The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910: Authorial Work Ethics, edited by Marcus Waithe and Claire White

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830–1910: Authorial Work Ethics ed. by Marcus Waithe and Claire White Mark Allison (bio) The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830–1910: Authorial Work Ethics, edited by Marcus Waithe and Claire White; pp. xv + 268. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, £79.99, $99.99. “A literary man has often to work for his bread against time, or against his will, or in spite of his health, or of his indolence, or of his repugnance to the subject on which he is called to exert himself, just like any other daily toiler,” William Makepeace Thackeray observes in The History of Pendennis (edited by John Sutherland, [Oxford UP 1994], 450). Thackeray thereby situates his eponymous protagonist—and, implicitly, himself—in an age in which literary creation has been routinized and commodified: “When you want to make money by Pegasus . . . farewell poetry and aerial flights” (450). Yet the narrator cautions against excessive pity for “Pegasus,” for “there is no reason why this animal should be exempt from labour, or illness, or decay, any more than any of the other creatures of God’s world” (450). Though metaphorically harnessed, the writer claims as symbolic compensation a recognition of the social validity of his work and virtual fellowship with all toiling creatures. [End Page 142] This passage is but one of many that I felt compelled to revisit after reading Marcus Waithe and Claire White’s carefully conceived and richly rewarding edited collection, The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830–1910: Authorial Work Ethics. Heeding the injunction of Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, the editors stress the complex interrelations of the Anglo-Gallic literary spheres in the nineteenth century: “The national literary traditions of Britain and France can be understood to rely on one another, as much as for what each assimilated as for what each repudiated” (2). On both sides of the English Channel, writers inhabited a post-Romantic dispensation in which the topoi of “creative genius and meditative contemplation” were losing their symbolic efficacy, necessitating new modes of legitimation and inviting “analogies with other types of labour” (4). But labor was itself, of course, an unprecedently dynamic and volatile category within this period; consequently, authors conducted their analogical explorations within milieus destabilized by “staggered incidence of industrialization and political radicalism” (4). The essays in this collection investigate how a compelling array of British and French authors “projected and problematized their own activity against a shifting and contested understanding of what it means to ‘work’” (2). Waithe and White ingeniously mobilize the concept of “work ethics” to theorize these self-reflexive vocational endeavors (5). This phrase simultaneously refers to “how different writers approached their work” and to “different ethical inflections of literary labour” (6). This latter emphasis brings “the complex relations between formal work and social responsibility,” implicit in the very idea of vocation, into high relief (9). The resulting thematic constellation—France and Britain, literary labor, and work ethics—proves supple enough to allow this volume’s contributors to adopt a wide variety of approaches but sufficiently defined to ensure a degree of thematic cohesion that often eludes collections of this kind. Indeed, scholars assembling an edited text will profit by studying this book for its editorial sure-handedness. Whether motivated by egalitarian commitment or the association of the working classes with arduous exertion, many nineteenth-century authors imaginatively identified with the laborer, whether in the form of the so-called unskilled worker or the master artisan. The exemplary figure of Gustave Flaubert appears in both guises in this volume. In Patrick Bray’s exuberant essay, Flaubert is the self-described “casseur de cailloux” (common stonebreaker) pulverizing Romantic clichés and creating “undeniable beauty” from the resulting linguistic detritus (102). In his own contribution, Waithe persuasively argues that a stylized image of Flaubert as a strenuous craftsperson allows Walter Pater to “unite otherwise discrete elements within the field of literary composition: style, pain, heroism, martyrdom, demonstrable labour, and artisanal skill” (157). This evocation of Flaubert enables Pater to construe the aesthete as neither a dandy nor a decadent, but the bearer of a “unified sensibility” (163). As this phrase...