Performing “The Profession” in Leonard Merrick's The Position of Peggy Harper (1911)

Abstract

In The Position of Peggy Harper, an unjustly neglected novel by Edwardian playwright Leonard Merrick, a young idealist seeks a career in the theatre only to run up against the tawdry commercialism of third-rate touring companies and rapacious managers. In Merrick's novel, the tension between inauthenticity and sincerity is linked to the problematic place of the professional artistic self in the late Victorian/Edwardian cultural marketplace. The metaphoric work done by theatricality in Merrick's novel drives his investigation into the problem of the authentic artistic self committed to a professional ideal in spite of the demands of the marketplace and the impulse towards massification and insincerity in commercial cultural production. Merrick's realistic and ironic representation of the construction of a working professional self in the world—here, the theatre—in tension with an ideal of profession as vocation, ultimately speaks to and for the anxiety of performing an authentic self in early twentieth-century modernity.