Jonathan Wild

‘A Merciful, Heaven-Sent Release’?

ABSTRACT This article traces the profound social repercussions that resulted from the mass enlistment of British office workers into the armed forces during the First World War. Drawing heavily upon fictionalized autobiographies of the period, my study examines the various stages of the clerks experience of the conflict and argues that the confidence gained during warfare by surviving office workers fundamentally shaped a more democratic postwar society. This change is evidenced, I argue, in the profile of the fictional clerk that emerges in British literature after 1918.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When writing his autobiography in the 1930s, H.G. Wells looked back with satisfaction upon the early years of his literary career: The last decade of the nineteenth century was an extraordinarily favourable time for new writers and my individual good luck was set in the luck of a whole generation of aspirants. Quite a lot of us from nowhere were ‘getting on’.1

Introduction: Leonard Bast’s Revenge

The anonymous reader of the manuscript of this book describes the office clerk as ‘a haunting and heretofore ghostly figure in fiction’. My own research into this topic began from a similar perception of the spectral nature of this figure. Why, I wondered, had such a representative member of the urban scene apparently left behind so few traces in British literature between Charles Dickens and the inter-war period? In other literatures of this era — American, Continental European, Russian — clerical workers were recognised as key components of developing cityscapes. By contrast, during the same period, British literature managed to produce only a comical Mr Pooter and a pathetic Leonard Bast to stand for their emerging class. While nobody would suggest that the literature of a nation should slavishly mirror its entire working population, the swelling army of late Victorian and early twentieth-century clerical workers would seem to plead a special case for representation. As a group that epitomised the petit bourgeois of the era, their interest for readers and writers (including those of the clerk class themselves) is self- evident. The starting point for my investigation therefore, and the question around which this book is constructed, concerns the reasons for an apparent fault line in literature in Britain. What was it about this culture that inhibited the development of a body of work capable of responding to the growth of a distinctive and effectively new class?

Degeneration in the Edwardian Office

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

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

E.M. Forster’s Leonard Bast and Frank Swinnerton’s Eric Galbraith are characters close enough in conception to represent two independent readings of the same individual. Whilst there is no suggestion that either character was written in response to, or even with knowledge of the other (Forster’s Howards End and Swinnerton’s The Young Idea were published within weeks of one another in 1910), the points of correspondence between the two intriguingly reveal their shared pedigree. Both are youthful, first-generation London clerks, Galbraith first arriving in London to work for ‘a large, over-staffed firm’ (59); Bast, who had also been ‘sucked into the town’ (122) (his parents having ‘been in trade’, his grandparents ‘agricultural labourers and that sort’ (234)), is similarly employed in a large modern office: the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company. Bast and Galbraith are additionally depicted as sharing a common domestic life, both living in the cheaply built flats that became a familiar feature of the London skyline in the Edwardian era: Galbraith in the grandly titled, but match-board partitioned Culverin Mansions, Maida Vale (’small, unpretentious and fairly cheap’ (15)); Bast in a ’semi-basement’ in Camelia Road, Brixton (’an amorous and not unpleasant little hole’ (60)).

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

During the winter of 1888–89, in which George Gissing’s ‘hopeless clerk’ James Hood first appeared in A Life’s Morning, the forerunners of the modern comic clerk were also making their debut. Whereas Gissing’s Hood (along with the era’s other serious studies of office workers) have largely faded from critical consciousness, the seemingly ephemeral comic characters — Mr Pooter and Jerome’s Three Men — have proved more enduring representatives of their social scene. Indeed, to a considerable extent, the literary profile of the clerk and the urban lower middle class in the late Victorian period rests upon these figures. This claim would have astonished George and Weedon Grossmith, the writers of The Diary of a Nobody (published in book form in 1892), and Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat (published in both book and serial form in 1889). Neither the Grossmiths nor Jerome considered that their comic works would enjoy such enduring popularity and cultural significance. George Grossmith fails even to mention the Diary in his autobiography Piano and I (1910). Jerome, for his part, declared in the ‘Author’s Advertisement’ to the 1909 edition of Three Men that he could ‘hardly remember’ writing the book, adding that he was quite unable to account for the ‘merits justifying such an extraordinary success’.1