Escaping Clerkly Lives in Middelbrow Fiction (1859-1945) PDF

‘WHAT THOUGHT OF ‘HEAD OFFICE’ TO “ONE OFF HIS HEAD’” : ESCAPING ‘CLERKLY LIVES’ IN MIDDLEBROW FICTION (1859-1945) by Nicola Jane Bishop, B.A., M.A. (Lancaster University) Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Lancaster University,...

‘WHAT THOUGHT OF ‘HEAD OFFICE’ TO “ONE OFF HIS HEAD’” : ESCAPING ‘CLERKLY LIVES’ IN MIDDLEBROW FICTION (1859-1945) by Nicola Jane Bishop, B.A., M.A. (Lancaster University) Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Lancaster University, March, 2014 Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in any form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. UNIVEHSnV ’ 1 8 MAP, I7;i5 LANC AL'I E R 1  ProQuest Number: 11003770 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is d e p e n d e n t upon the quality of the copy subm itted. In the unlikely e v e n t that the a u thor did not send a c o m p le te m anuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved, a n o te will ind ica te the deletion. uest ProQuest 11003770 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). C opyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C o d e M icroform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 ‘WHAT THOUGHT OF ‘HEAD OFFICE’ TO “ONE OFF HIS HEAD’” : ESCAPING ‘CLERKLY’ LIVES IN MIDDLEBROW FICTION (1859-1945) Nicola Jane Bishop, B.A., M.A. (Lancaster University) Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. at Lancaster University, March, 2014 Abstract This thesis explores how the literary clerk, a nonentity by most accounts, became so emblematic o f urban modernity by the early twentieth century that he served to unite the middle and high brows. While the thesis draws parallels with, and offers challenges to, our understanding of the parameters of modernist fiction, it does so through a detailed study of texts that are defined thus far as middlebrow. This includes the works of Victor Canning, Norman Collins, Keble Howard, P. G. Wodehouse, as well as Shan Bullock, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Edwin Pugh. These authors address the plight o f the clerk, and they do so from personal experience; most converted to full-time authorship after a period of office work. These novelists, then, are the product of a ‘clerkly’ fascination with reading, writing, and the acquisition of cultural capital. The narratives that they offer - filled with tales o f clerical hardship - show that their sympathies lie with those who cannot write their way out of the office. This is a topographical study which identifies a series o f ‘escapes’ that clerkly authors make available to their literary clerk. In framing the research in this way, this thesis assesses the validity of the typical clerk type before examining the spaces in which the clerk-character could begin to emerge as a viable literary ‘everyman’. The clerk is thus placed within those spaces which usually define him (the office and the suburb), demonstrating that underneath the fa$ade of conformity, there is a ‘human’ element. This human element is to be found in the subversion of office-time, the pleasurable retreat to the suburb, and, in the discovery o f the ramble. This ultimate escape —an adventure in the Home Counties —showcases the moment in which the clerk-character, at last, becomes the clerk-author. 2  Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Office 32 Chapter Two: The Suburbs 78 Chapter Three: The Ramble 129 Conclusion: Everyman a Clerk 178 Bibliography 190 3  Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr James Taylor for teaching me to develop and not dismiss ideas, and Professor John Schad for encouraging me to find the better writer within myself. I also could not have finished this thesis without the continuous and continuing support, dedication, and affection of my first and favourite academic. For every 5am dog walk, every Friday Bolognese, and every late-night proof-read of this work, I thank you, Sam. To Megan, for showing me the scenic route. 4  Introduction There are thousands like him. There they go, hurrying for the bridges, each in his cheap black coat, each with pale face and uneven shoulders: thousands of them. Slaves of the desk. Twopenny clerks. And he is one of them, just a little higher in the clerkly scale perhaps, just a little superior in attainments and status maybe: but unmistakably one of them. A Twopenny clerk. Why, yes. Still he, with all the others, is to be respected. He is doing his best. He is cheerful, manly in his small way, hopeful, amazingly contented. Also he has a soul, this figure that I see in the crowd, and he has an ideal [...].' Shan Bullock, Robert Thorne: Diary o f a London Clerk (1907) The clerical worker captured the imagination of modernity. Following the creation of vast commerce, an expanding banking sector, and the administration of empire, a growing tide o f clerks crossed London Bridge from their suburban dwellings, destined for impressive new office buildings in banks and businesses. While London has always been seen as a whirl of movement - Wordsworth, for example, described the city as an ‘endless stream of men and moving things’ - the nineteenth century marked the moment in which that ‘stream’, for so many authors and spectators, became primarily clerical.2 Thus Edgar Allan Poe called the ‘tumultuous sea o f human heads’ a ‘tribe o f clerks’ in 1840; P. G. Wodehouse represented his clerks in 1910 as a ‘human stream’; and finally, in 1922, T. S. Eliot saw the clerks as undone by death, ‘flow[ing] over London Bridge’.3 All three authors had, in fact, themselves been a part of the clerical mass. Michael Heller has recently suggested that by 1911 as many as ten per cent o f all male workers in London were clerks,4 and there were more who 1 Shan Bullock, Robert Thorne (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1907), p. 138. 2 William Wordsworth, ‘Book VII: Residence in London’, The Prelude (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1993), p. 177. 3 Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Man o f the Crowd’, Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, year unknown), pp. 85-6; P. G. Wodehouse, Psmith in the City (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008), p. 20; T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, C ollected Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 11. 61-63, p. 63. 4 Michael Heller, London C lerical Workers 1880-1914: Developm ent o f the Labour Market (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), p. 1. 5 lived in the surrounding suburbs - those whom Norman Collins called the ‘half-urban hordes’ - commuting in each day to office buildings across the capital.5 The clerk not only personifies the commercial city but also typifies so many of the social changes that mark the nineteenth century: in particular, increasing suburbanisation and the democratisation of educational opportunities made available through the new Board Schools. It is no surprise, therefore, that in fiction the clerk became a figure of interest - or even, an ‘Everyman’ figure. This clerkly everyman not only suited the needs of a vast clerical audience but he also provided a fascinating, comic, and at times feared, social specimen. As Christopher Breward suggests, the ‘everyman’ was a ‘delineation [who was] depressingly uniform in his identity and habits’.6 Indeed, the middle classes so carefully avoided the petit-bourgeois clerk that the vastness o f his class was subtly obscured from discourse. Instead, as Jonathan Wild has put it, the clerk becomes a spectre, lost within two-dimensional satire and stereotype.7 This thesis seeks, then, to bring the clerk figure to the fore by examining the clerkly subculture that arose from multiple representations produced both by middle-class observers and the clerks themselves. The focus will be on the construction o f ‘clerkly’ spaces such as the office and the suburb demonstrating how the clerk came to reflect more widely the anxieties o f everyday or ‘ordinary’ modernity. In doing so, I reclaim the title ‘everyman’ from what Breward called ‘journalistic jettison’ and draw attention to the collective empathy that saw the futility 5 Gregory Anderson suggests that there were only 91,000 clerks in 1851. By 1891, as F. M. L. Thompson calculates, the number o f male clerks stood at 370,000, an increase o f 279,000 from 1861, and by 1911, Heller suggests that at least 250,000 o f these clerks lived in the capital alone, with a further 129,430 clerks living in Middlesex, Essex, Surrey and Kent. By 1951, as Ross McKibbin suggests, there were 2.4 million ‘petty clerks and salesmen, insurance agents and shop assistants’ across England. Heller, London Clerical Workers, p. 1. Norman Collins, London Belongs to Me (London: Collins, 1947), p. 9; Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), p. 2; Thompson, The Rise o f Respectable Society: A Social H istory o f Victorian Britain 1830-1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 68; Heller, London Clerical Workers, p. 14; McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 45. 6 Christopher Breward, “‘On the Bank’s Threshold”: Administrative Revolutions and the Fashioning o f Masculine Identities at the Turn o f the Century’, Parallax, 3:2 (1997), p. 112 - my emphasis added. 7 Jonathan Wild, The Rise o f the Office Clerk in Literary Culture 1880-1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 1. 6 of clerkdom as a suitable symbol for fin-de-siecle anxieties and early-twentieth- century concerns.8 In placing the clerk at the heart of this narrative, I am suggesting that the dominance of the lower-middle-class clerk is a marker o f the social shift that benefitted both authors and readers alike in creating a distinct petit-bourgeois hegemony. In this way, the lower-middle-class clerk benefitted most from Virginia W oolfs claims that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ because, for a time, the self-confessed ‘nobody’ took centre stage.9 As Christine DeVine puts it, ‘Mr Polly and Kipps [...] represent no serious threat to the status quo [...but] their very existence in the popular fiction of the day, written by a well-known and popular author, constitutes in itself such a threat’.10 In a literary scene divided into two opposing camps - the ‘middle’ and ‘high’ brows - the clerk could threaten not only the status quo but the construction of opposition between these two groups (an opposition that has been continued until the present day). Like Carola Kaplan and Anne Simpson, then, I am interested in the ‘interpenetrations and intersections’ of Edwardian and modernist fictions, and the ‘narrative continuities’ that can be seen across Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian literatures.11 I argue that modernist authors and popular writers alike were simultaneously drawn to a figure who for some represented the worst aspects of compulsory education, mass publishing, and ephemeral outpourings, but for others championed the freedoms that such modem developments allowed. In this respect, rather than viewing modernism as a reaction against the middlebrow, I suggest, notably in my conclusion, that modernism eventually furthers 8 Breward, ‘“ On the Bank’s Threshold’” , p. 112. 9 See, for example, the number o f novels that feature the clerk which were published in 1910 itself - E. M. Forster’s H ow ards End, H. G. W ells’ The History o f Mr Polly, Frank Swinnerton’s The Young Idea, P. G. W odehouse’s Psmith in the City, and W. Pett Ridge’s Nine to Six-Thirty. Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), p. 4. 10 Christine DeVine, Class in Turn-of-the-century Novels o f Gissing, James, H ardy and Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 117. 11 Carola Kaplan and Anne Simpson, Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and M odernist Literature (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996), p. xvi; Nicola Humble, The Feminine M iddlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, D om esticity and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University, 2001), p. 4. 7 middlebrow causes by acting on the criticisms o f society frequently levelled by clerical writers. In examining spaces that are first associated with the clerk - such as the office and suburbia - and which later came to epitomise modem living more widely, I argue that the clerk becomes the secret hero of English modernity, making English culture a distinctly ‘clerkly’ one. My topographical study o f these three spaces or places - the office, the suburbs, and the ramble - sees the clerk at the centre of literary discourse at the early part of the twentieth century. By framing the research in this way, my thesis draws on the growing discourses of both middlebrow culture and place writing. In examining the spaces that shaped the clerk’s daily existence, and the multitudinous representations of those spaces, I will read the sites of clerical normalcy as markers of the petit-bourgeois hegemony as well as, in the final chapter, exploring the ability o f clerk-writers to avoid stereotyping and develop that hegemony into a symbol o f the nation. Literature Review This thesis is a work of literary history which thus contributes to a number of fields of scholarly work across both literary studies and historiography in studying the relationship between writers, class, and literary output. Writing in the 1970s, Gregory Anderson observed that the significance o f the Victorian working classes had eclipsed scholarly interest in the lower middle classes.12 At the end of that decade, Howard Davis stated that ‘the “curious neglect” of clerical workers as an object of sociological study [...] has scarcely been remedied’.13 These observations remain, indeed, accurate 12 In America, research into the clerical equivalent has been much more extensive; see, for instance, Albert Blum, White-Collar Workers (New York: Random House Press, 1971), William A. Ruch, White Collar Productivity (New York: Pergamon Press, 1982), Mark McColloch, White-Collar Workers in Transition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), Charles Wright Mills, White Collar: the American M iddle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Thomas Augst, The C lerk ’s Tale: Young Men and M oral Life in Nineteenth-century America (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 2003). 13 Howard H. Davis, Beyond Class Images: Explorations in the Structure o f Social Consciousness (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 145. for the next thirty years of academic research. This is partly because, prior to Anderson’s first work, Victorian Clerks (1976), the clerk was seen as playing a relatively minor role in systems of social stratification - particularly within Weberian and Marxist accounts o f the complexity o f the British class structure. Notably, then, interest in the clerk arose not out of his own class position but because he was seen as integral to the definition of the other classes.14 As Stephen Mihm argues, Marxist historians sought to identify the moment at which the petit bourgeoisie, as Marx predicted, was ‘absorbed into one of the two primary classes’.15 One o f the earliest of these accounts was The Condition o f Clerical Labour (1935) by F. D. Klingender, a Marxist critique of the social, economic and political situation of the clerk. Klingender argued that the clerk had become proletarianised by the 1930s thus contributing to the shrinking of the bourgeoisie that Marx had predicted. David Lockwood, in The Blackcoated Worker (1958), first countered this argument with the suggestion that clerical workers, in fact, retained many of the privileges that continued to define them as being apart from the working class - an argument supported by McKibbin in 1998, who suggested that in terms of education, dress, salary and social aspiration, the clerk was definitely middle class. By the 1970s, Anderson’s discussion o f areas such as pay, lifestyle and unionisation contributed to the growing debate by supporting Klingender’s original analysis - findings which Heller has very recently countered in London Clerical Workers as falling simply into a ‘declinisf narrative. I shall discuss the trends of pessimism and optimism in more detail later; for the moment, we need only to observe that Klingender and Lockwood began a debate about the position of the clerk which would shape critical literature to the present day. 14 Klingender, The Condition o f Clerical Labour (London: Lawrence, 1935); Lockwood, The B lackcoated Worker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); McKibbin, Class and Cultures, p. 45; Anderson, Victorian Clerks', Heller, London Clerical Workers, p. 9. See also Peter Bailey’s article on the historiography o f the lower middle class - ‘White Collars, Grey Lives? The Lower Middle Class Revisited’, Journal o f British Studies, 38 (July 1999), 273-290. 15 Stephen Mihm, ‘Clerks, Classes, and Conflicts: A Response to Michael Zakim’s “The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary’” , Journal o f the Early Republic, 26 (Winter 2006), p. 607. 9  Geoffrey Crossick’s panoramic edited collection, The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914 (1977)16 was the first to place the clerk within a distinctly lower- middle-class framework, examining the role that had been played by bureaucracy in the creation of class identities. Disappointingly, most o f those who contribute a chapter to the volume - including Hugh McLeod, Richard Price, R. Q. Gray, and S. Martin Gaskell - did not go on to produce further work o f any substantial length on the lower-middle-class characters they examine.17 Despite, as Peter Bailey observes, ‘providing no arrestingly revisionist success story’, Crossick et al did draw together the threads of representation as a starting point for further study, even allowing for the lack of impetus that led to the lower middle classes remaining a marginal area of study 1ft for the next twenty years. Amo Mayer suggests that this demonstrates the reluctance of academics - particularly those who may have studied at the new polytechnics of the 1970s - to study a class ‘in which so many of them originate and from which they seek to escape’.19 A new tide of scholarly criticism examining the clerical class began in the late 1990s with Bailey’s own article ‘revisiting’ the lower middle class. Bailey draws our attention, once more, to the noticeable gap within existing scholarship of this particular class; as he suggests, ‘the lower middle class was hardly likely to precipitate its own E. P. Thompson’.20 ‘Compared with those rugged darlings, the working classes’, Bailey continues, ‘[...] the office clerk and the shopkeeper deserved the condescension o f posterity’.21 As Rita Felski observes, in her criticism of John Carey’s contentions, ‘the lower middle class has typically been an object of scom 16 Geoffrey Crossick, The Lower M iddle Class in Britain, 1870-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). 17 One contributor to Crossick’s book who is an obvious exception is Anderson, the author o f Victorian Clerks as well as a parallel study in female clerical workers - The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers since 1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 18 Bailey, ‘White Collars, Grey Lives?’, p. 276. 19 In American historiography, Mihm points to the comparative insecurities o f ‘deskbound academics’ and clerks - both o f whom do not engage in production according to the terms o f traditional labour - as an ironic factor in the former’s dismissal o f the latter. A m o Mayer, ‘The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem’, Journal o f Modern History, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sept. 1975), 409-436; Mihm, ‘Clerks, Classes, and Conflicts’, p. 608. 20 Bailey, ‘White Collars, Grey Lives?’, p. 276. 21 Bailey, ‘White Collars, Grey Lives?’, p. 276. 10 among intellectuals, blamed for everything from exceedingly bad taste to the rise of Hitler’.22 Felski writes openly about being interested in the lower middle class because it is her own social origin, something rarely confessed in academia, whilst recognising also the inherent contradictions in a lower-middle-class identity: Being lower-middle-class is a singularly boring identity [...] a non-identity [...] yet as older forms of class polarization and class identification begin to dissolve, the lives of ever more individuals in the industrialized West are defined by occupations, lifestyles, and attitudes traditionally associated with the lower middle class.23 Given the obvious significance of the lower-middle-class within modem society,24 it is no wonder that Bailey and Felski are critical of works like Crossick’s collection; yet, in all fairness, The Lower Middle Class in Britain remains the only study which attempts an evaluation of the broad sweep of lower-middle-class identities, however underwhelming its outcome in promoting further research. The handful of works produced after Bailey and Felski’s observations in 1999 and 2000 have been more focused - see, for example Geoffrey Spurr’s article on the London YMCA, Richard Higgins’s discussion of the clerk in the novels o f H. G. Wells, and A. James 25 Hammerton’s analyses of lower-middle-class marriage. Two important works, 22 Rita Felski, ‘Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class’, PMLA, Vol. 115, No. 1 (Jan. 2001), p. 34. Felski is referring to John Carey’s conclusions in The Intellectuals and the Masses: P ride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). 23 Felski, ‘Nothing to Declare’, p. 34. 24 Michael Zakim highlights the pivotal role o f the American clerk as the crux o f ‘all the new markets in the new market society’ - following in the footsteps o f Benjamin Franklin who ‘retroactively became America’s first clerk’. His interpretation o f why the clerk remains ignored in labour history is based on the idea that the clerk is ‘outside an Anglo-American tradition that identified labour as the source o f value’. Zakim, ‘Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary’, pp. 567, 603, 571. 25 Geoffrey Spurr, ‘The London YMCA: A Haven o f Masculine Self-Improvement and Socialisation for the late-Victorian and Edwardian Clerk’, Canadian Journal o f H istory, Vol. 37, Issue 2 (August 2002), 275-301; Richard Higgins, ‘Feeling like a Clerk in H. G. W ells’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 50, Issue 3 (Spring 2008), 457-475; A. James Hammerton, ‘Pooterism or Partnership? Marriage and Masculine Identity in the Lower Middle Class, 1870-1920’, Journal o f British Studies, 38 (July 1999), 291-321; Hammerton, ‘The Perils o f Mrs Pooter: Satire, Modernity and Motherhood in the Lower Middle Class in England, 1870-1920’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1 9 9 9 ), 261-276. 11 however, have been published since 2006 that specifically place the lower-middle- class clerk at the centre of both labour and literary history. In the most recent of these, London Clerical Workers, Heller argues that previous commentary on the clerk was a narrative of over-simplified decline and fall, and that actually there are grounds for understanding the growth o f the clerical industry and the feminization of clerical work as creating not only a change but one that substantiated the clerk’s place in the middle class.26 This view, reinforced by the work of Weber and Bourdieu, brings us back to the traditional focus of the older economic histories by engaging, once more, in the debate over the working- or 77 middle-class credentials of the clerk. Heller’s study, while critiquing the findings of earlier historians, such as Anderson, has methodologically much in common with his predecessors - as he acknowledges - particularly with respect to source base and OR statistical analysis. While this is a revision o f ‘declinist’ or ‘pessimistic’ narratives, it does remain fixed within the traditional terms o f debate, allowing the clerk only to be either working or middle class. And while Heller places the London clerk at the centre of his story, which many before him did not, his method o f telling that story remains traditional.29 In this way, Heller continues, as so many have before him, to make the category of Tower middle class’ a «o«-identity; merely giving the clerk a boost into the middle class ‘proper’. Heller thus not only rescues the clerk from the ‘shame’ o f a lower-middle-class-ness but, in doing so, implies that we can congratulate ourselves on becoming a middle-class nation. Where my study diverges most from Heller’s is in the emphasis on an understanding of class that is based not only on social and economic factors but on cultural capital. In this sense, I place emphasis on the very 26 Heller, London C lerical Workers, pp. 11-12. 27 See also R. Guerriero Wilson, Disillusionment or New Opportunities? The Changing Nature o f Work in Offices, G lasgow 1880-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1998). For a further account in opposition to Anderson and Wilson, see Paul Attewell, ‘The Clerk Deskilled: A Study in False Nostalgia’, Journal o f H istorical Sociology, 2.4 (1989), 357-87. 28 Heller, London Clerical Workers, p. 11. 29 Anderson, for example, focused on Manchester and Liverpool clerks in his earlier work, and many o f the sources in his broader study reflect this. 12 educational and aspirational values that created a recognisable and distinctive lower- middle-class identity, and one which is worth studying in its own right. The second, and most relevant, study is Jonathan W ild’s The Rise o f the Office Clerk in Literary Culture (2006). W ild’s analysis draws on fictional representations of the clerk which make him central to our cultural and social understanding. Indeed, W ild’s study answers Michel Crozier’s criticisms of British historians in The World o f the Office Worker (1971), which argues that the cultural and social implications of black-coated workers are neglected because to British academics the term ‘clerk’ is TO defined only in economic terms. Wild’s study o f the clerk-character within middlebrow fiction is a detailed chronological catalogue of both the representational and socio-historical rise of the clerk (and his ‘subsequent death’); his extensive research uncovered many of the novels discussed in this thesis.31 Wild also explores aspects o f lower-middle-class cultural identity which were first raised in Carey’s The T9 Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) but with more optimistic conclusions. While Carey’s chapter on ‘The Suburbs and the Clerks’ is particularly illuminating and offers a thorough, albeit brief, analysis of the position of the clerk with regard to cultural improvement, Wild suggests there is a broad scope o f clerical representations, ranging from the most-recognised ‘tame cat’ to what he sees as the iubermensch clerk’.33 This thesis has taken to heart comments made in Wild’s afterword about the status of the clerical class in realist fiction (and contemporary society) and made the questions raised by his study the starting point for analysis. My focus, however, is topographical, seeing not only the position of the clerkly class itself as crucial to the modem social and cultural norms, but also the spaces which were occupied by the clerk as paramount in forming distinct constructions of Englishness. 30 Michel Crozier, The World o f the Office Worker (London: Chicago University Press, 1971), p. 29. 31 Wild, Rise o f the Office Clerk, p. 8. 32 Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This study is discussed in more detail in chapter two. 33 See, for instance, W ild’s comments on Mr Hall Pycroft in Arthur Conan D oyle’s ‘The Stock- Broker’s Clerk’ who is a “manly and morally upright clerk” (1893). Wild, Rise o f the Office Clerk, p. 89. 13  Following in the footsteps of Wild and Carey, this thesis also draws upon recent studies of middlebrow fiction - a field which, as Jonathan Rose suggests, ‘has lately won new respect among scholars’.34 Rose’s own study, The Intellectual Life o f the Working Classes (2001) - written at the end of a decade o f early exploration into middlebrow fiction but predating the very recent surge o f popularity - still fuels debate within this field. Sharing some commonalities of approach with Carey’s study, Rose explores the divide between high modernism and autodidactic working- class authors. His chapter entitled ‘What was Leonard Bast really like?’ is clearly of interest in any study of lower-middle-class authorship, and his conclusions will be discussed further in the first chapter of this thesis. More recently still, the AHRC- funded ‘middlebrow network’ has marked the entry of the middlebrow into the academic mainstream, and has broadened the range o f authors and periods studied. Globally, the study of middlebrow culture has reached the forefront of critical discussion which means that much of the resultant work has been directed towards detailed case studies of nationality, gender, and periodization that have hitherto been ignored.37 34 Jonathan Rose, ‘R eview o f P riestley’s England: J. B. P riestley and English Culture’, History, Review o f N ew Books, 37.1 (2008), 26-27. 35 Christopher Hilliard responded in 2005 with a critique o f R ose’s use o f class as the only delineator between modernist and ‘plebeian’ literary styles - or, as Hilliard puts it, while ‘class and privilege satiate the social history o f literature, [...] it is unhelpful to interpret the reception o f modernism as class conflict continued by other means’. Hilliard accuses Rose o f using early-twentieth century representations o f modernism as a metaphor for contemporary strife within American academic circles. Rose, The Intellectual Life o f the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Hilliard, ‘Modernism and the Common Writer’, The H istorical Journal, 48, 3 (2005), pp. 787, 771. 36 The Middlebrow Fiction Network is an AHRC-funded resource for those studying novels by middlebrow writers. See their website for a detailed description o f the middlebrow, as well as a bibliography o f middlebrow work - www.middlebrow-network.com. 37 See, for example, Belinda Edmondson, Caribbean M iddlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) and Jonathan Hess, M iddlebrow Literature and the Making o f German-Jewish Identity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010). Discussions o f the feminine middlebrow were broached earlier, following works such as Teresa Mangum’s Married, M iddlebrow and Militant: Sarah G rand and the New Woman N ovel (Ann Arbor: University o f Michigan Press, 1998). Recently there has been a second wave o f this trend, with new research including Jaime Harker’s Am erica the Middlebrow: W omen’s Novels, Progressivism, and M iddlebrow Authorship Between the Wars (Amherst: University o f Massachusetts Press, 2007), Humble’s The Feminine M iddlebrow Novel, Melissa Sullivan’s Revisioning M iddlebrow Culture: Virginia Woolf, Rose M acaulay and the Politics o f Taste, 1894-1941 (Umi Dissertation Publishing, 2011), and Erica Brown’s Com edy and the Feminine M iddlebrow Novel: Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013). See also Hillary Hinds, ‘Domestic Disappointments: Feminine Middlebrow Fiction o f the Interwar Years, Home Cultures, 6, 2 (2009), 199-211. 14  The debate begun in the Edwardian period continues to shape contemporary views on the middlebrow. W oolfs ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924) - written as a rebuttal to Arnold Bennett’s own dissection of (her) modernism - is still often cited in middlebrow studies, although the considerations raised by Nicola Humble about the neglected “ ‘facts and forgotten associations’” which created a ‘fluid and flexible literary community’ are still overlooked.38 Thus the quarrels that were begun in Edwardian literary circles have, as Kate MacDonald suggests, been allowed to on dominate contemporary criticism. Hilliard, for example, continues this controversy by devoting much of his article on modernism and the common reader to ‘unpick[ing Jonathan] Rose’s claim’ that ‘working-class intellectuals were especially predisposed against modernism’.40 Like the historiography o f the lower middle class, research into the middlebrow thus stands on the outskirts o f an academy that tends to find engagement with it to be rather too personal. Defining the Clerk As clerical work developed throughout the nineteenth century, the clerk-character went from working alone as a personal assistant to entering vast bureaucratic halls filled with row upon row of identical desks. Much emphasis has been placed on the clerk as a figure who merges seamlessly into this mass to become only a two- dimensional character, one who typifies much but who means very little. Thus, the clerk’s stereotypical form - viewed in works as varied as Dickens’s David 38 Humble, The Feminine M iddlebrow Novel, p. 24. 39 Kate MacDonald, ‘Edwardian Transitions in the Fiction o f Una L. Silberrad’, ELT, 54, 2 (2011), p. 217. 40 Hilliard suggests instead that the aversion to modernist styles was a literary judgement, rather than a class one, and subsequently included middle-class critics. For further discussion on Carey’s conclusions see Jeremy Jennings and Tony Kemp-Welch’s Introduction to Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1-25. Hilliard, ‘Modernism and the Common Reader’, p. 772. 15 Copperfield (1850),41 the Grossmiths’ Diary o f a Nobody (1892), Forster’s Howards End (1910) and T. S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917) - has been read as a standardised representation of life as a lower-middle-class nobody. Instead of dwelling on these caricatures we will look, as did Storm Jameson in 1929, at the depth of the characters; for, as Jameson says of Wells, ‘no single work [...] leaves us with so vivid a sense of having lived through a complete stratum o f society as does Kipps’’.42 This study will argue that the works of the clerical authors, while often sharing commonalities with their middle-class peers on representations of their environment, present a different clerk-character - one who is nuanced, three-dimensional, and a dominant protagonist, so much so that he becomes a major literary type or figure fo r modernity. At this point, it is pertinent to define more closely the use of the word ‘clerk’. I argue that he is not only identifiably lower middle class but that the fictional clerk became representative of the whole of the lower middle class. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey reiterates the argument of W. H. Crosland, author of the highly sceptical study The Suburbans (1905), that ‘the clerks’ had ‘virtually come to constitute society’ 43 Mark Clapson likewise calls the term ‘clerk’ a ‘pejorative catch­ all term’ for the lower middle classes.44 And even social historian Crossick goes so far as to state: ‘I shall make no apology in what follows for concentrating on the clerk as a representative example of the lower middle classes’.45 This begs the question, then, 41 Though Dickens is well-known for his plentiful (and, as Wild suggests, obsessive) use o f clerical characters, he will not be studied in depth during this thesis. This is, in part, because Dickens is responsible for the dominant stereotype across his 104 clerks, most o f whom are secondary characters. Most o f his clerks’ names heighten the impression o f a clerkly caricature - for example, Chuffey, Nicodemus Dumps, Guppy, Minus, Morfin, and Newman Noggs. More practically, whilst this thesis ranges through texts from 1859-1945 (most notably in the final chapter), the focus is on the second wave o f clerical characterisation that occurred during the so-called ‘bureaucratic revolution’. George Newlyn, as cited in Wild, The Rise o f the Office Clerk, p. 11. 42 Storm Jameson, The G eorgian N ovel and Mr Robinson (London: Heinemann, 1929), p. 4. 43 Higgins likewise applies a broad definition in his article ‘Feeling Like a Clerk in H. G. W ells’. He calls Kipps both a ‘clerkly character’ and, at times, more specifically, a clerk. This conflation can also have roots in transatlantic translation (as I suspect in this case) because an American shop assistant like Kipps would have been, and would still be called a store clerk rather than, in this case, a draper. Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, p.58; Higgins, ‘Feeling Like a Clerk’, p. 461. 44 Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs: Brave New Worlds, Social Change and Urban D ispersal in P ost-w ar England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 6. 45 Crossick, The Lower M iddle Class, p. 97. 16 as to how the term ‘clerk’ should be defined, but also how far that definition becomes fixed. The earliest uses of the word in the eleventh century were related to posts held within the religious community; however, the only lasting connection this religious cleric has with our nineteenth-century clerk is that both were distinguished by their literacy. In the modem era, the technical definition of the clerical worker is very broad - to quote the Oxford English Dictionary he is, [o]ne employed in a subordinate position in a public or private office, shop, warehouse, etc., to make written entries, keep accounts, make fair copies of documents, do the mechanical work of correspondence and similar ‘clerkly’ work.46 Again we find the adjective ‘clerkly’ serving as a generic term to cover a broad range not only of professional duties but socio-economic characteristics. Identifiably ‘clerkly’ features, as Carey suggests, are all represented in Wells’ Mr Polly, as well as being recognisable in the lower-middle-class protagonists o f many of his other novels.47 The scope o f the term begins to expand beyond those who are technically clerks. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary lists several words deriving from the noun ‘clerk’ - of which clerkage, clerkdom, clerkery, clerkess and clerkish are all nineteenth-century terms that indicate a wider cultural diffusion.48 The term ‘clerkish’, for example, describes any characteristic that is ‘suggestive of a clerk’; it demonstrates not only the extent to which clerkly culture was embedded in wider 46 "clerk, n.", Oxford University Press [20 June 2011], 47 For example, Mr Lewisham o f Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) is an overworked teacher, while Mr Kipps from Kipps: The Story o f a Simple Soul (1905) and Mr Hoopdriver in The Wheels o f Chance (1896) are draper’s assistants. 48 O f these words clerkage, clerkdom, and clerkery can be used either to broadly describe the duties o f a clerk or to represent a collective body o f clerks. Clerkess is the less-used term for a female clerk; secretary or typist becomes more usual by the twentieth century. Clerkish as an adjective, describes clerkly characteristics, being defined as ‘suggestive o f a clerk’ - "clerk, n.", Oxford University Press [20 June 2011]. 17 society but the emphasis placed on a set of visually prominent signs.49 In a broader sense, the terminology of typical clerk-culture will also be assessed in this thesis; in chapter two, for example, the resonance o f words such as ‘suburban’ will be closely examined. There is, then, a certain element of fluidity in this thesis, reflective of the fluidity within tum-of-the-century stereotypes and beliefs about the clerk. In this way I will, like both Carey and Crossick, refer to several lower-middle-class characters who are not technically clerks but who represent the broader ‘clerkly’ culture. This is also a culture in which the gender of the clerk begins to lose fixity. At the beginning o f the ‘bureaucratic revolution’ the clerk was, as in the works o f Dickens, educated to a suitable degree and thus explicitly male. By the end of the nineteenth century, as George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) indicates, the increasing necessity for bureaucracy, and contemporaneous debates about the place o f lower-middle-class- women workers, meant that new roles were being created to make use of the new female workforce. The impact of this change is examined in close detail in Anderson’s seminal White-blouse Revolution (1989), which argues that the changes in bureaucratic formation contributed to debates on a clerical masculinity that was already in a state of crisis. My thesis takes the male clerk as its subject and, in doing so, offers a commentary on the fluctuations in gender representation across the period of study. This commentary is, however, secondary to the examinations of fictionalised escapes from clerical life and, as such, discussions o f gender are interwoven into the topographical foci where relevant. The female clerk does not feature in this thesis because the ‘clerkly culture’ which was established at the end o f the nineteenth century, and from which stereotypes were drawn, was dominated by male clerks - as reflected in the development of gender-specific terms like ‘secretary’ once female workers began to join the market. 49 See, for example, E. M. Forster’s assertion o f Leonard Bast’s ‘lilting step o f the clerk’. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 41. 18  The basis of this male ‘clerkly culture’, I will argue, can be found in two, sometimes opposing, forms. The first is what could be termed an ‘outsider’ representation of clerkly culture, concerned with furthering a stereotype that is substantiated through language, appearance, and suburban architecture; these characterisations are often drawn by middle-class critics. The second, ‘insider’ perspective is an expression of the aspirational values and beliefs that were fostered by those within the lower middle classes, most recognisable in the firm belief in social mobility, the desire for (cultural) self-improvement and education, and the importance o f the projection of a certain type of lifestyle. The blurring o f fine lines o f distinction between these two types of representation occurs, as this thesis charts, when the clerks themselves begin to use the fictional codes that their non-clerkly adversaries establish. In doing so, these stereotypes - which are, by their nature, negative - become destabilised by the clerks who themselves write novels with clerical protagonists. One example of this that coincides with constructions of clerical masculinity can be found in the stature of clerkly characters. Like Jameson’s everyman-reader Mr Robinson, the clerk is, generally speaking, a Tittle man’ - just like the solicitor’s clerk (a Tittle ginger-haired man’) to whom poor Edward Malone, of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), loses the fair Gladys.50 In Agatha Christie’s short story ‘The Case of the City Clerk’, Mr Roberts is described as ‘a small, sturdily built man of forty-five, with wistful, puzzled, timid eyes’, and is referred to three times as a Tittle clerk’.51 Likewise, Collins describes the clerks in London Belongs to Me (1945) as ‘smooth, c'y precise little men wearing stiff collars and hom-rimmed spectacles’. Conan Doyle, Collins, and Christie demonstrate the absorption and unquestioning repetition of stereotypical depictions by outsider commentators. If we look at those writers who were clerks we can see how this type became widespread in the literary imagination. 50 Jameson refers to clerkly Mr Robinson as ‘little’ no less than ten times within the seventy-five page long essay. Jameson, The Georgian N ovel; Arthur Conan Doyle, The L ost World (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 260. 51 Agatha Christie, ‘The Case o f the City Clerk’, Parker Pyne Investigates (New York: HarperCollins, 1934), p. 68. 52 Collins, London Belongs to Me, p. 13. 19 One of Irish author Shan Bullock’s clerks, Mr Ruby, for instance, is a ‘poor, troubled, homely little man’, Wells’ Mr Polly is a ‘short, compact figure’ and Edgar Finchley, prolific clerk-author Victor Canning’s creation, is, in the very first six words of the novel, defined as ‘forty-five, short’.53 Adventurer Professor Challenger, also of The Lost World, provides a more typical image o f the Edwardian male ideal. Challenger is the ultimate model of Imperialist hyper-masculinity; and when Edward meets him for the first time, he comments, ‘it was his size which took one’s breath away’.54 Carey argues that the construction of the weak and effeminate clerk is, to some degree, challenged by ‘Hall-Pycroft-type-clerks’, as found in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’ and Wells’ History o f Mr Polly (1910).55 Yet, while these muscle-bound, athletic types can be found, their incongruity is what draws our attention to them. Wells, in particular, despite being responsible for the ‘strong young stockbroker’s clerks’ that bully Uncle Jim, places a dismally downtrodden lower- middle-class type as his titular character - the ‘puny little chap’ Polly.56 As Bailey suggests, ‘Victorian writers faced with the disquieting irruption o f a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers devised a parodic discourse o f littleness, whose feminized tropes rendered the clerk as socially insignificant as the sequestered Victorian woman’.57 This ‘social insignificance’ is demonstrated in the conflation, then, of the clerkly and the middlebrow; the Edwardian trend of interpreting middlebrow fiction as a discourse of ‘littleness’ is apparent across literary criticism. As Hilliard argues, the ‘ordinary reader’ becomes synonymous with the Tittle man’ — ‘that species so favoured by interwar commentators’.58 And yet, I argue that there is a more positive, 53 Bullock, Mr Ruby Jumps the Traces (London: Chapman and Hall, 1917), p. 7; H. G. Wells, The History o f Mr P olly (London: Collins, 1969), p. 20; Victor Canning, M r Finchley Discovers His England (London: Pan Books, 1970), p. 7. 54 Conan Doyle, The L ost World, p. 21. 55 Carey, Intellectuals and the M asses, p. 64. 56 And as Carey suggests, it is his ‘failures alone, among his characters [that] have warmth and life’ - see, for instance, Kipps, Mr Lewisham, Mr Polly and Hoopdriver. Wells, The H istory o f Mr Polly, pp. 228 and 90: Carey, Intellectuals and Masses, p. 141. 57 Peter Bailey, ‘White Collars, Grey Lives’, p. 272 - my emphasis added. 58 Hilliard, ‘Modernism and the Common Writer’, p. 771. 20 and in some respects literal, interpretation of the small clerk; as Clive Bloom suggests of Edwardian literature more broadly, ‘the little man replace[d] the hero’.59 I would argue that Bloom, though, is wrong to argue that the little man simply ‘replaces’ the hero, rather than becoming or redefining the hero; for the Rubys, Pollys and Finchleys of Edwardian fiction do not fit in with traditional definitions o f the hero but are instead the heroes o f ordinary life. The authors Since this thesis is primarily a study of fiction, there should be a description of how this source material has been identified and interpreted. Logistically, this has involved research of a somewhat unorthodox nature; while many hours have been spent in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland, there has been still more research undertaken in second-hand bookshops, browsing market stalls, and in charity shops. This is partly because it is difficult to ascertain whether there are clerical characters or clerkly types from the title of a novel alone (although reading the entirety of William Freeman’s Dictionary o f Fictional Characters (1963), while tedious, helped), but also because there is much pleasure to be had in owning these books. Most of them are early editions, often because they have not been reprinted since Edwardian clerks themselves, after a hard day at the office, sat in a quiet comer reading them. Discovering works which contain the amateur ‘rambler’ - discussed in detail in chapter three - has been limited only by personal funds; there are so many to be found in second-hand and antiquarian bookshops across the country it has been difficult to control the desire to buy them all.60 Much o f this research has, therefore, been conducted ‘on the ground’, as it were, but I have also made use o f several 59 Clive Bloom, Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, 1900-1929 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 27. 60 For example, a title search for the word ‘ramble’ in the Copac catalogue (www.copac.ac.uk) returns 2751 hits. This includes those which distinctly market themselves as ‘ramble-narratives’, generally written by amateurs but not the many local area and county guides, which also frequently include descriptions o f ramble journeys. 21 nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature catalogues, including John Sutherland’s Stanford Guide to Victorian Literature (1989) and Michael Cox’s Dictionary o f Writers and their Works (2001), whilst the footnotes of Wild, Rose, and Carey have led me to many authors who have received little critical attention elsewhere. Some of the authors in this thesis enjoy near-canonical status; Wells and Gissing, for example, are ambiguously placed but frequently discussed. Arnold Bennett, William Pett Ridge, Frank Swinnerton, Shan Bullock and Edwin Pugh, on the other hand, are more likely to be cited within specifically middlebrow studies.61 Far from canonicity stands the largely obscure but prolific writer Victor Canning,62 as well as many clerks who wrote only one or two works of anecdotal literature, many of whom feature in chapter three. Most of the authors studied were clerks, even if only briefly, during their youth. Bennett, for example, worked from the age o f sixteen in his father’s solicitor’s office, later becoming a clerk in London; and Bullock was a civil service clerk in Somerset House before transferring to the office o f the public trustee, a post which he held until his retirement.63 Pett Ridge spent many years working a six- day week as a clerk in a railway clearing house whilst also attending evening classes at Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institute.64 Swinnerton was a clerk-receptionist at J. M. Dent, where he later assisted in the launch of the Everyman’s Library, and Pugh worked in a lawyer’s office for eight years.65 Canning was a clerk in the education 61 For further research on Arnold Bennett see John Shapcott (ed), Arnold Bennett: New Perspectives (Stoke-on-Trent: Arnold Bennett Society, 2007), and Robert Squillace, Modernism, Modernity and Arnold Bennett (London: Associated University Press, 1997). While Bennett received prolific attention between 1930 and 1970, these are two o f the only general studies since the 1980s. There has only been one critical work focused explicitly on Shan Bullock - Richard M ills’s Violent Imaginations: The Ulster Novel, 1900-1996 (University o f Ulster, 1996) [electronic resource], and one on William Pett Ridge (which also mentions Edwin Pugh): Vincent Brome, Four Realist Novelists: Arthur Morrison, Edwin Pugh, R ichard Whiteing, William P ett Ridge (London: Mildner and Sons, 1965). The one further study o f Edwin Pugh is Sally-Ann B aggotf s thesis - ‘The Cockney at Home: Class, Culture and the City in the Works o f Edwin Pugh’ (University o f Birmingham: Unpublished PhD Thesis, 2005). For information on Frank Swinnerton, see Irene Campbell, ‘Frank Swinnerton: the Life and Works o f a Bookman’ (University o f Warwick: Unpublished PhD thesis, 1992). 62 While Canning is obscure in literary circles, he did receive great critical acclaim during the 1970s for his dark thrillers, several o f which were made into film —including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Family Plot (1976). His main clerk-character, Mr Finchley, received a small revival in interest when the novel Mr Finchley G oes to Paris (1938) was recorded as a BBC Radio 7 dramatization featuring Richard Griffiths in 2008. 63 Patrick Maume, ‘Shan Fadh Bullock’, DNB. 64 George Malcolm Johnson, ‘William Pett Ridge’, DNB. 65 Robert Lusty, ‘Frank Swinnerton’, DNB; Damian Atkinson, ‘Edwin William Pugh’, DNB. 22 office from the age of sixteen until he made enough money to become a full-time writer; and Wells began his working life as a draper until, like many other lower- middle-class authors, he became a pupil teacher.67 Jerome K. Jerome also dabbled in clerical work as well as journalism before becoming a professional writer, as did Graham Greene, who began work in an office as an unpaid intern. For middle-class critics, a clerical origin was generally enough to undermine any author’s claim to be treated seriously. Jerome, for instance, was mockingly referred to as ‘Mr Jerumky Jerum’ by Punch and criticised for his ‘vernacular’ and ‘forced and vulgar’ use of ‘Yankee humour’ as well as his slippages into ‘clerkly’ /TO language. His many readers were not so sneering, with more than 202,000 copies of Three Men in a Boat (1889) being sold by 1909, making it publisher Arrowsmith’s most prized novel in the 3s. 6d. series.69 In Joan and Peter (1918) Wells is cynical about the critical reception facing many authors who were of a lower social background and subsequently wrote about lower-middle-class life: ‘the social origins of most of the crew were appalling’, his middle-class character ironically remarks, ‘[indeed] Bennett was a solicitor’s clerk from the potteries. Wells a counter-jumper’.70 Wells the counter-jumper was first-generation lower middle class, as were most of this group of clerkly authors. Their fathers were of the skilled labouring classes - Bullock, Canning, Gissing, Ridge, Pugh, and Swinnerton being the sons of, respectively, a tenant farmer, a coach maker, an impoverished chemist, a theatre props maker, and a railway porter. These artisanal roots suggest that the educational reforms o f the late- nineteenth century were increasing social mobility with the office serving as a bridge between the two classes. This does not necessarily mean that those working-class roots were forgotten. Pugh and Ridge, along with Arthur Morrison (another clerk- turned-writer), were part of the late nineteenth-century ‘Cockney School’ of writers. Mw w w.victorcanning.com [accessed 27.01.11]. There is very little information available on the biography o f Victor Canning aside from this fan site, which cites Canning’s sister as the source. 67 George Gissing also spent some time as a pupil teacher, as did Jerome and D. H. Lawrence. 68 Punch, 3 Jan. 1891. 69 Philip Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 31. 70 Wells, Joan and Peter (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1933), p. 195. 23 Indeed, in recording the usage of the ‘Cockneyisms’ o f the characters in their novels, Pugh and Ridge were central in the construction o f the familiar contemporary style attributed to London’s east-enders.71 Ridge’s lower-class characters were portrayed as defiant, proud and unrepressed, as the heroine of his most popular work Mord Em ’ly (1898) shows. Ultimately, however, both writers turned their attentions to the suburban lower middle classes, finding in their new subjects a ready readership with a disposable income and a penchant for literature. Not all of the works studied in this thesis, however, are written by and aimed at clerks. In order to place the writings of the clerk-authors within the wider critical context, I discuss some novels that I consider exemplify the widespread diffusion not only of the clerical stereotype but of a clerkly subculture. If the novels written by clerks are often a complicated mix of sentimentality and bitterness, dependent on their experiences of clerical work, those written by the slightly more comfortably middle class (authors such as Crosland, the Grossmiths, Forster) are equally complex 79 compounds o f mockery, patronisation and pity. In part, these representations are based on the fine line drawn between the middle class ‘proper’ (Crosland et al) and the clerical classes themselves.73 The middlebrow novels in this study have not, for the most part, achieved critical acclaim; they are novels which were once popular, to varying degrees, but which now exist mainly within British Library out-of-print collections. The scope and breadth of a study involving many novels which have, in the past, been difficult to locate, and thus are often under-appreciated, should contribute to a wider 71 Most o f Morrison’s work dealt with the cruelty o f poverty-stricken east-end life, whereas Pugh and Ridge moved away from this. Despite criticising other Cockney authors for their bias towards the negative aspects o f East End life, Pugh’s own works were largely ‘over-sentimental and unrealistic’ - Atkinson, ‘Edwin Pugh’, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 28.01.11]. 72 The Grossmiths’ father was the chief reporter o f The Times, while Forster was the son o f an architect. All three were educated at preparatory schools. W. H. Crosland, like George Grossmith, and, briefly Forster, was a journalist and newspaper editor. 73 George Gissing has a more unusual relationship with the clerkly classes; drawn into lower-middle- class life by a woman named Nell, who brought only ruination and poverty, he casts his clerkly characters as pathetic figures who invoke both pity and scorn. See W ild’s chapter on George Gissing in Rise o f the Literary Clerk for a detailed discussion o f Gissing’s changing attitudes towards clerks. 24 understanding of several works which have so far escaped academic attention.74 These novels mark the moment at which French naturalism coincided with a generation of authors weary of Victorian realism, and the resultant fiction is a product of, as Humble ♦ 7S argues, innovation and change. The instinctive reaction, however, has often been to dismiss the more diverse influences of many o f these novels - instead, most are designated works of ‘classical realism’ - a term which itself is considered a criticism in the twentieth century. Yet Luc Herman’s Marxist definition o f classical realism - ‘embod[ying] bourgeois ideology and oppressively engender[ing] a subject position nr that will not call capitalism into question as a mode of production’ does not always fit here. What many o f these novels present is actually an, often subtle, confrontation with capitalist bureaucracy itself. These novels fall far short of a revolutionary call because they are grounded in the despair found in a context which cannot be altered or 77 overcome; instead we read a narrative o f inactivity. If, as Barthes argues, classic realism offers a ‘character, unified and coherent, [as] the source o f action’, then the clerk-figure is not a classic realist protagonist.78 Indeed, moments of action, of optimism, or even of clarity, are usually countered by an ending without resolution and an identity beyond grasp.79 In clerical fiction, instead of what Herman describes as ‘the disruption of identity and the subsequent return to order’ of the realist plot, we 80 invariably have hesitant, indeterminate endings - the fate o f the clerk. 74 The recent wave o f digitalisation coinciding with the rise o f the e-book has made, even during the period o f this thesis, many o f these novels much more widely available; works that are out o f copyright are a popular market for new digital publishers. 75 Humble, Feminine M iddlebrow Novel, p. 27. 76 Luc Herman, Concepts o f Realism (Columbia, SC: Camden House Inc., 1996), p. 206. 77 Lynne Hapgood calls, for example, Shan Bullock’s Robert Thome a ‘“ thorn” in the side o f the system ’ and a product o f Bullock’s ‘radical’ vision. Hapgood, Margins o f Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture, 1880-1925 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 187. 78 Roland Barthes, as cited in Herman, Concepts o f Realism, p. 206. 79 For example, Mr Ruby in Bullock’s Mr Ruby Jumps the Traces (1917), runs away to Gibraltar, then returns to an oppressive clerical life; Mr Lewisham in W ells’ Love and M r Lewisham (1900) wants to be an author throughout the novel, but never makes it. In The Broken Honeymoon (1908) by Edwin Pugh, the main character marries without particularly desiring it, goes on his honeymoon, and his wife leaves him. In George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Gordon Comstock battles fiercely against the ‘m oney-code’ but ultimately has to give in to the demands o f his growing family. 80 Herman, Concepts o f Realism, p. 206. 25 The Readers One of the most interesting aspects of clerical fiction is that pessimistic illustrations of the clerk did not seem to deter a clerkly readership. In part, this is a result o f changes in literary culture that occurred at the beginning o f the twentieth century when, as MacDonald argues, middlebrow fiction ‘focused on the domestic and on ordinary life Q1 mirroring the lives of the anticipated readers’. This mirroring o f reality in clerical novels reflects, then, an assumed clerical audience. Likewise, literary historians have demonstrated that the clerkly audience was an avidly literate one. The clerkly class thus becomes part of the definition of what we understand as an established middlebrow readership - as MacDonald further states: In the British Edwardian period the emergence of the middlebrow is closely connected with the increase in numbers of the clerk, the office girl, and the salaried lower middle classes in suburbia. It is associated with evening classes, self- improvement, increasing mobility and earnings.83 Clearly clerks read but what is more ‘striking’, as Leah Price observes, is that once clerks become a large potential audience ‘diatribes against certain kinds o f printed 81 See, for example, the title o f Bobby’s novel in H. G. W ells’ Christina A lb e rta ’s Father - ‘Ups and Downs: A Pedestrian N ovel’. MacDonald, ‘Edwardian Transitions’, pp. 214, 216; Wells, Christina A lb erta ’s Father (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), p. 184. 82As MacDonald suggests, middlebrow fiction was ‘channelled by publishers into reprint library series, designed to sell at a low price and in large quantities to the new generations o f the educated middle class and lower middle classes’. Leah Price further argues that ‘clerical workers were perceived as the first truly mass audience for fiction, newspapers, [and] magazines’; she also draws our attention also to the - so far little-studied - phonographic reprints o f both popular and educational works that were directed specifically at clerks able to read this shorthand format. John Baxendale suggests that clerks were among those in a class that was ‘expanding in numbers, whose next generation became the suburbanites and, as Humble argues, the “middlebrow” readers o f the 1930s’. MacDonald, ‘Edwardian Transitions’, pp. 214, 216; Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell, L iterary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 38. John Baxendale, P riestley’s England: J. B. Priestley and English Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 13. 83 MacDonald, ‘Edwardian Transitions’, p. 216. See, Humble, Feminine M iddlebrow N ovel, p. 13 for the description to which Baxendale is referring. 26 matter [popular fiction] assume that it’s being read by clerical workers’.84 Clerks are frequently portrayed as avid consumers of cheap works, both by critics - see, for example, Crosland’s chapter on ‘Cheap Classics’85 - and by sympathisers. One of the first descriptive markers used by many middlebrow authors is a close and detailed examination of their clerk-characters’ bookshelves. Thus we read that Bullock’s Mr Ruby has cheap copies of ‘Carlyle’s Frederick, Macaulay’s Essays, Josephus, The Decline and Fall, Shakespeare, Byron’, and Wells’ Mr Polly scours cheap book sales in order to build up an enormous collection: ‘hundreds o f books [...] old, dusty books, books with tom covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked with string and glue’.86 Mr Aked, elderly clerk in Bennett’s A Man from the North (1898), even has a ‘fine lot of French novels’ whose ‘vivid yellow gratefully lightened a dark comer’ as well as spending a good deal o f time reading George Gissing novels in the reading rooms of the British Museum.87 In fact, in 1905, the City o f Westminster oo listed clerical workers as the vocational group using its libraries more than any other. The rise of cheap publishing, that followed the 1842 Copyright Act, meant that, in due course, series such as Nelson’s New Century Library (1900), Grant Richard’s World Classics (1901), Collin’s Pocket Classics (1903) and Dent’s Everyman Library (1906) all sold well-known works for about a shilling. As Waller states, ‘it was a reasonable guess that the [readership] included the literate young o f the lower-middle and OQ aspiring professional classes’. We must, of course, be careful when trying to understand readership of any kind. As Mary Hammond suggests, ‘we cannot assume that a particular author or genre meant a particular thing to its readers based either on textual analysis alone, or on textual evidence combined with an analysis of an assumed or intended audience’. 84 Price and Thurschwell, Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture, p. 38. 85 Crosland dism issively states: ‘the suburban library-purchaser has taken to book-buying simply and solely because the books are cheap and fit most sweetly into dainty bookcases’. W. H. Crosland, The Suburbans (London: John Long, 1905), pp. 189-90. 86 Bullock, M r Ruby, p. 13; Wells, H istory o f M r Polly, p. 119. 87 Arnold Bennett, A Man from the North (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1911), p. 85. 88 Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations, p. 52. 89 Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations, p. 59. 27 She goes on to argue that people read across genres, and against the ‘marketing grain’ particularly in an age of cheaper editions and the growth o f borrowing libraries.90 If I make the assumption that clerks read clerical fiction it is, in this case, based on the level of detail about clerkly life illustrated by the authors. Arguably this depth of analysis appeals to few others than those who have likewise experienced life as a clerk. In this case, I am not equating cost too closely with sales; rather by examining the fictional clerk I am taking a look at his literary bookshelves, under the assumption that the clerk-author would reference works that he would expect a clerk-reader to know. For the same reasons, I do not examine the work of reviewers too closely in this thesis; this is, in part, because reviewers were more likely to be drawn from the established middle classes, but it is also an attempt to shift the focus from canonical writers towards popular ones - reviews of the latter are rarer. As Jameson says, it is the ‘respectable little [suburban] man o f quiet manners’ who is best placed to survey the contemporary literary landscape, rather than the critic who ‘keeps his head buried in the sand of his own back garden’.91 Aims and Objectives This thesis will argue that the dominant version o f clerks as pitiable, pathetic ‘nobodies’ was in fact challenged by a more nuanced form o f depiction created by the clerks themselves. I suggest that clerks were an important cultural symbol of the everyday lives of many, and that in fiction they were figures that could be enjoyed by an audience that empathised with and understood the trials that they faced, and the rewards they sought. This theory is tested in the examination of the spaces the clerk 90 Hammond commends R ose’s research into reader’s memoirs, but argues that there is still a necessity to analyse publishing data because it can uncover the ‘hidden forces at work’. These forces, she continues, ‘determined not only what was available and to whom, but also influenced the selection o f one book or edition over these where these were coexistant’. Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation o f Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 11-12. 91 Jameson, The Georgian N ovel, pp. 1, 6. 28 inhabited and the escapes he made from the constraints of clerical life. As I argue, the clerk’s flights into the suburbs and countryside enabled him both to challenge the office-bound stereotype and to act out of character. In these moments of escape, however fleeting they may seem, the clerk began to construct an identity that made him not a type but an everyman. Woven across the thesis and examined in each of these three spaces is the impulse that drove the clerk towards expressing the essence o f this everyman status in literature. And so we see, in the office, the suburb, and the ramble, both actual or physical flight and imaginative or creative flight. Key to this thesis is the idea that we have become a lower-middle-class nation - not only in that we are a nation of office workers but because our dominant cultural identity is a ‘clerkly’ one. In a sense, therefore, the nation is a metaphorical office and we are all clerks. The values and lifestyle of the clerk have helped to draw the parameters of modem cultural and social meaning which have become, in some respects, an embodiment of Englishness. (Note, because o f the London-centric vision of clerkly life, as well as the publishing industry, the term ‘Englishness’ must be used rather than ‘Britishness’). The familiarity of the tedious nine-till-five existence, compounded by an unsympathetic and monotonous retreat into an odious suburban dwelling, remains a well-recognised narrative well into the twenty-first century. Modem audiences, who work in offices and live in suburbs, can continue to relate to the comedy of characters such as the late-Victorian Charles Pooter. There remains, indeed, an appetite for mocking the clerical character - the popularity o f Ricky Gervais’s award-winning series The Office (2001-02) shows many aspects of this modem attitude that, I will argue, began with the Victorian and Edwardian treatment of the same class.92 The Office was set in Slough - the modem suburb berated by John Betjeman in 1937 as not ‘fit for humans now’, with its ‘bald young clerks’ who have 92 And the American adaptation o f The Office is just one indicator that clerkly interests have become integral to Western culture. See also, David Nobbs’s novel, The Death o f Reginald Perrin (London: Gollancz, 1975), which was made into a television series in the 1970s ( The Fall and Rise o f Reginald Perrin), directed by Gareth Gwenlan and John Howard Davies (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1976-79) and reproduced in 2009 as Reggie Perrin (directed by Tristram Shapeero and Dominic Brigstock (Objective Productions, 2009-2010)). 29 ‘tasted Hell’ - and Gervais’s characters are supposed to epitomise the daily grind in a way that, at times, becomes too close for comfort.93 These contemporary links, while not the focus o f this thesis, are essential in our understanding of the clerk as a figure who can transcend both his period and setting and who is thus not ‘limited’ to Edwardian middlebrow fiction. They also parallel the notions of escape discussed in this thesis; as anyone who has seen such television programmes as Escape to the Country and Location, Location, Location can attest - it is the city office-worker who most often needs to flee.94 The wide-ranging time-frame of this study allows me to mention briefly both the end of the early clerical culture - the small-company clerk reminiscent of many o f Dickens’s characters - and the almost global bureaucracy that developed by the 1930s. While this seems to cross many historical boundaries, the broad scope of this study allows threads o f continuity to be identified across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in some respects, into the twenty-first. This reflects my contention that while the clerk is Victorian in origin, he is a figure that remains almost unchanged until at least the 1930s and who is, in a variable form, present still. The wider implications o f lower-middle-class taste and culture, viewed particularly in the continuing ambiguity toward suburbia, shows how deeply the clerk and his characteristics have penetrated English identity in a way that makes us uncomfortable still. In order to limit the scope of this study there must, though, be some chronological boundaries. Although this thesis does extend as far back as 1859, and as far forward as the 1940s, there is particular focus on clerical fiction between 1880 and 1920. I am not, therefore, claiming to cover in depth all o f the social, political and economic changes of this period. Clearly the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth saw complex and challenging situations unparalleled in British history. One premise of this thesis, however, is that the most striking feature of 93 John Betjeman, ‘Slough’, John Betjem an’s Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 1962), p. 22. 94 Escape to the Country dir. by Jon Nutter et al. (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2002-present) and Location, Location, Location dir. by Matthew Elmes, Andrew Jackson et al. (Ideal World Productions, 2000-present). 30 clerical representation in literature during this period is the exceptional levels of continuity, not change, and for this reason I do not discuss either world war in detail. In this omission, I am taking the lead from the novels themselves; most o f which pay little attention to the wars. Instead, the rapidly expanding bureaucratic sector, increasing mechanisation, and suburban commentaries dominate as contemporary concerns.95 In much of the middlebrow fiction between 1914 and 1920, the War receives little attention; in part because authors were providing realistic escapism - the description of ‘ordinary’ life without war - but also because initially for many the realities of life continued: work at the office, the commute, suburban life, and the family.96 The 1940s provide a chronologically sensible point with which to conclude for two further reasons. The first of these is the arrival of the motor car. Once the clerk could afford a car, his concept of space (and escape) would change forever. Suburban architecture began to change as off-street parking factored as a design consideration, and the late-Victorian villas and Edwardian terraces which had stood for so long as symbolic o f the vast colonisation of suburban London began to wane. Likewise, the ramble altered dramatically once the era of mass car ownership began. While attempts to popularise the bicycle tour filled some o f the void left by the freedom o f the ramble, the changing technological and social culture o f the 1940s meant that rambling fast became anachronistic. The second reason for ending in the late 1940s is that the conventional clerkly character begins to disappear from fiction. In fact, using the term ‘clerk’ to typify certain characteristics becomes out-dated, partly because there is no longer a coherent sense of clerical identity. To put it another way, the male clerk vanishes into the figure 95 The ramifications for clerks and clerk-authors during the First World War, are discussed in W ild’s article, ‘A Merciful, Heaven-sent Release?’, Cultural and Social History, Vol. 4, Issue 1 (2007), 73-94. For a chronological social and literary history o f the clerk see also W ild’s book, The Rise o f the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939. 96 See, for example, Bullock’s Mr Ruby Jumps the Traces, published in 1917, which does not discuss the war. As Elizabeth Bowen wrote in the postscript to The Demon Lover (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945): ‘These are all war-time, none o f them war stories’. There are, as Bowen suggests, important tales o f war, but there are also tales written during a war, which may not be explicitly about the war, or even mention it, but which still teach their reader much about the time they were written. 31 of the secretary and the typist, or unceremoniously merges into a generalised office- worker. One of the last clerks in this study is Mr Josser, o f Collins’s London Belongs to Me (1945), who, rather appropriately, retires in the first chapter, after forty-two years as a clerk. This, I suggest, is the end o f the ‘tribe o f clerks’ which Poe had identified back in 1840. By the second half o f the twentieth century the word ‘clerk’ no longer plays a role either in the language o f the office or in the novel. Synopsis The first chapter posits the office as a space that shaped the clerical psyche and represented the stifling monotony of ‘clerkly’ work. I also begin to draw out elements o f escape that permeated the everyday and challenged routine working life. Fundamentally, my argument is that the clerk’s experience was not an enjoyable one, but that the clerk-authors do not dismiss the clerk him self because o f this - as many middle-class critics did. From a theoretical perspective, this chapter will engage with Rose’s Intellectual Life o f the Working Classes and Paul Jordan’s Author in the Office (2006), in order to explore the legitimacy of creative freedom during office hours. This chapter examines several areas of what I term the ‘emotional’ experience of the office as represented in fiction: namely, the effects of mechanisation theory, the psychological impact of clock-watching, and the internalisation of discipline. In focusing on these aspects of the office space, I examine how the clerk’s seemingly oppressive environment led him away from clerical work and into the world of authorial success between 1893 and 1945. In doing so, this clerk-author began to challenge the formation of an office-worker ‘type’ and began to elicit empathy and hope, rather than pity for his clerical hero. In chapter two, I discuss how suburbia came to represent all that was deemed disagreeable in middlebrow culture, middle-class emulation, and political conservatism. I also offer a rebuttal to C. F. G. Masterman’s comment that ‘no one 32 fears [...] the suburbans; and perhaps for that reason’, he suggests, ‘no one respects them. They only appear articulate in comedy, to be made the butt o f a more nimble- 07 witted company outside’. This chapter draws on the contemporaneous commentaries of H. J. Dyos and Masterman, as well as the more recent cultural work o f Carey and the socio-economic analyses of F. M. L. Thompson, David Thoms and Roger Silverstone. I also engage with the work of Franz Coetzee, Tom Jeffery and David Smith, by analysing the assumption that the suburbs encouraged political conservatism and arguing that the suburban clerk has a place within the discourse of socialism. More generally, therefore, in chapter two, I dispute the well-known suburban type - as epitomised in the Grossmiths’ The Diary o f a Nobody (1892) and Crosland’s The Suburbans - by showing how the suburbs became an environment which inspired many of its clerical inhabitants to produce enjoyable and insightful fictional narratives as well as expressing themselves politically outside o f traditional Villa Toryism. Through the exploration of works such as Howard’s Smiths o f Surbiton (1905), Bullock’s Robert Thorne (1907) and Mr Ruby Jumps the Traces (1917), as well as Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up fo r Air (1939), I argue that the suburbs were an exciting environment both creatively and politically. My last chapter focuses on the London clerk and his escape on a ramble through the Home Counties. Here I discuss the ramble as a personal and life-altering journey frequently chronicled by clerks, either as a literary work, or as part o f a non- fictional narrative, which provided a sense of self-fulfilment as well as offering inspiration to other clerks. In this last chapter, I place the literature of rambling alongside the nineteenth- and twentieth-century fascination with the pastoral idyll, and locate the clerk within discussions of both rural and national identities. Rebecca Solnit’s history of walking, Wanderlust (2001), as well as Melanie Tebbutt’s 2006 article on northern clerk-hikers, build on the older academic studies o f mrality by W. J. Keith, Malcolm Chase and Martin Wiener, in order to define notions of walking, rambling, and hiking that are, in this chapter, examined as integral to the clerk’s 97 C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition o f England (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 56. 33  98 experience. In this way, rambling becomes opposed to the more modem term ‘hiking’ being associated, as it is, with a rugged, dangerous, more physically demanding leisure activity. Instead, the clerical ramble is constructed as a carefree and almost spiritual exploration of southern England that involves a pilgrimage to medieval sites, loosely following the example of early chroniclers, such as Cobbett and Defoe. This immersion in history amongst the last sites o f a pre-industrial pastoral idyll enhanced the clerk’s engagement with national character and identity, as well as providing respite from the office and domestic and social tensions in the suburb. The central premise of the chapter is that the ramble acted not only as a valuable form of escape from the monotony and boredom of clerical life but also as a means to re­ invent a lost sense of masculinity. For the class-conscious clerk, these sites o f escape represent a challenge to a rigid system of social status that was, to varying extents, successful. The suburban home, whilst appearing, from the outside, indicative of one’s social and financial position, was to some extent experienced from within as a space free of class constraints. Most successful in terms of a deconstruction of class position is the ramble - the clerk becomes freer while rambling because class becomes less visible in a ‘natural’ setting. More importantly, however, than the clerk’s various flights and escapes, is the clerk’s transition from nobody to protagonist. This crucial transformation is demonstrated not only through the portrayal o f the clerk character in these novels but also by assessing the democratisation o f authorship and the development across multiple fictions of the clerical everyman. Finally, I must establish, as others who have studied the clerk tend to do, my own outlook on the clerk. Like Woolf, I argue that there is ‘a [strange] feeling of 98 See Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline o f the Industrialist Spirit 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), W. J. Keith, The P oetry o f Nature: Rural Perspectives in P oetry from Wordsworth to the Present (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980) and The Rural Tradition: A Study o f the Non-Fiction Prose Writers o f the English Countryside (Toronto: University o f Toronto Press, 1974), as well as Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (eds), The Imagined Past: History and N ostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) and Glen Cavaliero, The Rural Tradition in the English Novels, 1900-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1977). 34 incompleteness and dissatisfaction’ within fiction at the turn o f the twentieth century, and I suggest that the centring of the clerk within novels by both middlebrow and modernist writers contributes towards this." This in itself raises two further questions; why did both sets o f (opposing) writers feel drawn towards the clerk, and why is it that their narratives unite in the representation of the futility o f clerkly life? By engaging with the misery expressed through clerical characters in novels both by former clerks and middle-class observers, I do not mean to imply a dismissal o f the clerk, nor an ignorance o f the power of stereotyping. This is not a negative narrative; instead, my thesis is separated into two parts in order to give a more balanced examination. The first will look at how far the ‘typical’ representations of office and suburb have been dominated by those outside the lower middle classes and see where the clerical authors placed themselves in relation to these stereotypes. The second will explore alternative ways o f assessing the literary clerk suggesting that it is in the clerk’s escape —or his holiday —that we see how far the clerk is liberated. In this second section we begin to find novels that do not end in Woolfian ‘incompleteness and dissatisfaction’ but rather in a counter-discourse o f adventure, rejuvenation and hope. 99 Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, p. 4. 35  Chapter One: The Office We live and let live, and assume that things are fairly well jogging along elsewhere, and that the ordinary man must be trusted to look after his own affairs. I quite grant—I look at the faces of the clerks in my own office, and observe them to be quite dull, but I don’t know what’s going on underneath.1 E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910) In the classic British sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), General ‘Insanity’ Melchett declares that his right-hand man and pre-war employee o f ‘Pratt and Sons’, Captain Kevin Darling, is ‘a pen-pushing, desk-sucking, blotter-jotter’.2 Darling, who in one episode of the series is excited by an evening spent unloading two shipments of paper-clips, is, to Captain Blackadder’s irritation, usually to be found about thirty-five miles safely behind enemy lines. Darling is a clerk-type - effeminate, weak-minded, weak-bodied, and utterly subservient - and a product both o f the 1980s and of a century of sneering at pen-pushers.4 In 1936 George Orwell coined the phrase in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a novel saturated with lower-middle-class-dom and the protagonist’s fear of ‘pen-pushing in some filthy office’ but the imagery had long permeated literary depictions of clerical workers.5 As early as 1907 Shan Bullock 1 Forster, H owards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 137. 2 Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, Blackadder Goes Forth dir. by Richard Boden (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1989). 3 Note obvious parallels with J. M. Barrie’s clerk, Mr Darling, o f P eter Pan an d Wendy (1911); both are weak-minded office workers who embrace a life o f safety at the expense o f adventure. 4 In modem British terminology, while ‘clerk’ as a popular reference has become almost obsolete, the term ‘pen-pushing’ headlines our criticisms o f bureaucracy. The term became particularly popular in the 1980s and has risen once more into proliferation, often used by those critics o f a large state. In the last four decades these comments have ranged from those in The Guardian about ‘assiduous pen- pushers’ (23 Oct. 1972), The Sun on the increasing number o f ‘pen-pushers’ hired in the NHS (3 Dec. 2003), and in The Telegraph about the ‘growing army o f pen-pushers across the E U ’ (11 Aug. 2008). 5 George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), p. 48. The term has become particularly popular amongst historians, and rarely is it offered as a compliment. See, for example, references as varied as Jonathan King’s G reat Moments in Australian H istory (Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2009) - ‘what would those pen-pushers back in Brisbane know about fighting’, p. 387; D iodorus Siculus, Books 11-12.37.1: Greek History, 480-431 BC trans. by Peter Green (Texas, U.S.A.: University o f Texas Press, 2006) - ‘Diodorus... [was] a flat and foolish pen-pusher’, p. 1, and Richard Evans’s citation o f the ‘tendentious Jewish pen-pushers’, in his Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800-1996 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 191. 36 refers to his eponymous protagonist, Robert Thorne, as one o f ‘many little pen-drivers - fellows in black-coats, with inky fingers and shiny seats on their trousers’.6 Indeed, William Reeve’s study of German drama suggests that Klesel (the main clerk character in Grillparzer’s Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (1873)) is ‘the culmination of a literary type - the federfuscher, or pen-pushing secretary’.7 This German incarnation o f the pen-pusher has a number of commonalities with our London clerk. He is lower- middle class, literate, and aware of the tenuousness of his position within a hierarchical society. In his case, the pen is not mightier than the sword but rather symbolic of the newly literate masses, particularly those, like the clerk, who no longer o fit neatly into a society divided into manual labour and an educated elite. Even traditional lines drawn between the producing and non-producing work forces begin to blur as the ‘bureaucratic revolution’ brought about an unprecedented expansion in the production of paperwork itself. Within the literary world, while highbrow authors despaired o f what they saw as the prosaic outpourings of a numb and mechanised incoherent mass,9 clerks-tumed- writers like Bullock, Frank Swinnerton, Edwin Pugh and Edwin Hodder, happily explored the misery of bureaucratic automation and the sheer monotony of clerical work. There have been studies of the pen-pusher himself but the second part of Orwell’s quote has remained largely undiscussed - that is, the ‘filthy office’ which shaped its clerkly inhabitant. This chapter will examine in detail the space of the office following the ‘bureaucratic revolution’; in particular, it will focus on literary portrayals of the implementation of mechanisation theory, the concept of clock- 6 Shan Bullock, R obert Thome: D iary o f a London Clerk (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1907), p. 176. 7 William C. Reeve, Federfuscher/Penpusher from Lessing to G rillparzer: A Study Focused on G rillparzer’s Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), taken from abstract. 8 Although, interestingly, as Reeve observes, in some early nineteenth-century literary/dramatic representations, intellectual capability meant a lower-class secretary or civil servant often enjoyed triumph over their masters. This is a similar portrayal to those in high positions in contemporary public office - see, for example, political sitcoms such as Yes Minister, dir. by Peter Whitmore, Sydney Lotterby, and Stuart Allen (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980-4). Reeve, Federfuscher/Penpusher from Lessing to Grillparzer. 9 See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Amongst the Literary Intelligentsia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). 37 watching, and attempts to subvert office time.10 In doing so, I explore how the clerk arrived at literary pen-pushing, examining the clerk’s environment and the nature of his work and charting this widespread, and long-lasting, representation o f office misery. This chapter also begins to explore the connection between the modernist conviction that the clerks were ‘subhuman’ because they were part o f the office ‘mass’ and the apparent agreement of clerk-authors.11 As such, this chapter does not seek to counter popular impressions of the office as a space o f drudgery but instead to examine the forces behind the cultural significance o f the figure o f the pen-pusher. In framing the first chapter this way, I offer a version o f the literary office that is fundamentally oppressive but without which the clerk’s escape (the ultimate focus of this thesis) would not have taken place. A Brief History of Office Histories Several recent works have begun to establish office work at the centre o f both popular and academic concern.12 First, Michael Heller’s recent book, London Clerical Workers (2011), includes a chapter titled ‘The Clerk, the Office and Work’ which sees 13 the office as central to defining the socio-economic status o f the clerk. Whilst Heller claims he will discuss the ‘actual experience of work for the male clerical worker’, his 10 Here, the implementation o f mechanisation theory is stressed as opposed to the practical application o f mechanisation itself which, as I shall discuss further, took much longer to achieve in Britain than in many European countries and America. See A. McKinley and R. G. W ilson’s use o f the phrase ‘hesitant mechanisation’ in “‘Small acts o f cunning”: Bureaucracy, inspection and the career, c. 1890- 1914’ in Critical P erspectives on Accounting, 17 (2006), p. 658. 11 As Jonathan Rose argues, Carey’s ‘blunt populist’ study accuses writers as diverse as George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Graham Greene o f viewing the ‘typical clerk [as] subhuman, machine-like, dead inside’ - several o f whom, as I argue, had a rather more nuanced understanding o f clerkly life. Rose, The Intellectual Life o f the British Working Classes (London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 393. 12 This is true also o f American academia - see, for example, Sharon H. Strom’s Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class and the Origins o f M odern Office Work in America, 1900-1930 (Champaign, IL: University o f Illinois Press, 1994) which includes detailed discussions o f the history o f office management during this period. 13 Michael Heller, London C lerical Workers 1880-1914: D evelopm ent o f the Labour Market (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011). 38 subheadings follow traditional analyses - employer-employee relations, career progression, pay structures, labour division and clerical turnover. In this respect he is following in the economically-minded footsteps of Gregory Anderson, Michel Crozier, David Lockwood and, especially, F. D. Klingender.14 Heller makes a largely quantitative assessment of office life, contributing to the long-running Marxist