés, Chatto & Windus, 1970. Eliot, Simon. Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919, The Bibliographical Society, 1994. Ex-Private X [A.M. Burrage]. War is War, Victor Gollancz, 1930. Farjeon, B.L. Samuel Boyd of Catchpole Square, Hutchinson, 1899. Ferguson, Niall. The Pity of War, Allen Lane, Penguin, 1998. Figgis, Darrell. Jacob Elthorne, Dent, 1914. Finkelstein, David and McCleery, Alistair (eds), The Book History Reader, Routledge, 2002. Fletcher, J.S. Mr Spivey’s Clerk, Ward and Downey, 1890. Ford, Ford Maddox. The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City, Everyman’s Library, 1995. Forester, C.S. Payment Deferred, Pan Books, 1963. Forester, C.S. Plain Murder, Penguin, 1954. Forster, E.M. Howards End, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, London, 1998. Forster, E.M. Howards End, Penguin, 1989. Forster, E.M. The Longest Journey, Penguin, 1976. Forster, E.M. Two Cheers For Democracy, Edward Arnold, 1951. Forster, E.M. Where Angels Fear to Tread, Penguin, 1988. Fraser, E.D. Cross Lode, John Castle, 1925. Frye, Northrop. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism, Indiana University Press, 1971. Furbank, P.N. E.M. Forster: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1979. Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britian, 1832–1920, Oxford University Press, 1991. Galsworthy, John. Justice, Duckworth, 1977. Galsworthy, John. A Modern Comedy (including The White Monkey), Heinemann, 1948.

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200 Bibliography Halperin, John. Gissing, A Life in Books, Oxford University Press, 1987. Halsey, A.N. (ed.), British Social Trends Since 1900: A Guide to the Changing Social Structure of Britain, Macmillan, 1989. Halsey, A.N. Change in British Society: From 1900 to the Present Day, Oxford Univesity Press, 1995. Hankey, Donald. A Student in Arms, Andrew Melrose, 1917. Hare, M. Butler’s Gift, Heinemann, 1932. Harrison, J.F.C. Late Victorian Britain 1870–1901, Fontana, 1990. Hewlett, William. Introducing William Allison, Martin Secker, 1916. Hibbitt, E.A. The Brittlesnaps, Duckworth, 1937. Hibbitt, E.A. Lowtown: The Story of a Working Class Provincial, Duckworth, 1938. Holtby, Winifred. Poor Caroline, Jonathan Cape, 1931. Hope, Anthony. The Prisioner of Zenda, J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1894. Hoult, Norah. Apartments to Let, Heinemann, 1931. Hoult, Norah. Violet Ryder, Elkin, Mathews and Marrot, 1930. Hoult, Norah. Youth Can’t be Served, Heinemann, 1933. Howard, Keble. The Smiths of Surbiton, T. Fisher Unwin, 1925. Howard, Keble. The Smiths of Valley View, Cassell, 1909. Hudson, William Henry. The Strange Adventures of John Smith, Sands, 1902. Hughes, Thomas. The Scouring of the White Horse or, The Long Vacation Ramble of a London Clerk and What Came of it, Macmillan, 1889. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s, Oxford University Press, 2001. Hyman, Esther. Study in Bronze, Constable, 1928. Jackson, Kate. George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2001. Jacomb, A.E. The Faith of his Fathers, Andrew Melrose, 1909. James, Louis. Fiction for the Working Man 1830–1850, Penguin University Books, 1974. Jerome, Jerome K. My Life and Times, Hodder and Stoughton, 1926. Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994. Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dog), Pavilion Books, 1982. Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dog), J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1909. Jerome, Jerome K, Three Men on the Bummel, J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1914. Joyce, Joyce Butler. Catherine-Wheel, Hodder and Stoughton, 1939. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914, Fontana Press, 1991. Keating, P.J. The Working Class in Victorian Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. Kemp, Sandra. Mitchell, Charlotte. and Trotter, David. Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion, Oxford University Press, 1997. Kipling, Rudyard. Many Inventions, Macmillan, 1899. Kipling, Rudyard. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition 1885–1918: Volume II, Hodder & Stoughton, 1919. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself, Doubleday, Doran, New York, 1937. Klingender, F.D. The Conditions of Clerical Labour in Britain, Martin Lawrence, 1935. Knowles, Vernon. Beads of Coloured Days, Wells Gardner, 1926.

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202 Bibliography Mottram, R.H. Bowler Hat: A Last Glance at the Old Country Banking, Hutchinson, 1940. Mottram, R.H. Castle Island, Chatto & Windus, 1931. Mottram, R.H. The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914–1918, Chatto & Windus, 1929. Mottram, R.H. Ten Years Ago, Chatto & Windus, 1928. Mottram, R.H. Three Personal Records of the War, The Scholartis Press, 1929. Mottram, R.H. The Twentieth Century: A Personal Record, Hutchinson, 1969. Muggeridge, Malcolm. Autumnal Face, Putnam, 1931. Nasson, Bill. The South African War 1899–1902, Arnold, 1999. Newlyn, George (ed.), Everyone in Dickens, Volume III, Characteristics and Commentaries, Tables and Tabulations: A Taxonomy, Greenwood Press, CT 1995. Nichols, Wallace. B. Jericho Street and Selected Poems, 1908–1921, Grant Richards, 1921. O’Donovan, Gerald. How They Did It, Methuen, 1920. Onions, Oliver. In Accordance With the Evidence, Nisbet, 1915. Onions, Oliver. Peace In Our Times, Chapman and Hall, 1923. Onions, Oliver. Whom God has Sundered, Martin Secker, 1926. Oppenheim, E. Phillips. A Millionaire of Yesterday, Ward Lock, 1900. Orchard, B.G. The Clerks of Liverpool, J.Collinson (Liverpool), 1871. Orwell, George. Coming up for Air, Penguin, 1963. Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Penguin, 1989. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin, 1982. Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume Twelve, A Patriot After All, 1940–1941, Davison, Peter (ed.), Secker and Warburg, 1998. Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume Seventeen, I Belong to the Left, 1945, Davison, Peter (ed.), Secker and Warburg, 1998. Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume Nineteen, It Is What I Think, 1947–1948, Davison, Peter (ed.), Secker and Warburg, 1998. Osborne, John. A Better Class of Person, Faber & Faber, 1981. Oxenham, John. Bondman Free, Hirst and Blackett, 1903. Oxenham, John. Profit and Loss, Methuen, 1906. Pain, Barry. Deals, Hodder and Stoughton, 1904. Pain, Barry. Dumphrey, Ward Lock, 1927. Pain, Barry. The Eliza Stories, Pavilion Books, 1992. Pavey, L.A. Mr. Line, Peter Davies, 1931. Payn, James. Sunny Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1891. Pelegrin-Genel, Elisabeth. The Office, Flammarion, Paris.1996. Philips, Austin. Red Tape, Smith, Elder, 1910. Philpotts, Eden. The End of a Life, J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1891. Philpotts, Eden. A Tiger’s Cub, J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1892. Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c1848–c1918, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pound, Reginald. Arnold Bennett, A Biography, Heinemann, 1952. Preston, Hugh. Head Office, Hutchinson, 1936. Price, Leah and Thurschwell, Pamela (eds), Literary Secretaries, Secretarial Culture, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004. Price, Richard. An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War 1899–1902, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

Bibliography 203 Prichard, K. and Prichard, Hesketh. Roving Hearts, Smith and Elder, 1903. Priestley, J.B. Angel Pavement, Penguin, 1948. Priestley, J.B. Angel Pavement, Everyman’s Library, 1968. Priestley, J.B. The Good Companions, Heinemann, 1929. Priestley, J.B. Margin Released, The Reprint Society, 1963. Priestley, J.B. The Plays of J.B. Priestley (including Cornelius), Volume III, Heinemann, 1950. Priestley, J.B. They Walk in the City, Heinemann, 1936. Pritchett, V.S. A Cab at the Door & Midnight Oil, The Hogarth Press, 1991. Pritchett, V.S. The Complete Short Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1993. Pritchett, V.S. In My Good Books, Chatto & Windus, 1942. Pritchett, V.S. Nothing Like Leather, Chatto & Windus, 1935. Pritchett, V.S. The Working Novelist, Chatto & Windus, 1965. Pugh, Edwin. The Broken Honeymoon, John Milne, 1908. Pugh, Edwin. Harry the Cockney, T. Werner Laurie, 1912. Pugh, Edwin. The Man Of Straw, Heinemann, 1896. Pugh, Edwin. The Shuttlecock, Hirst and Blackett, 1907. Pugh, Edwin. A Street in Suburbia, William Heinemann, 1895. Pykett, Lyn. Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century, Edward Arnold, 1995. Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000. Raymond, Ernest. The Old Tree Blossomed: A Realistic Romance, Cassell, 1930. Raymond, Ernest. Rossenal, Cassell, 1922. Rayner, Olive Pratt (Grant Allen). The Type-Writer Girl, C.A. Pearson, 1897. Reynolds, Mrs Baillie. The Judgement of Charis, Cassell, 1921. Richards, Frank. Old Soldiers Never Die, Faber and Faber, 1964. Richardson, Dorothy. The Tunnel, Duckworth, 1919. Ridge, W. Pett. Bannerton’s Agency, Methuen, 1921. Ridge, W. Pett. Light Refreshment, Hodder and Stoughton, 1910. Ridge, W. Pett. London Only, Hodder and Stoughton, 1901. Ridge, W. Pett. Love at Paddington, Thomas Nelson, 1912. Ridge, W. Pett. Minor Dialogues, J.W. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1895. Ridge, W. Pett. Mixed Grill, Hodder and Stoughton, 1913. Ridge, W. Pett, Next Door Neighbours, Hodder and Stoughton, 1904. Ridge, W. Pett. Nine to Six Thirty, Methuen, 1910. Ridge, W. Pett. On Toast, Methuen, 1916. Ridge, W. Pett. Outside the Radius: Stories of a London Suburb, Hodder and Stoughton, 1899. Ridge, W. Pett. The Remington Sentence, Methuen, 1913. Ridge, W. Pett. Sixty Nine Birnam Road, Hodder and Stoughton, 1908. Ridge, W. Pett. A Story Teller: Forty Years in London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1923. Ridge, W. Pett. Up Side Streets, Hodder and Stoughton, 1903. Ridge, W. Pett. Well to do Arthur, Methuen, 1920. Roper, Michael and Tosh, John (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800, Routledge, 1991. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001. Routh, G. Occupations of the People of Great Britain, 1801–1981, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1987.

204 Bibliography Rubin, Joan, Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Rutherford, Mark (William Hale White). Autobiography and Deliverance, Leicester University Press, 1969. Sackville West, Vita. The Heir, Heinemann, 1922. Sargent, George, E. The Poor Clerk and his Crooked Sixpence, The Religious Tract Society, 1883. Savage, D.S. The Withered Branch: Six Studies in the Modern Novel, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950. Sayers, Dorothy L. Murder Must Advertise, Gollancz, 1947. Schneer, Jonathan. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001. Searle, G.R. The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought 1899–1914, Oxford University Press, 1971. Sharp, Margery. Rhododendron Pie, Chatto & Windus, 1930. Shaw, George Bernard. The Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw (including Augustus Does his Bit), Constable, 1931. Shaw, George Bernard. Misalliance, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Fanny’s First Play, Constable 1914. Sherriff, R.C. The Fortnight in September, Tom Stacey, 1972. Sherriff, R.C. Greengates, Gollancz, 1936. Sherriff, R.C. No Leading Lady: An Autobiography, Victor Gollancz, 1968. Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred. The Kinsman, Methuen, 1907. Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred. The Lantern Bearers, Methuen, 1910. Simkins, Peter. Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–1916, Manchester University Press, 1988. Sinclair, May. The Common Maze, Hutchinson, 1913. Sinclair, May. The Judgement of Eve and Other Stories, Hutchinson, 1914. Slater, Olive. Martha and Mary, Collins, 1921. Sloan, John. John Davidson, First of the Moderns: A Literary Biography, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995. Smiles, Samuel. Self Help, John Murray, 1958. Smith, Chris, Knights, David, and Willmott, Hugh (eds), White-Collar: The NonManual Labour Process, Macmillan, 1991. Spielmann, M.H. The History of Punch, Cassell, 1895. Steadman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society, Penguin, 1976. Stephens, James. Etched in Moonlight, Macmillan, 1928. Stevenson, John. British Society 1914–45, Penguin, 1990. Stevenson, John and Cook, Chris. The Slump, Quartet, 1979. Stevenson, Sylvia. The Tight-rope, Geoffrey Bles, 1926. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Ebb Tide, Heinemann, 1894. Stoker, Bram. Dracula, Oxford University Press, 1998. Stone, Wilfred. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E.M. Forster, Stanford University Press, 1966. Sullivan, Alvin (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT and London, 1984. Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Bibliography 205 Sutherland, John. The Longman Guide to Victorian Fiction, Longman, 1988. Sutherland, John. Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, Macmillan, 1995. Swinnerton, Frank. The Elder Sister, Hutchinson, 1925. Swinnerton, Frank. George Gissing: A Critical Study, Martin Secker, 1924. Swinnerton, Frank. The Georgian Literary Scene, Everyman’s Library, 1938. Swinnerton, Frank. The Merry Heart, Chatto & Windus, 1909. Swinnerton, Frank. On the Staircase, Methuen, 1914. Swinnerton, Frank. Summer Storm, Hutchinson, 1926. Swinnerton, Frank. Swinnerton: An Autobiography, Hutchinson, 1937. Swinnerton, Frank. The Young Idea, Chatto & Windus, 1910. Swinnerton, Frank. Young Felix, Hutchinson, 1923. Thomas, Alan. The Lonely Years, Ernest Benn, 1930. Thompson, Graham. Male Sexuality Under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature, University of Iowa Press, 2003. Thomson, Edward. John Arniston, Macmillan, 1939. Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Tilsley, Frank. Devil Take the Hindmost, Howard Black, 1969. Tilsley, Frank. First Things First, Michael Joseph, 1938. Tilsley, Frank. I’d Do It Again, Morley-Baker, 1969. Tilsley, Frank. Little Tin God, Collins, 1939. Tilsley, Frank. The Plebeian’s Progress, Gollancz, 1933. Tilsley, Frank. We Live and Learn, Labour Book Service, 1939. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999. Trafford, F.G. George Geith of Fen Court, London, 1864. Tremaine, Herbert. The Feet of the Young Men: A Domestic War Novel, C.W. Daniel, 1917. Tremlett, Mrs Horace. Fanny the Fibber, Hutchinson, 1921. Trollope, Anthony. John Caldigate, Oxford University Press, 1952. Trollope, Anthony. The Small House at Allington, John Lane, 1906. Trollope, Anthony. The Three Clerks, Oxford University Press, 1929. Trotter, David. The English Novel in History, 1895–1920, Routledge, 1993. Tupper, Martin F. Select Miscellaneous Poems of Martin F. Tupper, Gall & Inglis, Edinburgh and London, 1874. Turner, John (ed.), Britain and the First World War, Unwin Hyman, 1988. Urquhart, M. The Fool of Faery, Mills and Boon, 1910. Wall, Richard. and Winter, Jay (eds), The Upheaval of War, Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, Cambridge University Press, 1988. Wallace, Edgar. The Sinister Man, Hodder and Stoughton, 1924. Warden, Florence. Our Widow, F.V. White, 1896. Wardle, Jane (Oliver Maddox Hueffer). The Lord of Latimer Street, Alston Rivers, 1907. Wellings, Arthur. Each Stands Alone, J.M. Dent, 1931. Wells, H.G. The Dream, Jonathan Cape, 1924. Wells, H.G. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1860), Volume II, Victor Gollancz, 1934. Wells, H.G. In the Days of the Comet, Macmillan, 1912. Wells, H.G. Tono-Bungay, Pan Books, 1964.

206 Bibliography Wells, H.G. The Correspondence of H.G. Wells: Volume 1, 1880–1903, Smith, David C. (ed.), Pickering and Chatto, 1998. Westall, William. Trust Money, Chatto & Windus, 1892. Whiteing, Richard. No 5 John Street, Grant Richards, 1899. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, Rinehart Press, San Francisco, CA, 1949. Wicks, Frederick. The Stories of the Broadmoor Patient; and the Poor Clerk, Remington, 1893. Widdowson, Peter. E.M. Forster’s Howards End: Fiction as History, Sussex University Press, 1977. Wiener, Joel (ed.), Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s–1914, Greenwood Press, New York, 1988. Wiener, Martin J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Williams, Brendan. Go Marry, Chatto & Windus, 1931. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell, The Hogarth Press, 1987. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution, Pelican Books, 1973. Williamson, Henry. A Fox Under my Cloak, Alan Sutton, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1996. Williamson, Henry. The Golden Virgin, Macdonald, 1966. Williamson, Henry. How Dear is Life, Alan Sutton, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1995. Williamson, Henry. The Patriot’s Progress, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1999. Williamson, Henry. Young Philip Maddison, Arrow Books, 1953. Wilson, Christopher P. White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885–1925, University of Georgia Press, 1992. Winter, J.M. The Great War and the British People, Macmillan, 1985. Wodehouse, P.G. Psmith in the City, A & C Black, 1950. Wooton, Barbara. Twos and Threes, Gerald Howe, 1933. Worpole, Ken. Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading: Popular Writing, Verso, 1983. Wright Mills, C. White Collar: The American Middle Classes, Oxford University Press, New York, 1967. Wyke Smith, G.A. Fortune my Foe, Hodder and Stoughton, 1925. Yates, Edmund. Broken to Harness: A Story of English Domestic Life, John Maxwell, 1865. Young, Arlene. Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999.

Index Academy, The, 63, 157, 181 Aldington, Richard, 141; A Fool i’ the Forest, 141; ‘The Case of Lieutenant Hall’, 145 Allen, Walter, 34, 165, 166 Allerton, Mark, 89, 184; Such and Such Things, 89, 91–6 Altick, Richard, 4 American literature, 1, 6–7, 165 Anderson, Gregory, 5, 13, 84, 171, 172, 180 Anonymous, The Story of a London Clerk, 7, 10, 17, 20–4, 180 Armstrong, Martin, The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby, 152 Arnold, Matthew, 23, 80, 113, 114, 156, 157 Arrowsmith, J.W., 56, 57, 64–9, 80; J.W. Arrowsmith’s 3/6 Series, 56, 58, 64, 66, 75, 80 ‘Arrys, 69, 70 Asquith, Anthony, ‘The Dead Volunteer’, 124–5

Bland, Hubert, 100 Board schools, see Education Act 1870 Bookman, The, 76, 153 Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the London Poor, 22 Boots Booklovers’ Library, 154 Braine, John, Room at the Top, 96 Brome, Vincent, 76, 159, 192 Buchan, John, 25, 169 Bullett, Gerald, 146 Bullock, Shan F., 53, 175, 178, 183; Robert Thorne, 81, 86–9, 93, 183, 184 Burnett, John, 191 Burrage, Alfred (Ex-Private X), War is War, 190 Cain, James M., 165 Cameron, James, 184 Carey, John, 28, 183; The Intellectuals and the Masses, 2, 175, 181 Clerks: agency clerks, 95–6, 152; bank clerks, 67, 126, 131, 132, 137, 152, 166, 173, 180; clerks as readers, 1–2, 9–10, 14–15, 17–24, 31, 34, 49–54, 56–8, 65–7, 71–3, 76–80, 89–90, 145, 154–9, 162; clerks as scribes, 155; clerks as yeoman stock, 82, 104–7, 125, 137–9, 150–2, 155, 157–8; cockney clerks, 49, 67, 68, 72, 90, 97, 136; commuting, 65, 75, 77, 80, 85, 111; female office workers, 4, 5, 94, 98, 126, 129, 144, 170; ‘hopeless clerks’, 14, 15, 35, 36, 44; masculinity, 5, 11, 45, 46–7, 87–90, 92, 170–1, 187; numbers employed, 3, 5, 13–14, 98, 124, 147–50, 172, 187; promotion, 16, 22, 28, 40, 59, 84, 85–7, 94, 98, 99, 142, 166, 173, 185; respectability, 37–9,

Baldick, Chris, 169 Beales, H.L. and Lambert, R.S., Memoirs of the Unemployed, 149–50 Beardsley, Aubrey, 17,18 Beerbohm, Max, 70 Bennett, Arnold, 9–10, 19, 24–31, 53, 100, 124, 154, 166, 169, 174, 175, 183; A Great Man, 29; A Man from the North, 9, 10, 24–30, 53, 88, 174, 183; The Card, 29 Besant, Walter, 10–20, 22, 24, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 74, 172, 173; All in a Garden Fair, 10–20, 22, 23, 24, 39; All Sorts and Conditions of Men, 15 Birkbeck College, 73, 181 Blake, J.P., 89–90, 155; The Money God, 89–92, 97 207

208 Index Clerks – continued 41–2, 59, 143, 176; term ‘clerk’, 5, 8, 14, 172; übermensch clerks, 85, 89, 92–6 comic literature, 45, 49, 55–80, 119 commuting, see clerks Connolly, Cyril, 165–6 Connolly, Joseph, 64, 180 Conrad, Joseph, 25, 30 Conway, Hugh, Called Back, 66 Crossick, Geoffrey, 2 Daily Chronicle, The, 34, 49, 50–4, 59, 80 Darnton, Robert, 1 Degeneration, 82–100, 118 Dickens, Charles, 1, 3, 11, 12, 24, 33, 83, 94, 154, 155, 171, 172 Dircks, Rudolf, ‘The Two Clerks’, 7, 85–6, 90, 183 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 31, 56, 187; A Duet with Occasional Chorus, 31, 175; The Lost World, 121–2; ‘The Stock-Broker’s Clerk’, 89–90 Drabble, Margaret, 25 Education Act 1870, 4, 7, 19, 172; Board schools, 7, 14–16, 19, 20, 22, 27, 40, 70, 73, 79, 93, 119, 172, 187 Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land, 145 female clerks, see clerks Flint, Kate, 57, 184 Ford, Ford Maddox, The Soul of London, 84, 89 Forester, C.S., Plain Murder, 152 Forster, E.M., 3, 185, 186; Howards End, 47, 50, 83, 91, 97, 100, 101–8, 111, 112–16, 119, 124, 157, 176, 186 Furbank, P.N., 115, 186 Galsworthy, John, 143, 166, 169, 190; Justice, 118–19, 121, 142; The White Monkey, 142 Geffrye Museum, 60, 179 Gissing, Algernon, 17, 36 Gissing, George: declassed clerks, 37, 42–3; exogamous marriage, 40–1,

47, 177; magazine fiction, 36, 45–8; masculinity, 45, 46–7; ‘negative identification’, 43–6, 48, 50, 54, 177; reader response, 34, 49–54, 80; respectability, 37–9, 41–3; subjectivity, 34–5, 39–41; works: ‘A Capitalist’, 47; Demos, 40; Eve’s Ransom, 34; ‘A Freak of Nature’, 47; ‘Humplebee’, 177; In the Year of Jubilee, 33; A Life’s Morning, 36–9, 41, 43, 44, 55 176, 177; The Nether World, 39–40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 48, 177; New Grub Street, 35, 40–3, 54, 87, 177; The Odd Women, 44–5, 46, 49, 50, 52; ‘The Pessimist of Plato Road’, 47–8, 52, 78, 178; ‘The Salt of the Earth’, 46; ‘The Scrupulous Father’, 47; ‘Simple Simon’, 46, 47; ‘The Tout of Yarmouth Bridge’, 46; The Town Traveller, 34, 48–54, 186; The Unclassed, 43–4, 177; ‘Under the Umbrella’, 46; ‘A Well Meaning Man’, 46; The Whirlpool, 79; Workers in the Dawn, 36 Gollancz, Victor, 162 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, de, 26 Good Words, 10, 14–15 Goodbody, John, 19 Great Depression, 7, 147–67; stigma of the ‘dole’, 148–50, 157–60, 191; unemployment figures, 148–50 Greenslade, William, 86 Greenwood, Walter, Love on the Dole, 191 Griffin, E. Aceituna, Genesta, 152 Grossmith, George and Weedon, 58, 80; The Diary of a Nobody, 1, 5, 55–64, 67, 79, 144, 169, 179 Hale White, William, Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, 10, 15, 31, 37, 74 Halperin, John, 35, 40 Hankey, Donald, A Student in Arms, 189

Index 209 Hare, Martin, Butler’s Gift, 152 Hepburn, Alexander, 115 Hibbitt, E.A., The Brittlesnaps, 152 Home Chimes, 55, 64, 65, 68, 179, 180 Hope, Anthony, 75, 181; The Prisoner of Zenda, 56 housing, 30, 59, 60, 68, 77–8, 135, 148, 163, 165, 184, 191 Howard, Keble, The Smiths of Surbiton, 81, 96–7, 139, 184 Hutchinson’s Pocket Library, 154 Idler, The, 72 implied reader, 21 Independent, The, 63 Irwin, Michael, 61–2 Jackson, Kate, 19 Jacobs, W.W., 64–5, 73 Jerome, Jerome K., 64–5, 75, 80, 100, 179, 180; The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 19, 64, 180; On the Stage – and Off, 19, 64; Three Men in a Boat, 55–8, 63–73, 75, 181; Three Men on the Bummel, 73 John O’London’s Weekly, 154 Keating, Peter, 13, 179 Kipling, Rudyard, 10, 17, 72, 169, 187–8; ‘The Finest Story in the World’, 173 Klingender, F.D., The Conditions of Clerical Labour in Britain, 148–9, 191 Lamb, Charles, 3, 86; ‘The Superannuated Man’, 11 Lane, John, 10, 24, 25, 30, 175 Lankester, Edwin Ray, Degeneration, a Chapter in Darwinism, 92–3 Leadenhall Press, 17, 19–21, 174, 180 Lewes, G.H., Ranthorpe, 12–13, 17, 21, 41, 173 Lewis, Jeremy, 172 Lewis, Sinclair, 6; Babbitt, 144 Light, Alison, 150–1, 153 Lockwood, David, The Blackcoated Worker, 3, 149, 172 London Mercury, The, 154

Macaulay, Rose, 103, 115, 116, 185; The Secret River, 103, 111–14, 116 Machen, Arthur, ‘A Fragment of Life’, 81, 108–10, 111, 112 magazines: publication figures, 4, 179 Maltby, H.F., A Temporary Gentleman, 140–1, 142, 143 Manchester Guardian, The, 31, 34, 93, 140 masculinity, see clerks; Gissing Masterman, C.F.G., Condition of England, 82, 101, 104–8, 109, 111, 114, 115, 121, 130–1, 134, 145, 186; The Heart of Empire, 82–5 Maupassant, Guy de, 26 Mayer, Arno J., 2, 166, 194 McAleer, Joseph, 154, 192 McDonald, Peter D., 30 Michael Joseph, 162 ‘middlebrow’ literary culture, 14, 155–7, 169, 193 modernism, literary, 111, 145, 169 Montague, C.E., Disenchantment, 131–2 Moore, George, 25–6, 28, 175 Mottram, R.H., 127, 144, 146, 189; The Banquet, 151; Castle Island, 151; The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 131, 137–40, 151, 155, 156, 188 Mudies Select Library, 15, 51–2 Muggeridge, Malcolm, Autumnal Face, 152 Nasson, Bill, 82 Naturalism, 25–31, 175 new journalism, 19 new reading public, 17, 19–20, 56, 64, 152 New Review, The, ‘candour in fiction’, 15 New Statesman, 100, 163 Newlyn, George, 11, 171 novels: pricing, 15, 19–20, 24, 65–6, 68, 69, 72; publication figures, 4, 67, 72, 192; three-volume novel, 10, 13, 14–15, 17, 37, 45, 53

210 Index O’Rell, Max, 19 Observer, The, 64 Office, The, 168 Offices: mixed sex offices, 5, 94, 98, 126, 129, 144; numbers employed, see clerks; office life, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12, 81–2, 86–7, 144, 151, 153, 156, 166, 172 Onions, Oliver, In Accordance With the Evidence, 89, 91–2, 93, 95–6 Orwell, George, 38, 74, 148, 149, 150, 158, 159–60, 167, 176; Coming up for Air, 148; Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 162; The Road to Wigan Pier, 148 Pain, Barry, The Eliza Stories, 59–60, 75 Petter, Martin, 134, 140 Pick, Daniel, 82, 83, 92 Pollard, H.B.C., 143 Preston, Hugh, Head Office, 152 Price, Richard, 83, 183 Priestley, J.B., 123–4, 125, 134–5, 146; Angel Pavement, 151, 153–60, 162–3, 168, 169, 193; Cornelius, 159–60; The Good Companions, 153; ‘postscripts’, 159 Pritchett, V.S., 37, 63, 80, 181; Nothing Like Leather, 152 Pugh, Edwin, 10, 41; A Street in Suburbia, 27–8 Punch, 11, 55, 57–8, 64, 70, 71–2, 80, 144–5, 178–9 Quennell, Peter, 163 Raymond, Ernest, The Old Tree Blossomed, 134–5, 136, 151–2; We the Accused, 152 readers, clerks as, see clerks respectability, see clerks Reveille, 143 Rice, Elmer, The Adding Machine, 144 Richards, Frank, Old Soldiers Never Die, 132–3 Ridge, W. Pett, 56–7, 64–5, 73–80, 100, 144, 153, 154, 181, 182,

184, 192–3; Minor Dialogues, 56, 74–6; Outside the Radius, 76, 78–9, 182 Robinson, F.W., 64–5 Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2–3, 193 Saturday Review, The, 64, 71 Sayers, Dorothy L., Murder Must Advertise, 152 Searle, G.R., 82 Secker and Warburg, 162 Sherriff, R.C., 125–6, 146; The Fortnight in September, 151; Greengates, 151 Shorter, Clement, 45 Sinclair, May, ‘The Judgement of Eve’, 117–18 Smiles, Samuel, 84–5, 89 Smith’s Circulating Library, 15 socialism, 44, 130, 152, 161–6, 167 Somerset House, 86, 183 South African War, 82–4, 86–7, 106, 124, 125 Speaker, The, 31, 51–2 Spectator, The, 33, 54, 64, 124 Stone, Wilfred, 104 Strand Magazine, The, 89 suburbs in literature, 9, 29–30, 31, 53, 57, 59–60, 63, 75–6, 77, 162, 184; ‘the Suburbans’, 104–8, 109, 115, 121, 131, 134, 186 Swinnerton, Frank, 34–5, 40, 41, 42–3, 97–8, 121, 139, 144, 152, 153, 154, 169; The Georgian Literary Scene, 97, 192–3; The Merry Heart, 97–8, 184–5; On the Staircase, 97; The Young Idea, 97, 98–100, 101–2 ‘temporary gentlemen’, see World War One Theroux, Paul, 63 Thomas, Alan, The Lonely Years, 141–2 three-volume novel, see novels Tilsley, Frank, 152–3, 160–7, 193, 194; First Things First, 161–2;

Index 211 Tilsley, Frank – continued I’d Do it Again, 152, 160, 164–6; Little Tin God, 167; The Plebeian’s Progress, 152, 160, 162–4, 191; We Live and Learn, 161, 193 Times, The, 56, 74 Tindall, Gillian, 34 Tit-Bits, 4, 17, 20 Tremaine, Herbert, The Feet of the Young Men, 7, 128–30, 188 Trollope, Anthony, 3, 12, 86, 183; The Three Clerks, 171 Trotter, David, 26 Tupper, Martin, A Dozen Ballads about White Slavery, 13 Turner, John R., 66 Urquhart, M., The Fool of Faery, 110–11 Warren, Lynne, 21 Wellings, Arthur, Each Stands Alone, 152 Wells, H.G., 9–10, 22, 24, 31–2, 72, 74, 100, 169, 175; Wheels of Chance, 72 Whitman, Walt, Song of Myself, 6–7 Wicks, Frederick, The Poor Clerk, 24 Widdowson, Peter, 107

Williams, Raymond, ‘negative identification’, see Gissing Williamson, Henry, 127, 130, 134, 138, 139, 146, 188; A Fox Under my Cloak, 135–7; The Golden Virgin, 189; How Dear is Life, 127–8, 132, 133; The Patriot’s Progress, 124, 126, 133 Wilson, Christopher P., 6 Winter, Jay, 126, 188 Wodehouse, P.G., Psmith in the City, 119–21, 125 World War One, 7, 8, 31, 42, 65, 97, 102, 123–46, 147, 159, 160, 187; ‘deofficering’, 141–2; fitness of clerkly soldiers, 124–7, 129, 131–3, 135–7; New Army, 123, 126, 136, 189; numbers enlisting, 123–4; pacifism, 128–30; ‘temporary gentlemen’, 134–44, 190; territorial soldiers, 127–8, 132, 135–6 World War Two, 159–60, 166–7 Wright Mills, C., 168 yeoman stock, see clerks Young, Arlene, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel, 2, 11, 60, 62 Zola, Emile, 25–6

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